The withdrawal bill vanished, and with it so did the prime minister

A chap called Mark Spencer stood at the dispatch box of the House of Commons and magicked the invisible prime minister in and out of existence

The Thursday morning statement about what’s on the parliamentary agenda for the week ahead is the traditional lowlight of the parliamentary calendar. The job of leader of the House of Commons is given to someone who has failed to live up to low expectations and is being very politely ushered out of the cabinet.

Not so long ago, Chris Grayling was put out to pasture there, having ruined the justice department. In normal times, you don’t then get to go and ruin another department. These are not normal times. And, in normal times, the Commons does not find itself without a leader because the holder of the lowest job in the cabinet has been the one to deliver the fatal blow in a prime ministerial coup.

But that is what happened on Wednesday night when Andrea Leadsom called time on Theresa May. And so, up stepped a chap called Mark Spencer, deputy chief whip to the deputy of the deputy chief whip, and then things got even less normal.

Currently, the nation is trying to ascertain whether or not it has a prime minister. The prime minister refuses to tell anyone what is going on. What we don’t know can’t hurt her. And so Westminster watchers will have to take their leads from elsewhere.

The only purpose of Theresa May’s premiership is to compel the House of Commons to vote on her withdrawal agreement for a fourth time. One of the reasons Andrea Leadsom quit last night is because she knows that it is her job to put the legislation before the house. With no leader, there can be no vote.

And so, here was Mark Spencer, standing at the dispatch box, engaged in what in any other week is an entirely administrative process, but on this occasion carried within it the confirmation or denial of the end of the prime minister. If the withdrawal bill was there, in the business for the week after next, Theresa May lived. If it was not, she did not.

It was not there. Or was it? Or wasn’t it? Mr Spencer, his short hour come at last, wished the life of the prime minister in and out of existence with every subclause he uttered. It would not be debated next Friday (Theresa May over), but it would be published in June (Theresa May clings on).

“We will update the house on the publication and introduction of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill on our return from the Whitsun recess,” he eventually said. Theresa May over.

It was a rolling disaster, none of it of his making, of course, and all of it the mood music to a country going in and out of polling stations, deciding whether or not to vote for a party without a leader, in a country without a prime minister, in elections that were not meant to be happening.

It is the towering stupidity of Brexit that has delivered us to this mad point. And yet, its beneficiaries will be the Brexit Party and Nigel Farage. It offers no solutions whatsoever to a crisis whose complexities should be clear to see. But that is all a problem for another day, one that will be more ridiculous even than this.