Until just after 10pm on April Fools’ Day, when John Bercow began to announce the results, it was still just about possible to persuade oneself that there might be an modestly uplifting ending to parliament’s long battle of Brexit. After a debate from which most Tory Brexiter MPs ostentatiously stayed away, it felt as if an all-party revolt of pro-European MPs might be about to drag Theresa May’s government unwillingly into a different kind of Brexit. But it was not to be. In the event, that effort has failed by just three votes. It probably might as well be three hundred.
The might-have-beens are agonising. If just two MPs had voted differently, the outcome would have been reversed. If the Scottish nationalists, the Liberal Democrats, the Independent Group of MPs, or even the DUP – all of whom might in some circumstances plausibly have found their own reasons to support Kenneth Clarke’s customs union motion – had voted differently, then the Brexit landscape would have changed.
But to imagine this is to indulge the politics of denial. None of these things happened. Parliament was not up to the task it had taken upon itself, of wresting control from a parlously weak and divided government. This narrowest of parliamentary defeats means that the House of Commons has confirmed for the fifth time — three goes on May’s deal and now two on MPs’ alternative motions — that it knows what it dislikes but not what it wants. The breakthrough has not happened. Instead, the Brexit landscape is as metaphorically churned, muddy and bleak as the western front.
If the first rule of politics is to be able to count, then there is a grim reality in the numbers. May’s deal had inched to 286 votes last Friday, going down by 58 at the third try. Last night Clarke’s motion on a customs union clambered to 273, just nine more than it secured last week, but still not enough because of those decisive abstentions. Nick Boles’s common market 2.0 motion did much better than last week, with 261 as opposed to 188 the first time, but the abstainers were key here too. Peter Kyle’s confirmatory referendum motion did best of all, with 280 votes this time, but there is still a bridge too far between its supporters and their goal.
In all these cases, the movement since last week was in the right direction. But the progress was desperately small. There is no momentum for the alternatives. So May can still claim that her deal has more support than any of them and will be tempted to try again with her own deal, for a fourth time, in the hope that the air has now gone out of the indicative vote process.
The government chief whip, Julian Smith, may have told the BBC this week that the Tory party and the cabinet were an undisciplined lot. But the fact is that, for all their shambolic state, they are more in control of Brexit politics than the opposition parties. That’s not saying much, but it is May who comes away from this with marginally more viable options than her opponents, either on the hard Brexit right or the soft Brexit centre. The second day of indicative votes has shown that the opponents of Brexit don’t have the numbers to win on anything other than their determination to avoid a no-deal crash-out on 12 April. Parliament is not going to take control from May any time soon, or probably any time at all.
But May is no longer in control either. She could roll the dice one last time. When ministers meet for a political cabinet on Tuesday, it increasingly looks as if, for want of anything else, they could take the country into a general election that is unlikely to solve anything.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
