Within days of the British referendum result on membership of the European Union, key EU leaders insisted that the UK would need to start its negotiation of Brexit by agreeing to pay as much as €50 billion for the UK to meet its already agreed obligations. Most of the British mainstream media hooted their derision at this calculation. Cabinet members in Teresa May's government decried such sums as absurd. The (then and current) Foreign Secretary said;
'Let them go whistle.'
In the last few days and hours May and her Cabinet have accepted the EU's initial financial approximation. 17 months of wily negotiation, led by Tory hard-man David Davis, has dumped Britain's rulers straight back to June 2016.
Additionally, the EU are to get a phrase 'agreed' by May along the lines of 'continuing regulatory alignment' to describe how Northern Ireland will effectively remain in the EU. (The Scottish National Party will have all sorts of fun with this.) And some other fuggy phrase will be 'agreed' allowing the EU's supreme court precedence over British law regarding EU citizens living in the UK.
The first act of the farce that is the Tories bash at Brexit looks like it is over. On all three cardinal points - Money, the EU court and Northern Ireland (four if you include the Tory's early insistence that the 'divorce' payments should go along side expected EU concessions over trade) May has completely collapsed. All this slow-motion car crash will be presented as some sort of triumph back in the UK of course. But even the most cynical British commentators seem shocked at the complete defeat of May and her government and are equally amazed that the wing of the Tory Party that thinks 'no deal is better than a bad deal' as May herself used to say, is not now howling for an end to the endless one-way concessions.
So what does May think she has won from her surrender? Political survival. And that is not as personally self-serving as might be thought.
The constant background hum in these days, where the Tory red lines are being unceremoniously rubbed off the map, is that only May can deliver Brexit. And it is particularly hard line Brexiteers, who want to echo Trump's only triumph and turn the UK into the world's second largest tax haven, that are insisting on May's indispensable role.
It seems obvious, after Trump's one legislative 'success, that the UK's 'no dealers' have not dropped their own ambitions. Supporting May, including right down to the bitter end over Brexit they hope will show everybody that a new course is inevitable as well as essential. They are happy for May to play her cards. They surmise that only in that way will the British realise that they do need to go it alone. But the whole Tory party and the establishment networks that sustain it are deeply aware that a General Election defeat, and a real and Corbyn led, alternative, is a disaster for all their potential futures.
So, for the (very short) time being 'only Teresa May can deliver Brexit' will remain the collective Tory watchwords. But the pressures in British society are much greater and building much faster than the Tory's dilemmas. And politics is moving much faster than the dismal plots hatched by Tory wannabes.
The Northern Irish concession - even were it to be delayed - will crack and muddle the Unionist position not just in the Westminster Parliament but in the North of Ireland itself. The SNP in Scotland is afforded a new platform and Scotland's Labour Party will regroup in a common cause. (Or shrivel further.)
Concessions to EU courts and to regulations or 'continuing regulatory alignment' strike at the heart of the argument that Britain's sovereignty is at stake in in the Brexit issue, or that resolving this is at the core of what Tory Brexit will deliver.
And the impact in society, with its widening social and economic gaps, the terrifying growth of new poverty, the gathering decline in key social services, that the endless cash already agreed that the UK will continue to pour into the EU's banks and bureaucracy, speaks, or rather shrieks, for itself.
The Tory's Brexit failure part-one, has sped up the future, accented the critical contradictions in a failing country, and sharpened the possibilities of social upheaval.
Some of those contradictions pass through the Labour Party itself. Corbyn's leadership and Labour's Manifesto remain the signals across society of the prospects of a real alternative. But it seems that the resolution of Labour's own internal fight will need in part to come from a active link to the hundred and one new battles that are opening out across society, in order that Labour has the both the social and the political heft to deliver that alternative.