It is quite wrong to feel pity for her. Firstly, her current misery is of her own making. The deal is terrible because her red lines made any other outcome impossible. That is her responsibility. Secondly, she is still now lying with almost every word she utters. Her entire defence of the deal rests on the most grotesquely misleading characterisations of its contents and implications. Her every answer to any question is deliberately and instinctively evasive. She is a deception machine, a next-generation political mechanism which simply cannot be straight with people, whether it's negotiators in Brussels, MPs in parliament, or the public on the doorstep. The fact she is so unconvincing when lying does not remove the moral responsibility for having done so in the first place.

And now all the various inadequacies we've seen through the last couple of years have joined together to undermine any chance of success she might have had. It would be satisfying, on a moral level, if we were not all forced to suffer the consequences alongside her.