HENRY DEEDES on desperate times in the Downing Street bunker as Theresa May pleas with guerrilla MPs: Set the hostage free!

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The Prime Minister gazed into the television camera, her hooded eyes tinged with a fleck of sorrowfulness. 

Her voice, only just restored after succumbing last week to Jean-Claude Juncker’s incessant cigarette puffing, crackled unevenly like a well-oiled chip pan.

There was an endearing distress to her manner, a polite fretfulness which said: ‘Please folks, it’s been a long old day. Just let me get something off my chest.’

At first, had it been anyone else speaking, it could have been a woman pleading with guerrilla fighters for the release of a loved one taken hostage.

Mrs May was, in fact, addressing the nation live about the next state of (what else!) Brexit, which she will now not be able to deliver on time. 

Humiliatingly, she has been forced to ask Brussels for Article 50 be extended until the day before Wimbledon starts. 

Theresa May looked directly into the TV cameras as she made a statement inside number 10 Downing Street

At first, had it been anyone else speaking, it could have been a woman pleading with guerrilla fighters for the release of a loved one taken hostage, Henry Deedes says

Her setting was inside Downing Street. She emerged, shortly after 8.35pm, alone, stranded as a runtish petty officer manning the crow’s nest. 

The delay to leaving the EU, she said, was of ‘great personal regret’. You, the poor public, she added sympathetically, must be fed up to the hind teeth of it all.

‘You are tired of the infighting, you are tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows, tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit when you have real concerns.’

She wanted to let us know she was as sick of it as we are. I’ve done all I can, it’s those pesky politicians who keep stabbing me in the back, she seemed to imply. I’m on your side. Her language was very much ‘it’s Us and Them’.

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‘Do they want to leave the EU with a deal that delivers on the result of the referendum? Do they want to leave without a deal? Or do they not want to leave at all?’

Was this a naked attempt to go above the heads of MPs and appeal to voters for sympathy? Without doubt. But then these are desperate times in the Downing Street bunker.

She reiterated her determination to get her battered Brexit deal through the House of Commons.

Mrs May became cross, her voice rising as though she were about to begin thundering from the lectern, if she’s capable of such a thing.

During her statement Mrs May reiterated her determination to get her battered Brexit deal through the House of Commons

I half-expected Carl Orff’s dramatic choral number Carmina Burana to start building to its foreboding crescendo in the background.

‘Now you want us to get on with it,’ she surmised. ‘And that is what I intend to do.’ And with that, off she marched back to her red boxes.

As national addresses go, it was no barnstormer. Hardly a spine-tingler like the ‘Touch the Face of God’ speech Ronald Reagan delivered following the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster.

But her words will almost certainly have found an audience. It is clear that for all her failures, outside the Westminster bubble, Mrs May has her admirers. Large swathes of the public respect her fortitude, her Keep Buggering On attitude, her flinty resilience.

Today, she’s back in Brussels, due to plead all afternoon with other EU leaders to back her extension and where she’ll doubtless be made to feel as welcome as a nun at a nudist colony.

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