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Last night, Theresa May had her Cleopatra moment. “Give me my robe. Put on my crown,” Shakespeare’s Cleopatra tells her ladies in waiting. “I have immortal longings in me.” Like the Egyptian

queen, the Prime Minister has now issued her final command. Tory MPs listened in silence as she promised to “leave this job earlier than I intended”. She had heard “very clearly” their

desire for “a new approach, and new leadership”. “But” — there is always a but — “we need to get the deal through and deliver Brexit”. Brexit has defined her premiership — and destroyed it.

Yet, even in the dying days of her reign, Mrs May is still the same determined woman that she was on that summer’s morning when she stood in front of Number Ten and promised to reunite the

country. She may have failed in that task. But even as she prepares to relinquish office, the Prime Minister still insists that only by passing her Withdrawal Agreement can her Conservative

colleagues do their duty by the people who elected them. Such determination is hard to resist, and impossible now that she has pledged to sacrifice herself. And so the big beasts of Brexit,

the dragons guarding the sacred hoard, have yielded at last. Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have staked their reputations on resisting Mrs May’s deal. Now they will vote for it, risking

cries of betrayal from the ultras of the European Research Group, led by Steve Baker. The latter says he will resign the Tory whip rather than vote for the deal. But Baker was never a Tory.

He is a libertarian of the purest stripe. He will be much happier outside a party that he clearly despises. Meanwhile, the scene is about to shift again in this great political drama, away

from the committee room and back to the chamber of the Commons. Parliament had seized control of Brexit, or so we were told. But the “indicative votes” had yielded no consensus around which

a majority could coalesce. Sir Oliver Letwin, who had championed this solution to the insoluble, declared the result of his experiment “a great disappointment”, but promised to return to the

House with new proposals by Monday. Meanwhile, the Speaker is still holding out against the Prime Minister’s valedictory ordinance that her deal be put to the vote for a third time. John

Bercow is as stubborn as Mrs May in his unspoken decision to stop Brexit by fair means or foul. To forestall a fait accompli by the whips, he has ordered the office where parliamentary

motions are tabled to refuse any version of the deal that is not substantially different. The stage is set for a showdown between Speaker Bercow and Andrea Leadsom, the Leader of the House.

The weapon of choice? Copies of Erskine May, with both duellists wielding rival interpretation of rules of procedure. Who would have thought that the future of the United Kingdom would come

down to something as arcane as the hermeneutics of precedent in the House of Commons? And yet what could possibly be more British? Now the nation will watch as our elected representatives

resolve the multitude of conundrums they have conjured out of the air. For resolve them they must — and they have little more than a fortnight in which to do so. Will Brexit take place? If

so, when? What kind of Brexit? How will it happen? And above all: who will lead us into the promised land? Despite all the business on stage so far, we still do not know the answers to any

of these questions. The curtain may be falling on the career of Theresa May, but we have certainly not reached the final act of the play. Indeed, we do not know yet whether Brexit will prove

to be a comedy or a tragedy.