Mandy Rhodes: Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson will struggle to duck blame for this Brexishambles

After two-and-a-half years of negotiation and a complete failure to get parliamentary support for her Brexit deal, Theresa May’s impotency climaxed, if that is not an oxymoron, in an eight-hour cabinet lock-in at Number 10 where she came up with a plan – to blame Jeremy Corbyn.

Ingenious, Baldrick. But let’s not forget that in the snap election of 2017, she warned the British public that Corbyn would be “alone and naked in the negotiating chamber of the European Union” if left in charge of Brexit.

And yet, now he is to become her fig leaf.

Brexit is taking a wrecking ball to the Tories and May’s move to bond with Corbyn – whether cynical or not – has just rubbed salt into very raw wounds. Members have taken scissors to their party cards. Two ministers have gone and many more are threatening the same.

This Tory Brexit may have already split the country, but it now threatens to rip apart the party and Corbyn, by personal invitation of Theresa May, could be the ultimate destroyer.

But equally, if Corbyn agrees, as has been widely rumoured, to abandon party policy on freedom of movement in a concession to the PM, then this too could be the end of Labour. It would truly be his Nick Clegg free tuition moment, his Blair Iraq folly.

Freedom of movement should not be up for debate by the leader of the Labour Party. It gets to the fundamentals about global inequity and to eschew it feeds right in to the bigotry and ignorance about European immigration that fuelled Brexit in the first place.

Labour needs to be very careful that when it gets into bed with the Tories, it doesn’t wake up sounding like Ukip.

These are existential moments in the political history of these isles. Brexit was meant to just be about leaving the EU but instead, it is ripping up our party-political system – maybe no bad thing, plunged us into a national crisis where a no-deal has actually become a favoured option and it has made us the laughing stock of the world.

And in Scotland, where more than 62% voted to Remain, that vote has felt largely ignored.

And so, what of Ruth Davidson’s so-called block of 13 Scottish Tory MPs?

What have they done to further Scotland’s case over the withdrawal from the EU?

Davidson returns from maternity leave in a few weeks’ time to the prospect that her party has managed to secure a no-deal Brexit and over the cliff we go.

How then will she counter the argument that she is simply an instrument of the party of Brexit, the party of this omnishambles, the party that split Britain, the party that threatened the Good Friday Agreement, the party that did not stand up for Scotland?

None of that is a comfortable position for a party leader to be in, in a country still so overwhelmingly pro-European and when there is an election to fight in two years’ time.

Maybe it will be time for Davidson to borrow the Prime Minister’s “cojones of steel” which she has so admired and spell out what she stands for now.