Diary Day 824, or thereabouts: a deepening sense of dismay is gripping people.

Diary Day 824, or thereabouts: it’s Christmas Day, and despite all the hoo-ha, almost nothing has happened in the Brexit saga.

Theresa May went to Brussels to seek changes in her Bad Brexit Deal. She was politely told she would not get any. Nothing new in that.

Critics among the Tory MPs were outspoken in their condemnation, particularly of the postponement of the vote on the BBD, which was heading for defeat at the combined hands of Remainers and hard Brexiters. Parliament has gone home until after the New Year. The “meaningful vote” is deferred to the week beginning 14th January, we are told.

The Tory parliamentary party held a vote of no confidence in Mrs May, which she survived. She is now safe from an internal party challenge for a year. This must be distinguished from a challenge in Parliament. The serious opposition parties tabled a motion of no confidence in the Government, which Jeremy Corbyn still refuses to sign. As leader of the official opposition he could, by signing, force a vote.

In an interview, Mr Corbyn told the Guardian that if his party won a general election he proposed to “go forward” seeking to negotiate a “customs union with the EU, in which he would be able to be proper trading partners.” In other words, under a Corbyn Government Brexit would go ahead. This he confirmed (and his shaky grasp of EU matters) by adding that the state aid rules needed to be looked at again.

His words provoked an angry backlash among Labour members and supporters. There is a surge of new members joining the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats. Many are saying they were Labour members but that Corbyn’s interview was the last straw. A war of words is going on on social media as Corbyn cult followers intervene to defend him and perpetuate the illusion that he is playing an extremely subtle ultimately pro remain game. But the atmosphere has changed. People aren’t buying it.

The fundamentals are still the same. TM the PM cannot get a majority for her BBD. There is no majority for any alternative either. Her strategy, if it can be dignified with that word, seems to be to play a game of brinkmanship with Parliament, as the date of potentially crashing out disastrously with no deal looms. It is all nonsense, as the UK could unilaterally revoke the Article 50 notice. But the Government has been talking nonsense for so long that no one can be very surprised.

A homeless man died in the street near the Palace of Westminster. Decent people were appalled. Hundreds of homeless are dying. Yet the Government is doing nothing to tackle homelessness or anything else. Not even measures to combat climate change, which is an ever more urgent threat.

Mr Corbyn will not move for a vote of no confidence. But people are speculating about the PM’s personality and mental state, and wondering whether she should resign. Especially at Christmas, the contrast between her professed Christian faith and her actions is stark. One thing I have been proved correct on is her fanatical determination to clamp down on immigration. She boasted about it. She is condemned out of her own mouth concerning that.

Vote or no, there is no confidence in the Government. This is a fully fledged constitutional crisis. A deepening sense of dismay is gripping people, except for hard core Brexiters and, I suppose, an unquantified number of the uninformed and apathetic.

How did the country come to this? There are many contributory causes and anyway causation cannot be proved. Many pressures over many years, not least from the ghastly Daily Mail, Telegraph, Sun and the rest, as well as the rabble-rouser Farage, pushed David Cameron towards his fateful decision to promise a referendum in the first place. But shallow irresponsibility was there too, revealed by his reported remark to other EU leaders that they were not to worry about the referendum vote because he was “lucky”. It was not quite as bad as relying on astrology, as Nancy Reagan (and through her, President Reagan) reputedly did, but it was not far off.

Someone on social media cited the former Thatcherite monetarist, then Ukipper, Tim Congdon at me, so I read one of his papers. He has been telling the world for approaching a decade how much EU membership costs Britain. The headline figure has an impressive air of certainty about it. What is it with numbers that they do that? The figure is the calculated cost of Britain’s compliance with all EU regulations. But when I looked at his underlying arguments they were feeble.

In saying it is the cost of EU membership he has assumed that after Britain leaves the EU it will not continue to comply with any of them. But that is obviously not correct: some regulations (such as to combat climate change) are not derived from the EU; and some regulations Britain would not want to jettison. For one thing it could not sell its goods overseas if it did. For another the British people would revolt. Is the economic case for Brexit really based on such elementary, glaring mistakes?

Shallow irresponsibility again.

I am hoping our reputed common sense will prevail, but where has it gone?