Mrs Maybe has been playing people’s bingo for a long time now. The rules of her shabby game are easy enough to follow.

All you do is count the number of times the prime minister mentions “the people” when she talks about Brexit.

From day one, Mrs Maybe decided on this tactic by ignoring all those people who voted Remain. Instead of acknowledging it had been a close-run vote, she deposited the 48% in the bin of convenient narrow squeaks. She disparaged this sizeable minority as an elite and “citizens of nowhere”. And then set about pretending that the British people had spoken with one voice.

This isn’t true or even a bruise on the kicked-about apple of truth.

Some of the British people had spoken in a poorly debated referendum that was knocked together in a hurry by her predecessor – the name escapes me now; a referendum, what’s more, that may well have been influenced by allegedly dodgy funding from Leave.EU impresario Arron Banks, who is still facing an investigation. What did he spend and where did the dosh come from?

But the only rule for Mrs Maybe’s Brexit Bingo has been to ignore or belittle the 48%. The prime minister could have chosen to consider their fears from day one, but instead turned her back on them.

Now she is trying to win public support for the generally disliked deal she has struck with the EU – a slow-motion arrangement she now must drag through the Parliamentary hedge.

Her main hope of success lies in the “just-get-on with-it mood”. An understandable sentiment in a Brexit-shot country, but one which boils down to slogging on with the mess she’s got us into, because it’s a ‘better’ mess than any other sort of godawful mess.

Theresa May’s grasp of political tactics has always been odd, ever since she blew that unnecessary election by betting the house on her oratorical powers (evidence for existence: none then or now).

Now it’s true that her persistence does win some admirers, but is blind stubbornness really such a virtue? And further proof of her peculiar way with a tactic comes with her “letter to the people” in which she promises to campaign for her deal with her “heart and soul” before next month’s crucial vote in the Commons. In this strange and misleading missive, she also says that March 29 next year “must mark the point when we put aside the labels of ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ for good and we come together again as one people”. Well, good luck with that.

The odd thing about her letter is that she doesn’t have to win around the people as they’ve already had their say in that narrow squeak of a referendum: it’s the MPs she needs on side.

And now Mrs Maybe wants a Brexit debate with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, reportedly on the same night as the final of I’m A Celebrity (“Rumble and the jungle”, according to the clunky headline in this morning’s Sun referencing a boxing match from 1974).

You may recall that she declined to take part in a leaders’ debate before that unnecessary election, but now she wants one with Corbyn. That, by the way, would see a Remain-voting Tory Brexit convert in the ring against a closet Brexit-fancying Labour leader whose party leans for Remain.

Theresa May wouldn’t take part in a debate that might have influenced voters – but now wants a vote in which there is no point in influencing voters. She wants this because she has a plan and Jeremy doesn’t, according to her logic.

There is a faint glimmer of truth to this. Corbyn’s only true tactic on Brexit has been to duck and dive in the hope that Mrs Maybe will fail, leading to a general election that Labour will win – a victory to be followed by a new Brexit solution summoned by magic.

Still, at least she can depend on Donald Trump – to cock things up for her by declaring that her EU deal scuppers trade deals with the US. Well, at least chlorinated chicken is off the menu for now and US companies will have less chance of infiltrating the NHS.