Last week, Karen Bradley, our Trivial Pursuit 'who is this person?' secretary of state, announced that restoring devolution was her main priority.
To be honest, that came as a huge shock to me: I wasn't even aware that she had a list of priorities, let alone a main one.
In terms of political influence and impact a hologram would have more substance and there's probably more chance of spotting Elvis on Shergar galloping across the grounds of Stormont, than there is of stumbling across Mrs Bradley breathing life into one of her priorities.
Anyway, it seems that her boss, the prime minister (although it may well be Arlene Foster or Nigel Dodds for all we know), doesn't regard restoring devolution as a priority. At the tail-end of her speech in Belfast on Tuesday (nicely summed up by the Irish News's John Manley as a 'pastiche') she had this to say: "As we do so, I hope we can also take steps to move towards the restoration of devolution - so that politicians in Northern Ireland can get back to work on the issues that matter to the people they represent." That was it. 39 words. Even the average telephone order for a takeaway requires more words than that. I've had longer exchanges with my cat - and I don't regard him as a priority.
I sometimes wonder if Mrs May has forgotten that there is, in fact, a secretary of state for Northern Ireland and forgotten, too, that she appointed her. Or maybe she is aware but couldn't really be bothered talking to her, since, in pecking order, Mrs Bradley is outranked by every single one of the DUP's MPs - even the ones whose names the prime minister can't actually remember.
And what of the rest of Mrs May's speech? What indeed! It was industrial scale jibber-jabber. Some of you may be aware of the 'infinite monkey theorem', which states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
The content of the prime minister's 'keynote' speech suggests that the monkeys are now in charge of the Number 10 speechwriting department; although still at the entirely random stage of the experiment. And judging by the enthusiasm with which she delivered her lines, it was quickly apparent that Mrs May was painfully aware that she was spouting gibberish. The faces of her audience - most of which resembled Charlton Heston's when he realised that the apes had taken control of the planet - would probably have confirmed her worst suspicions.
Donald Tusk - who has the unique talent of making Sammy Wilson sound half-sensible - was reflecting on the nature of hell on Wednesday afternoon. Maybe it's because he had just had a meeting with Leo Varadkar; or maybe - and this is the more likely explanation - it's because he had been shown the footage of Mrs May's speech the previous day. She was in a living hell at that moment: a hell that even Dante wasn't skilled enough to conjure out of thin air. To be brutally honest, it would make more sense now to send a monkey to Brussels at this stage; if only because its random hoo-hoo-hooing would probably sound more convincing than the likely alternative - the prime minister's boo-hoo-hooing.
Some people, in the first stages of madness, hear voices. Mrs May is now responding to the voices. Sadly, she's also giving them mixed messages. On Tuesday she was speaking to unionists, nationalists, remainers, leavers, local business people (whom she had spectacularly shafted after they rallied to her side over the backstop proposal), Dublin, Brussels, the various factions within her own party (which vary in number, depending on the latest headlines in the Daily Telegraph) and a few monkeys hoping for inspiration.
The whole idea of speaking in tongues is that you leave everyone convinced and inspired, even if they're not entirely sure why. In her case all she does is unite everyone around the worrying truth that, in terms of strategy, she is all bunch and no banana. Even the monkeys had given up, knowing they there would never ever be enough time to type out a policy she could sell.
Oddly, though, I'm beginning to think that we should add Mrs May to that very small list of life forms which would survive another ice-age, gigantic meteorite crash or nuclear holocaust. She seems to be indestructible. Nothing fazes her. Enemies lose the will to live. Audiences are swept off the scene by her tidal wave of make-it-up-as-she-goes-along incoherence. Opponents are battered into serial dithering by her refusal to give up or lie down. She's moved from won't survive, to can she survive, to how does she survive.
That's impressive; albeit for all the wrong reasons.
