“NOTHING has changed, nothing has changed” – remember those words? It was Mrs May during last year’s election campaign and it’s the same again now.

Her Brexit proposal has been thrown out by the biggest margin in the history of our parliamentary democracy and yet her mantra remains unchanged.

It initially sounded as though things had changed. “Come and talk with me” she said to opposition leaders after her defeat.

Jeremy Corbyn agreed to go but only if she would accept that no deal was not an option; she refused.

But those party leaders who did attend reported back that she had told them she would not support a customs union, membership of the single market, extending Article 50 or measures to prevent a no deal. So what was the point of the talks, they unanimously asked?

I suspect that from Mrs May’s point of view, proposing “talks” offered real gains. First, it helped her kick the Brexit can further down the road, second it made her look (briefly) magnanimous and third it dumped Jeremy Corbyn in a rather large hole.

For even though Mr Corbyn might have seen taking no deal off the table as an important point of principle, by not attending he made himself appear to be the obstacle to moving things forward and he forfeited the opportunity of telling reporters after meeting Mrs May that “she didn’t hear a word I had to say” and that she was the real block to progress.

He made another tactical error by allowing Mrs May to push him into moving a Confidence vote immediately after she had suffered humiliation at the hands of her own backbenchers.

Indeed, she provoked him into calling such a vote, knowing full well that with the DUP on her side, she would survive and foolishly he agreed.

The result was that what should have been a terrible week for Mrs May with her contemplating having presided over the biggest government defeat in the House ever, ended with her luxuriating in her ‘victory’ over Labour in the Confidence vote and watching Mr Corbyn trying to justify his refusal to meet with her.

But all this is small beer compared to the problem of the fast-approaching cliff-edge of no deal.

I wish I could share the optimism of those who think that it will be a good thing. Maybe in the very long term it will be, but in the immediate years to come we will all suffer disruption, some minor, some major – already there is a shortage of some medicines as pharmacies start to stockpile in anticipation of the no deal. This is not good news.

As regular readers of this column might have worked out, I favour a second referendum as the best way out of this mess. Why? Because when we voted in 2016 we knew what Remain consisted of but we had no idea of what Leave would look like. Now that we know that Leave probably means crashing out with no deal it is not unreasonable to ask people if this is what they really want.

The latest YouGov poll shows that 56 per cent of those polled want a second referendum. Before you dismiss polls as having got the last election and referendum result wrong, it’s worth pointing out that in fact they got them both right.

The problem is that poll predictions are not snapshots, they give a range of predictions which are accurate within a range of plus or minus three per cent. It’s a qualification that seems to escape most journalists and politicians.

On that basis most of the reputable polling companies, including YouGov, accurately predicted the last election and referendum results. And they are now telling us that the majority want a second referendum.

But there’s one other possible way forward, other than a full-blown referendum – it’s come from a group of Labour and Tory backbenchers who suggest that a series of citizen assemblies might be a way out of our current impasse.

These have been used effectively in a number of countries – Ireland and Australia for example – to find solutions to apparently unsolvable problems. They involve a group of 200 randomly selected citizens in different parts of the country spending a number of weekends listening to experts (politicians are excluded) from all sides of the argument, inviting submissions, discussing the various options and then making a series of recommendations to Parliament.

Will it work? Who knows, in Ireland this process found a way through the seemingly intractable problem of reforming that country’s abortion laws. It might work here – it can’t be much worse than the current imbroglio. After all, what do we have to lose?

Ivor Gaber is professor of Political Journalism at the University of Sussex and a former Westminster political correspondent.