RICH LOWRY: May’s Brexit is becoming increasingly haphazard and provisional.

May has just pulled her Brexit deal from a parliamentary vote that she was going to lose in an embarrassing drubbing that might have loosed her increasingly precarious grip on power.

She has negotiated abysmally, giving away leverage right at the start when she prematurely invoked Article 50, beginning the process of Britain’s departure with no realistic fallback plan if talks with the EU failed. She ended up with an agreement that would effectively leave Britain within most EU rules, with no means of influencing them anymore. The London Spectator calls the deal “Remain-minus.”

There’s a reason that resignations of her Brexit negotiators have become a semiregular event.

Now, humiliated and her credibility in shreds, May says that she is going to go back to the EU to get more reassurances, when the EU has said that it is not conceding anything else of consequence. And why should it? There’s no guarantee that May can get any tweaked deal through Parliament, regardless.

And she’s already tried to sell so many meaningless gestures from the EU as concessions that Brexit supporters won’t be inclined to take her seriously, either.

The larger question is whether once the EU has its hooks in a nation-state, will it ever relinquish it?

Not willingly, no.