11) The probability of the EU giving the UK as long as it realistically needs to recover from its Brexit nervous breakdown and say with clarity what kind of future relationship it wants with the EU is infinitesimally tiny.

One source says: “She’s been told – ‘You need to understand prime minister, it’s very simple maths – the ERG [European Research Group] will fuck you, fuck the Conservative party and they will throw themselves over a cliff. Your Remainer colleagues will not’. It’s who’s got the biggest balls.”

“The Remainers need a gameplan to show Julian [Smith] is wrong on this. At the moment, they are rolling over having tummies tickled. And she’s thrown all her weight behind the chief whip.

“She gets to save her party and potentially gets to live for another day. She will be the PM who delivered Brexit. She can blame Parliament and Tusk, Juncker and the EU [for no-deal] and say I managed it as best as anyone could.

“She’s home and dry as long as she sits tight with the Brexiteers who only a few weeks ago wanted her head. It’s utterly tragic.”

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“A lot of people are in despair. The sensible ones have their head in their hands, the nutters we kept at the door for 40 odd years are now in control. We thought they were dead after they didn’t get rid of her. They are back in control, because they are willing to blow the house up.”

Well there you are

May's position is neither substantial nor sustainable. It is disjointed and delicate. It bears repeating, after Tuesday’s volte-face, that it was May herself, not the EU, who created the all-UK backstop that she is now seeking to unpick. But the deeper truth, which she must have known when she originally agreed to it in 2017, is that the backstop was an attempt to reconcile three promises that are almost impossible to fit together in one consistent policy.

The first of these is May’s promise to leave the customs union, which she made because she knows that the Thatcherite right of her party, including some of the most fanatical long-term advocates of Brexit, attaches immense importance – though it was barely mentioned in 2016 – to an autonomous trade policy. The second is her promise to Ireland, which in law and by treaty she is duty bound to make, that a new trade regime would not cause the creation of a hard border of any kind. And the third is the promise she made to the DUP after the 2017 election that she would not permit customs and regulatory divergence between Britain and Northern Ireland.