What’s striking about this is that there is, in fact, a deal on the table that not only delivers these things, but which actually goes further. It’s called the Irish backstop and it is precisely the part of Mrs May’s deal that all of Parliament’s hard-line Brexiteers now say they most hate.

It is hard to keep track of what exactly these Brexiteers hate. One week, they suggest the backstop be reopened and edited. Another week, they want “legally binding assurances”, which could consist of a supplementary legal note interpreting the backstop as temporary. The next week, they want to chuck the whole damn thing.

If the Brexiteers are wondering why they have so spectacularly failed to take control of the negotiations over the last two years, this ought to give us a clue. The problem is not, as Donald Tusk claimed this week, that they had no plan. They were flush with plans – pamphlets, articles, speeches, journals.

There’s “Flexcit”, a 400-page blueprint for leaving the EU over a 20-year period. There’s “Change or Go”, a 1,000 page dossier laying out every option under the sun. As I set out last week, there might even be a feasible strategy for a no-deal – not that any Brexiteer has coherently argued it. The problem is that the Brexiteers have so many plans and they change so often that they can’t unite consistently behind any of them.

Until recently, what nearly all of these plans had in common was that they rejected no deal as too risky and involved leaving the EU over an extended period, passing through a stage that looks very like the backstop.

The backstop, flawed though it is, delivers all of the following elements of Brexit: an end to EU budget payments, full control over immigration, total control over the services industries (including finance) that comprise 80 per cent of our economy, substantially increased control over all other industries, the right to reject any future EU employment, environmental or social legislation, control over farming and fisheries and an end to the jurisdiction of EU courts.

This is a faster, more ambitious vision of Brexit than Mr Davis, Mr Paterson or any of their peers were advocating a few years ago. And yet they are now screaming betrayal at the Prime Minister for suggesting it.

They do make some sound arguments about the backstop’s disadvantages. Taking up the regulatory freedoms it offers could trigger extra checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea into Northern Ireland. The principle is galling, but the practical effect is negligible. Such goods comprise less than 0.5 per cent of UK GDP.