It is one more thing that Theresa May can blame on the European Union. Sitting in an airless office in Strasbourg Mrs May had to endure Jean-Claude Juncker chain smoking as they hammered out the latest Brexit agreement.

The prime minister was already quite ill but the next day she could barely defend her own revised deal to MPs, her voice rasping as she reached for the words.

The embrace between Mr Juncker, president of the European Commission, and Mrs May, sealing revisions to her Brexit deal, was probably a high point of her week. But the same evening in a Westminster cloakroom, it was already unravelling. There, Geoffrey Cox, attorney-general, was announcing to a Downing Street aide that he would not be updating his