Theresa May’s diplomatic tour last week was hardly a path through hell. After rapping Donald Tusk, the European Council president, on the knuckles over his attack on Brexiteers, she was dining with her Irish hosts in Dublin by Friday night.

That encounter in an old Guinness family residence capped a week that did not move Brexit forward an inch. We are not in Brexit hell, only stuck in purgatory.

The Queen stayed at Dublin’s Farmleigh House in 2011, during a state visit that marked a euphoric high for Anglo-Irish relations. That must have seemed a distant memory when May arrived at the house in Dublin West, taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s constituency. The chilly recent encounters mirror how Brexit has returned Anglo-Irish relations to a brittle state.