Investors’ ability to take a rosy view of an even deeper Brexit mess is remarkable. Sterling, the market’s usual prism for viewing the UK’s departure from the European Union, fell 2% on Friday but the pound is still higher than it was on the morning of 18 April, the day Theresa May announced her fateful plan to go to the country to secure a stronger negotiating hand.

Investors’ mood of semi-cheerfulness flows from the idea that May is now so weakened that she, or the next Tory leader, won’t be able to pursue a hard Brexit that seeks to take the UK out of the EU single market and customs union.

A market-friendly plotline – a soft form of Brexit that secures cross-party support – is indeed possible. But before investors run away with the idea that the Brexit landscape has been transformed, they should consider the alternative. The original fault lines may simply have widened. A safe passage out of the EU may have become trickier to find.

The immediate problem is that the negotiating clock is now ticking. May’s biggest mistake – bigger than the botched manifesto, the U-turns and her arrogantly aloof approach to campaigning – was to trigger article 50 before calling the general election. If she felt she needed a personal negotiating mandate, she should have secured popular backing for her version of Brexit and only then embarked on the process.

As it is, the UK is now saddled with a minority government that must revisit basic Brexit questions. The Democratic Unionist party says it does not want a hard Brexit, which presumably implies staying in the customs union at least. So how will May hope to keep the Eurosceptic hardliners in her own party happy? The argy-bargy could take weeks, or months, to address, and may only lead to May’s resignation or another election. Whatever Westminster dance follows, the EU27 are not obliged to grant the UK a time-out. Why would they? Their negotiating power is growing by the day. Donald Tusk, president of the European council, grasped the point: “We do not know when Brexit talks start,” he said. “We know when they must end. Do your best to avoid a ‘no deal’ as result of ‘no negotiations’.”

Well, quite. The two-year deadline for negotiating departure from the EU was tight in the first place. It starts to look daunting if the UK spends the first six months forming an unstable government that then collapses and then holds a second general election that produces another wobbly administration. Those would be perfect conditions for the UK crashing out of the EU in 2019 without a deal – not from choice, but because we couldn’t get our act together.

The deeper problem, of course, is that 48% of the country voted Remain last year and the victorious 52% of Leavers never agreed on what form of Brexit they wanted. David Page, senior economist at Axa Investment Managers, puts it this way: “The difficulty for any government would be that there is no Brexit consensus to deliver: supporters were drawn to Brexit for diverse (and sometimes diametrically opposed) reasons. The problem for this government is that its new fragility increases the difficulty in driving through its version of Brexit, raising the chances of a chaotic Brexit with no deal in place.”

In the immediate aftermath of the election, one can understand why investors were still sanguine. The trade incentives for both the EU27 and the UK are intact. Common sense could yet prevail and soft Brexit could be the result. It’s too soon to panic. Yet the chances of panic further down the line – either in the form of a plunge in sterling or a wobble in the gilts market – have surely increased.

In other circumstances, one might say a cry of alarm from financial markets is exactly what’s required – it might help to force consensus. In the case of Brexit, however, it’s hard to be hopeful it would he heard. The UK has just held a “Brexit election” in which neither main party wanted to talk in detail about Brexit.

Renewables and nuclear are the way out of future crises in Qatar

One former energy minister warned a few years ago that if there was chaos in Qatar, the tiny gulf state that supplies a third of the UK’s gas imports, then the UK would be “up shit creek”.

Reality has not proved so apocalyptic. Despite the diplomatic crisis facing Doha last week, the country’s vast shipments of frozen gas to Britain are unlikely to be affected – although transport costs may rise modestly. But what if the crisis was to escalate? And what about in two decades’ time, when an exhausted North Sea leaves the UK importing as much as 93% of its gas, rather than the 60% of today? On the face of it, such a prospect sounds alarming. However, Britain increasingly relies on imports for many things.

Few people stay awake at night fretting over the 40% of our food that is imported. Similarly, few would have even noticed the UK flipping from a net exporter of gas before 2004 to an importer now. The reality is there is plenty of gas out there in the world, and it can come from increasingly far-flung places.

That was illustrated last week by the arrival of a US tanker packed with liquefied natural gas in Świnoujście, a Polish port. It was the first US shipment of LNG to central Europe, and the US’s fast-growing position as an energy powerhouse suggests this is a sign of the future, rather than an aberration.

Nor is there a lack of infrastructure in the UK. There are three LNG terminals in the UK to bring the stuff in, as well as four gas pipelines to Europe. As one expert told the Observer, when it comes to infrastructure for gas imports, “we are pretty well endowed”.

There are alternatives to increasing dependence. One is to frack for shale gas – but there are huge unknowns about whether Britain’s geology will make it economically viable to extract it, and about its political acceptability.

The other is to focus on renewable and nuclear power, and storage and energy efficiency, to displace the need for gas to generate electricity and heat Britain’s homes. That is surely the best long-term solution.

Directors just love a large slice of rich Burberry pie

Calculating executive pay is fiendishly difficult, which is why Vince Cable, when he was business secretary, required companies to publish a “single figure” for how much their boardroom directors received each year. It is not a perfect solution, but the figures are intended to make it easier to compare pay changes over the years and between different companies.

Largely, it works. But the publication of Burberry’s annual report last week also shows it doesn’t pick up all pay awards. The “single figure” for Christopher Bailey – the company’s design guru who next month will hand over day-to-day management to a new chief executive – puts his total for 2017 at £3.5m. Leaf on a few pages, and it turns out Bailey is also being handed 600,000 shares – worth a cool £10.5m. A tiny footnote explains these shares are not included in the “single figure” as they “were awarded to Christopher prior to his appointment to the board and are not subject to performance”.