Slowly but surely, the government is getting its act together on Brexit. It needs to start making actual hard choices in its “position papers”, not merely lists of options, but it is clear from the stream of documents being published that ministers and civil servants are finally gripping the issues in all of their bureaucratic complexity.

Remainian ultras can scream as hysterically as they like, but their most potent accusation – that the government is useless, clueless and unable to understand that Brexit will be won or lost in the legal detail – is no longer credible. Yes, the cabinet remains bitterly divided and, yes, the clock is ticking, but we are in a much better place than we were even a month ago. The UK has finally acquired the intellectual firepower to negotiate competently and to assess all of the trade-offs; that certainly wasn’t true just after the referendum.