SO did the soft or hard Brexiters win? Is May’s speech a “Norway minus” a “Canada plus” or just a wish list more than a credible plan? Certainly her speech was full of contradictions. The UK will leave the customs union. And it will have less access to the EU’s single market. But despite this, Mrs May wants somehow to protect integrated, cross-border supply chains and to avoid a hard border for Northern Ireland.

Yet she had nothing new to say on customs and so no new approach to the Irish border question. She repeated ideas from last summer: proposing either a complex, untested approach to “mirroring” EU tariffs for goods or, magically, streamlining customs’ co-operation to ensure no physical infrastructure on the Irish border. And, of course, there would be no border in the Irish Sea.