Yesterday, for Theresa May, the prevarication was over. The appointed time of choosing was here. Was the Conservative Party to be surrendered to the likes of Margot James, Richard Harrington and Claire Perry, the three fearsomely pro-Remain ministers who had threatened to resign if she didn’t take no-deal off the table?

Or was it to be the party of its mainstream members, over 70 per cent of whom want to leave the EU either with no deal or with a straightforward Free Trade Agreement? People like me. People like the 117 MPs who voted against Theresa May in December’s no confidence vote.

In the end she sided with the Remainer MPs, a group whose obsession with remaining in the EU at all costs is so great that they are content to see the largest democratic vote for anything in UK history overthrown, the British political system smashed, the Conservative Party rent and the country return, humiliated, to the EU begging to be let back in.

On the Ides of March, she will cross the Rubicon and begin the process of cancelling Brexit and with it destroying a party to which she has given her life.

The first step will be seeking a two month delay, an outcome which is likely to be put to Parliament on March 14. The EU may not grant that — it might insist on a longer delay from the off. But it matters little. That delay will not make her deal pass, it will not make the EU offer any change to the backstop and it will not give the two Labour Parties (the Corbynites and the TIGgers) any reason to shift from their own commitments to cancel Brexit.