The history of leaders who choose to remain in office governing with the support of the Opposition when their party is against them is a sorry one.

It tends to end in failure for the leader and an extended period out of office for their party.

Theresa May has now decided to follow this path. A man she recently derided as unfit to lead the nation and as dangerous is now the one who will help her resume her lamentable effort to deliver on the decision of the British people in a referendum and on her many promises.

Jeremy Corbyn has spent his whole political career arguing for a system of government that has failed where it has been tried in other parts of the world and one that has no place for the conventions of the British constitution.

This is not a cosy arrangement between two parties that have a broadly similar view of politics but one of desperation.

In this way it is worse than Sir Robert Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws on the back of Whig votes. There was then a commonality of constitutional understanding, a policy that in a few years everyone accepted and a narrowness of the political divide that allowed many people to cross it in either direction.