At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester this year, one cabinet minister speculated to The Times that at least five of his colleagues could go over Brexit, consigning Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Andrea Leadsom and Liam Fox to the back benches.

While one of them is no longer around the top table because of unrelated misdemeanours, Brexit has yet to cost Mrs May the scalp of a single colleague. Indeed all the cabinet lined up behind a divorce settlement that Nigel Farage labelled a “capitulation” and entails spending £35 billion after 2019 and the continuing influence of European courts for eight years, as well as a two-year “standstill” transition that in effect delays exit until 2021.

What went right? Some of this