Storm Gareth was battering the walls of No 10, but in the cabinet room it was Theresa May who resembled a winter squall. “She had a face like thunder,” said one cabinet minister. “It was cold fury.” It was Thursday morning and the prime minister launched into a denunciation of her colleagues after a turbulent week that had put her administration on the edge of a new political precipice.

May took aim at the four cabinet ministers — Amber Rudd, David Gauke, Greg Clark and David Mundell — who had defied a three-line whip to abstain in the previous night’s vote on plans to rule out a no-deal Brexit. Clark, the business secretary, began to “babble” that he had not understood the whipping arrangements. This