The doomsday alternative is that the Government gets into a fight in the Commons, loses the vote on the customs union or fails to reverse this week’s Lords amendment and Theresa May resigns. For this to happen there will have to be more than a dozen Tory MPs ready to countenance the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. A few are said to be prepared to risk what they see as a short-term calamity for the long-term prize of reversing Brexit but it is not clear how many.

In truth, no one really knows what would transpire if the Government fell. There would presumably be an election, but what would it be about – leaving without an agreement or staying in the EU? What if it again resulted in no party winning an outright majority? A coalition could only be cobbled together with parties that take a similar view of Brexit; yet they may not represent a majority in the country.

The price of any pact might well be the promise of another referendum, though what would the question be? And if it ended up reversing the last one, how would that help unite the country? It would be an unmitigated political and constitutional mess.

Tory MPs thinking of helping to defeat the Government on what would effectively be a confidence issue need to consider that they may unleash demons far scarier than anything they have convinced themselves will be conjured up by our leaving the EU. They may well think that staying in the EU is in the long-term interests of the country – but we had that argument during the referendum.

By precipitating a crisis in the hope of reversing Brexit, they risk causing chaos and national humiliation. If we wanted some appropriate music to accompany that debacle, how about this from Les Miserables: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men?”