Brexit is dead – strangled at the weekend by Prime Minister Theresa May and her cabal of Remainer cronies.

It was a brilliant coup, masterfully conducted with a sadist’s attention to detail.

All the ministers in the Cabinet were hauled up to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence, where their phones were confiscated, as though they were naughty children. Then the stubbornly pro-Brexit ones who were rightly disgusted by the shaming sell-out deal May had cobbled together with her virulently Remainer civil servants were given the same choice Rommel was in 1944: cyanide pill or slow career death.

The cyanide pill option would have involved resigning immediately on principle: but then being ritually humiliated by having their official car confiscated and having to walk to the train station via the mile-long drive, or catch a cab, with a £67,000 pay cut.

A letter to each minister, leaked to the press, warned them of this beforehand. Petty, but given how vain ministers are, very effective.

None of the leading Brexiteers present – not Michael Gove, not even Boris Johnson whose last chance this was to establish himself as the credible voice of the Leave resistance – chose to do the decent thing. (Though Brexit Secretary David Davis has resigned since, as has his brilliant and principled junior minister Steve Baker – one of the unsung heroes of the Leave campaign).

Really, though, the “who did what to whom and why?” elements of this story are a distraction from the only thing that matters: Brexit has been sabotaged, democracy undermined, and the people betrayed by the Remainer establishment.

In June 2016, 17.4 million people — more than had ever voted for anything in British history — voted Brexit to free themselves from the clutches of that Remainer establishment. Now the Remainer establishment has responded as only it knows how: by ignoring the democratic will and shoring up its power base by whatever means necessary.

The two articles that best sum it up are this excellent leader from the Sunday Telegraph: