Throughout this hair-tearing, spirit-squashing, nationally humiliating parade of cluelessness, there has been at least one Conservative politician who deserves respect.

It’s Theresa May.

Of course she’s made mistakes. Particularly in the first year of her premiership, when she set unrealistically high expectations of what the EU negotiations could achieve. But at least – apart from that strange little display after Salzburg, in which she seemed to imagine she was delivering the decisive monologue in a very bad film about the Second World War – Mrs May has acted with dignity, composure, and class.

Which is more than you can say for the crew of charlatans plotting to depose her.

This is because the so-called “European Research Group” on the Conservative back benches is stuffed with the most risible crowd of fantasists, crackpots and dunderheads to be found anywhere outside the comments section below a YouTube video about chemtrails. In the Commons on Thursday these jabbering blowhards spent three solid hours rubbishing the Prime Minister and her proposed deal without once, any of them, explaining how they would have done it better. They’re terribly good, these people, at saying what they want: perfect control, immaculate sovereignty, trillion-pound trade deals with Easter Island. But for some reason they always have precious little to say about how they, in the real world as opposed to their daydreams, would achieve it.