With every turn of the screw it becomes clearer. Jacob Rees-Mogg should have cried foul on December 8 last year when Theresa May promised Dublin and the EU that the Irish border would remain invisible. He and his European Reform Group (ERG) bottled it.

He warned her before she left for Brussels that her red lines “were beginning to look a bit pink”. She returned from Brussels with a deal that made it all but impossible for Britain to leave the customs union in any meaningful way. We waited for Mr Rees-Mogg to call her out.

And he bottled it. Everything that has happened in preparations for EU negotiations since then has thrown the significance of that deal into sharper focus. There is no way