It was death by a thousand cuts, but when Donald Tusk administered the coup de grace on Theresa May’s Chequers plan in Salzburg on Thursday, there was still a sharp intake of breath among those who had – encouraged by delusions in Downing Street – clung to the belief it could survive.

“It will not work,” said the president of the European Council in his customary matter-of-fact style, “because it risks undermining the single market.”

This cannot have come as news. Michel Barnier has been saying for months now that the EU cannot risk undermining the “four freedoms” of goods, services, capital and movement that undergird the single market.

Until Thursday, Downing Street has been in denial. It believed that when Mrs May got her fellow EU leaders in the room, they would show more flexibility than Mr Barnier and the “theologians” in Brussels who she blamed for such a narrow, blinkered approach to the negotiation.

But the chiefs have spoken, and they have apparently come to the same conclusion as Mr Barnier – that the customs and trade part of Chequers was “cherry-picking” and posed a systemic threat to the economic and political future of their union.

Mr Tusk pushed the blade up to the hilt by posting a picture of himself on his Instagram account offering Mrs May a pastry, alongside the caption: “A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.”