It was about 7pm on Thursday — five hours into a showdown with her Brexit “war cabinet”— that Theresa May revealed her hand and persuaded senior ministers both to agree a policy on leaving the EU and that she might have a future as prime minister. After months of obfuscation May and the other members gathered in the boardroom at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, where she asked her chief civil service negotiator, Oliver Robbins, to outline what she had in mind. It is a measure of May’s enigmatic nature that only one of her ministers — David Davis, the Brexit secretary — had any idea what Robbins was about to say.

“She does treat everybody equally,” one cabinet minister joked. “She keeps everybody