It has just been revealed that The Evening Standard is now the most read newspaper by MPs — but no member of the Cabinet will read this editorial today. They are locked away in Chequers all day, their mobile phones confiscated by Downing Street officials keen to leak their own account of the Brexit summit before rival versions appear. Senior members of the Government will be shut off from the world — literally and metaphorically.

At issue, in theory, is whether Theresa May can get agreement on her proposed customs partnership with the EU. This involves Britain agreeing in future to align with all the EU’s regulations over physical products, and abiding by the European Court’s rulings on them. Where today we are part of the rule-making, we would become a rule-taker, accepting the decisions of those who remain in the EU. Britain is giving up control.

When it comes to a future trade deal with, say, the US, the EU will agree the terms and we will meekly adopt them. We will be at the back of the queue, to coin a phrase. The red lines Mrs May foolishly drew up in her early months as PM will be abandoned. But this is the price she now knows Britain has to pay to maintain the free flow of goods, avoid the damage protectionist barriers would bring and keep the commitment to the open border with Ireland that she conceded to the EU negotiators last year.

Will the seven Brexiteers in the Cabinet be prepared to accept this humiliation? The signs are “yes”, because they have no choice. When they met in Boris Johnson’s room in the Foreign Office last night they will have realised that a mass resignation, and a challenge to Mrs May’s leadership, would only expose the fact that they don’t have enough Tory MPs backing them to succeed. The Foreign Secretary’s office has seen many a moment when the occupant realises they no longer have the power they once had.

But that does not mean Mrs May prevails, because there is one thing she and her Cabinet seem to have forgotten — they are not negotiating with themselves but with the EU. Part of Mrs May’s plan to align with the EU’s product rules is the assumption that we can set our own rules on services, which make up 80 per cent of the British economy, and end free movement of people. Yet the EU has consistently said it is not prepared to let the UK “cherry pick” the bits of membership it likes and reject the rest. Nor, as President Macron among others is making clear, is it going to allow any division of the four fundamental freedoms of the EU (goods, capital, services and people). Britain cannot have a third way, where we stay in the single market for goods but not for people and services.

We are back to the choices the Cameron government set out for the country before the vote: either stay in the whole single market, through an European Economic Area arrangement like Norway, or have a free trade agreement like Canada, with new barriers at the border and the damage that business has been rightly warning us of. A majority in the Cabinet and in the Commons has now firmly resolved that it will not be party to an act of gross economic self-harm. That means Britain is ineluctably being drawn towards a form of EEA and customs union membership. Some leading Brexiteers, such as Dan Hannan, are openly talking about it; in private, there is at least one Brexiteer Cabinet member thinking of breaking ranks and proposing it. For it is clearly now the best option for both the country and the Conservative Party, as this paper has consistently advised. The irony is that this is the one course Mrs May has set herself against. How long will this latest fruitless act of opposition last? She may get her way at the summit today but once the Cabinet get their phones back, they will realise that there is a real world beyond the parched gardens of Chequers.

Reasons for pride

Spoilt for choice — that’s our condition this weekend. There’s Pride, then there’s Wimbledon, with Kyle Edmund playing Novak Djokovic, the Grand Prix at Silverstone and the small matter of the England game. Tough choices. But they all make us proud.