Portrait of the week | 12 July 2018

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Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary the day after David Davis resigned as Brexit Secretary, both in reaction to a government plan for Brexit agreed by the cabinet after being held incommunicado at Chequers for 12 hours, their mobile phones confiscated. At Chequers, Mr Johnson was reported to have said: ‘Anyone defending the proposal we have just agreed will find it like trying to polish a turd.’ In his resignation letter he said that the Brexit ‘dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt’, adding: ‘We are truly headed for the status of a colony.’ Dominic Raab, the housing minister, replaced Mr Davis; Kit Malthouse replaced Mr Raab. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, replaced Mr Johnson; Matt Hancock, the digital, culture, media and sport secretary, replaced Mr Hunt; Jeremy Wright, the attorney general, replaced Mr Hancock; Geoffrey Cox replaced Mr Wright. Steve Baker the Brexit minister also resigned, as did Maria Caulfield and Ben Bradley, vice-chairmen of the party, of which there had been at least nine. Lord Carrington, who resigned as foreign secretary at the outbreak of the Falklands War, died aged 99.

The contents of Theresa May’s Chequers plan, to be amplified in a white paper, was released as a three-page summary. It claimed to allow for a free-trade area for goods, as if the EU and UK were ‘a combined customs territory’; services were to be dealt with separately. There would be ‘a common rulebook’, with ‘the UK making an upfront choice to commit by treaty to ongoing harmonisation with EU rules on goods’; in other words a permanent treaty would oblige Britain to obey EU regulations. UK courts would have to have ‘due regard’ for EU case law. A facilitated customs arrangement would avoid Irish border checks.