We don't know where Brexiteers are going now. And neither do they

In happier days when Britain was not on the brink of disintegration, David Davis told me a story about the 19^th century French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Little did I suspect that soon he would be living it.

The Francophiles among you will recall the apocryphal tale of Ledru-Rollin enjoying his lunch at a Parisian café when a revolutionary crowd stormed past. Ledru-Rollin leapt from his seat and cried

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”

Where were they going? He did not know. What was his plan? He did not have one.

True believers in Brexit are revolting, and not without cause. They were assured that we could have Brexit without tears; tear up economic and legal arrangements going back almost half a century without suffering a huge dislocation. Anyone who said otherwise was a liar, paid by the EU to promote “project fear”.

It used to be said that a conservative was “a liberal who had been mugged by reality”. Today the converse applies. Reality mugged the cabinet at Chequers on Friday and it agreed to a compromise. (I should not need to add that the compromise won’t work. The options facing Britain are full alignment with the EU – in which case, why leave? – or a complete break – in which case, chaos.)

Alas, there are politicians reality cannot lay a glove on, however hard it tries. Having agreed with his colleagues on Friday, Davis heard the rumbling of the tumbrils in the offices of the Sun, the stamping of feet on the Tory backbenches.