Reshuffle!

Raab – as Ian Dunt pleasingly said, the idiot’s idiot – to the Foreign Office. Patel – sacked in disgrace last year – to the Home Office. Javid – I don’t have much of a problem with him, actually, but he’s a born-again no dealer so I don’t trust him – to the Treasury.

The Great Offices of State, reduced to this.

But I’m interested to see where this goes. Pleased, even, in a Last Days of Rome kind of way. The Remainers, even the reasonable Brexiteers – Liam Fox has come out of this leadership contest, shockingly, with his reputation enhanced, deconstructing Boris’s GATT 24 rubbish and warning against no deal – have been purged. Dominic Cummings, mastermind behind the Vote Leave campaign, has come in to Downing Street as chief advisor. It’s a lovely reunion of the Leave lot, the hardliners and the extremists.

It means there can be no ‘stabbed in the back’ myth when it all goes belly up. There was a flavour of this in 2016 when May appointed the three Brexiteers – Johnson, Davis, Fox – to Brexit-facing roles, the idea that they’d made the mess so they had to clean it up. A bit of tactical genius from May, a knowing nod and a wink to the impossibility of their position – until it wasn’t, until we realised it was just another bit of kicking the can down the road. There was never any plan, just survival.

And that was why May went so hard with the ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ line. Her aides recently admitted it was thrown in because they felt they should say it, rather than being based in any evidence; because she was a Remainer, she had to work extra hard to burnish her Brexiteer credentials, appointing Leavers to key positions and pursuing the hardest Brexit possible.

But now she’s gone, and the Eurosceptics have well and truly taken the wheel. So when it all goes wrong – be that failing to deliver Brexit on time, or calling a second referendum, or disastrously crashing out without a deal – it’s entirely on their heads.

They’ll try to shift the blame, of course. The Leave campaign – and the Eurosceptic movement more generally – were largely exercises in false apportionment of blame. Johnson’s recent kipper claims – blaming the EU for regulations imposed by the British government– are the latest in a long line of falsehoods.

I always wonder why, if the EU is so bad, they need to make things up about it.