Is anyone brave enough to sign May’s death warrant?

When Theresa May delivered her Commons statement yesterday, she read out something her staff had shaped before the resignations of David Davis and Boris Johnson.

It was a bit like her strange remarks declaimed from the steps of Downing Street after the last election – written for a famous victory, but delivered after a semi-defeat.

Little tributes to her right honourable friends the Members for Haltemprice and Howden (DD) and Uxbridge and South Ruislip (BJ) were spatchcocked in, but her essential

‘They may well feel the easiest thing to do is let her have her plan and see what happens’

argument was presented as if last Friday’s Chequers agreement were still agreed. Obviously, since she had just lost her two most senior Cabinet Brexiteers, it wasn’t.

David Davis’s resignation was logical and – which in politics is not always the same thing – right. Long ago, the Prime Minister had decided to undermine his department and divide his job between an unelected official (Olly Robbins) and herself.

Angela Merkel, sitting in Berlin, knew more than he did about the proposed deal he was employed, but not allowed, to shape. He wasn’t wanted and he wasn’t doing anything and he disagreed with what was being done, so he had to go.

Boris Johnson’s departure was also logical, because of Mr Davis’s.

After that Heathrow stunt, he could not fly to Afghanistan all over again to evade a decision. Given his known views, he could not sustain the pretence of agreement necessary to Cabinet government once his colleague had blown the gaffe.

So which side now holds the upper hand? In terms of the House of Commons – and it is the Commons which usually holds the power of political life and death – Mrs May does. Most of her party’s parliamentary colleagues do not want a leadership election, let alone a general election. They may well feel the easiest thing to do is to let her have her plan, and see what happens when she puts it to M. Barnier.

If the required 48 members sign what they hope will be her death warrant, they could find that no one is brave or competent enough to execute it. The parliamentary term ends in a fortnight: she is surely safe until the end of the summer. Even the Labour benches, though they have to say they want an election, are highly nervous about going to the country now.

Mrs May understands this, and that is why – to the rage of many in her party – she had them briefed by her chief of staff about her statement. She knows that Europe is the great subject on which they do not want to be made to make up their minds.

Against this coalition for the status quo, what chance do two controversial, erratic men, as from yesterday out of office, each incapable of acting in concert, both easily dismissed by the establishment as being Brexit “romantics”, have?

Very little – except for that fact that they oppose that status quo.

Watching the questions to Mrs May’s statement yesterday, one got the

clear impression that what unites a cross-party majority in the House is that it wants Remain.

It knows it can’t have it, because of a little thing called a referendum, and because of what both main parties said at the election. But what that majority fears above all is what Mr Davis made Mrs May assert after the previous Chequers Cabinet meeting in February, and which Boris emphasised in his resignation letter yesterday – “the right to diverge” from the EU.

Mrs May is governed by that fear of freedom too, the prisoner clinging to her captor. As the person doing Brexit, she is therefore inauthentic.

No one – I think I really do mean no one – can see clearly how all this is going to end. But what was true at the referendum two years ago is just as true now – there is a difference between most of those who govern and most of those who are governed. Again and again, British voters are told what’s good for them by their leaders. Again and again, they don’t agree with them anymore. Just now Tory supporters in the country understand this better than many of their MPS. Now that the resignations have given them permission, they will make their views known in good time for the party conference in October.

I kept a copy of the article Boris wrote in this paper on February 22 2016, when he came out for Leave. This is its last sentence, predicting, obliquely, the referendum result: “And in the matter of their own sovereignty, the people, by definition, will get it right.” It is this fact, expressed in 17.4million votes, which makes the Brexit cause authentic, and therefore potentially victorious.