During a meeting at Downing Street last week, Geoffrey Cox (the terrifyingly sonorous attorney general) compared Theresa May’s putative Brexit compromise with the EU to the medieval Italian poet Dante’s Limbo.

With his Vincent Price-esque baritone, Cox served the Cabinet with a bespoke Project Fear. The idea that Brexit Britain might end up an eternal halfway house for disappointed lost souls - businesses and politicians forever at the mercy of an alienated European super-state - did not appeal to the Cabinet.