Interpretation one: its members are talking at length, but there’s no real resistance to the Prime Minister’s draft Brexit plan. Interpretation two: it is running into trouble.
They should first seek to persuade May not to press for a decision, since there will have been no opportunity for full timely study of the text.
They mustn’t let Downing Street bounce them into agreeing a 500-plus page deal that they won’t have had time to study properly.
Also: Scottish Tories attack SNP over income tax ‘gap’; no boost for Plaid from new leader; and DUP’s Brexit donation given a clean bill of legal health.
Obama’s EU referendum intervention didn’t help deliver a Remain result for Cameron. It’s not clear that the Government has learned from the experience.
What will happen this week? When could a summit take place? What would the Cabinet say – and what might the Attorney General do?
We have occasionally seen precipitous falls in Cabinet members’ scores. Vertiginous rises are rarer. Indeed, it is hard to think of a jump quite like it.
Progress in this chart is invariably linked to media coverage – of which the former Brexit Secretary has had lots recently and the former Foreign Secretary less.
As Attorney General, he is telling his Cabinet colleagues what any proposals for a deal really mean – even if that’s inconvenient for Downing Street.
Don’t allow the UK to get locked into an unending transition, the single market, or the customs union – and resist the lazy ‘Norway option’.
The Chancellor’s recent claims of a coming “Deal Dividend” sent the wrong message at the wrong time – and showed up a deep Treasury malaise.
The Brexit secretary admits it wasn’t his idea, however, and that we’d have to “know how we get out of it”.
It isn’t just pro-Brexit MPs who should be watching the Prime Minister carefully. It’s pro-Union ones: in other words, all of them.
The key question now for Conservative MPs is whether they can support the UK being trapped in a customs union – and the dismemberment of the Union itself.
McVey? Mordaunt? Hammond, because the policy swings the other way? May herself? None of the above?