Downing Street has lost the right to be trusted

As a rule, it is naïve to hope that the thuggery of our masters will rebound and the wicked will suffer for their misdeeds. The good don’t end happily and the bad unhappily in modern Westminster. Still, as the Brexit crisis intensifies I am happy to tell you there are a few hopeful signs that the wages of sin are, if not political death, then at least political torture.

In a report of the highest significance this morning, Peter Foster of the Daily Telegraph showed that all Boris Johnson’s blustering that giving him a free hand was the only way to get a deal out of the EU was so much bull. (I know, I know, I was shocked too.)

The Johnson administration has not been sincere about striking a compromise with the EU and has put forward no serious proposals on the Irish border. Foster reported that two ‘highly placed’ sources had told him that Dominic Cummings had described the EU negotiations as ‘a sham’ in internal strategy meetings at Downing Street.