On Brexit, no one quite knows where Boris is taking us

I am not going to lie: I am bored sick with Brexit. Like so many of you, I have become that frustrated child in the back of the car moaning, ‘are we there yet?’

Boris Johnson won’t tell us. Or at least not in precise terms. So on this marathon journey, just days before we leave the EU in a legal sense at 11pm on 31 January, the final destination can only be deduced, and certainly not with any precision.

What Johnson says he wants, more than anything, is a trading relationship with the EU that returns to the UK a sovereign ability to set its own rules and regulations for business, such as companies’ duties to employees, their environmental obligations, their safety standards and so on.

All this is implicit in the phrase – which the Chancellor in today’s FT uttered as an echo of the PM – that ‘there will not be alignment, we will not be a rule-taker’.