The abandoned revolution: has the government given up on Brexit?

There is a lesser-known Robert Redford film, The Candidate, in which he plays a no-hope Democrat taking on a popular and well-liked Republican in a Californian election. After engaging unexpectedly well with the public and winning an improbable victory, he turns to one of his aides and asks, bewildered: ‘What do we do now?’ The question is left hanging in the air like the back end of the bus in The Italian Job.

The script might as well have been written about Boris Johnson and the Brexit referendum campaign. It is nearly six years on from that victory, and two years on from Brexit itself. And yet it is still far from clear what — if anything — the Prime Minister intends to do with his victory.

We thought we knew what he wanted from Brexit. Had he not spent the referendum campaign advocating how leaving the EU would help us open up to the rest of the world? Had he not spent his early months as foreign secretary banging on about ‘global Britain’ and how it was his mission to help Britain ‘be more outward-looking and more engaged with the world than ever before’?

Then there were the promises to take action on over-regulation, a subject which he had spent 25 years railing against and which formed an important part of the Daily Telegraph piece in March 2016 in which he explained why he had decided to campaign for Leave.