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The Tory party is the party of Brexit, whether it likes it or not. The referendum was called by a Tory prime minister, Tory politicians led Vote Leave and it is a Tory government that is taking Britain out of the European Union. Theresa May might equivocate when asked if she’d vote Leave in another referendum, but to the average voter, Brexit is a Tory policy. Mrs May’s reluctance to say she’d back Brexit in another vote is revealing of a broader Conservative desire to avoid being too closely associated with the project. A classic example is Philip Hammond’s view that the £350 million a week supposedly promised to the National Health Service is Boris Johnson’s problem, not his.

‘We take the view that while things are bloody awful, we don’t want to risk making things worse.’ That is how one senior Tory backbencher sums up the mood of the parliamentary party. No one disputes that the Conservatives are in the doldrums. There is no wind in the government’s sails. No. 10 doesn’t know where it wants to take the country. This general sense of drift is interrupted by the occasional squall. The latest storm was caused by Nick Boles’s criticism of Theresa May. On Friday evening, the former housing minister took to Twitter to lament the lack of a radical government agenda and to tell the Prime Minister to raise her game. Immediately, Westminster began wondering what he was up to. Who he was speaking for? After all, Boles has form.

Last week Nigel Farage described the deal we’ve done with France over the refugee camp near Calais as a ‘humiliating capitulation’. His was the most disgruntled voice among a number of others. The disgruntlement arose from the ‘Sandhurst’ deal struck with France during President Macron’s visit to Britain. The Prime Minister had agreed (at Sandhurst) to pay some £44.5 million more for the maintenance of security on French soil, mostly around Calais, and undertaken to speed up the snail’s-pace processing of applications from refugees with family connections in Britain.

I wonder if we are about to see a mass resignation of women from Labour, furious at the party’s collapse before the shrieking transgender army? Only last week it said that the 50 all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats would indeed be restricted to women, rather than opened up to people with penises and weighty scrotums who like to dress up as ladies. This followed the threat of action under equalities legislation from feminists enraged that their long fight for equal representation was once again under threat from men; this time men in a not-too-cunning disguise. The legal threat was crowdfunded by a bunch of sisters and fellow travellers — but then the NEC backtracked. It said it intended to be ‘ahead of the law’ (i.e.

Tuition fees have all but killed the Liberal Democrats. The breach of their manifesto pledge to abolish the charges, compounded by them voting for a fees increase, broke the party. Even the opportunities presented by Brexit have not revived them. In their defence, they can plead that tuition fees make fools of all parties. The Conservatives opposed them at first, then raised them to £9,000 a year. The Labour party introduced them, yet now campaigns to abolish them. In 2018, we seem to be in for another bout of tuition-fees silliness. No. 10 is clear that Jo Johnson was moved from the universities brief in the reshuffle because he was obstructing a review of the current policy.

In the churchyard by the church near my grandmother’s house, there’s a tombstone with an inscription that’s haunted me since I was a child. It marks the grave of a woman called Elizabeth who died, as I remember, in the 1920s. Elizabeth married young, had five babies in five years, then died well before she reached 30. The epitaph on her stone: ‘She did her duty.’ I often find myself thinking about Elizabeth and how different her cold and stoic age was to ours. I thought of her late last year as a slew of research revealed that an astonishing number of women, more than one in ten, screen positive for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).