Robert Peston

I am confused by what David Davis’s new principles to ensure fair competition between Brexit Britain and the EU are supposed to achieve – especially the part on consumer protection. The Dexeu secretary said: 'The UK will continue to be a leading advocate of open investment flows after we leave the EU. But it cannot be that an EU company could merge with a UK company and significantly reduce consumer choice'. Does this mean that he and the Government now regret the sale of our airports, trains, airlines, telecom companies, energy suppliers and so on to huge businesses from Spain, Germany, France and the rest of the EU?

'Is Boris preparing to flounce out of the cabinet?' Not my question, but that of one of his senior ministerial colleagues. Why could that be? Exhibit A. In this morning’s cabinet, he is hijacking Jeremy Hunt’s update about how hospitals are coping with the winter pressures with a headline grabbing and overtly populist demand for the Treasury to find an additional £5bn a year of health spending – which would be a modest down payment on the £18bn ('£350m a week') he pledged during the EU referendum campaign. Theresa May won’t be amused. Hunt can’t be sure if Johnson is friend or foe. But it is the kind of typical Boris intervention that says to his backbench colleagues 'if she’s too timid as PM, look what I would do'. Exhibit B.

The government threw everything at trying to defeat Tory rebels led by the former attorney general Dominic Grieve and their amendment to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill - which forces the government to enact a statute "approving the final terms" of Brexit before the UK leaves the EU. And that is one of the big reasons why this defeat for Theresa May matters: it shows the fury among some of its MPs, notably those who voted to Remain, that they are being ignored, as Theresa May engages in the most important negotiations relating to this nations' future since those that took us into the EU (or what was the Common Market).

So it turns out there is something Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party fears and loathes more than the possibility of a government led by Jeremy Corbyn. They would be prepared to sink Theresa May and her government to prevent even the remotest prospect of a border being introduced in the middle of the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Which is why the prime minister has to be quadruply clear that any regulatory alignment she offers to the EU to prevent the re-establishment of a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic has to be alignment that applies clearly and equitably to the whole of the UK and not just to Northern Ireland.

There is a naive belief at the top of government that because the Tories are only a fart’s yard behind Labour in the polls — despite daily manifestations of schism, scandal and incompetence — everything will turn out fine in the end. But this is to ignore the party’s greatest structural weakness: it is clueless in cyberspace. On the social media battlefield, it is fighting with knitting needles against Labour’s laser-guided missiles. The crude stats are humiliating for Theresa May. Her Twitter and Facebook accounts have 411,000 and 540,000 followers respectively, compared with 1.6 million and 1.4 million for Jeremy Corbyn. His online films and tweets are seen by millions, — many times the number who hang on the Prime Minister’s digital words.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I might conclude that the prime minister's speech in Florence represents the victory of Whitehall, led by the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, over the arch Brexiteers in the cabinet. Because although it is spectacularly short on detail, it does not represent a clean break with the EU. And it seems to propose some kind of associate membership of the EU for Britain as the long-term status quo. May proposes a new trading relationship with the EU that is neither membership of the European Economic Area and the single market or a conventional free trade arrangement. She wants our future economic relations with the continent to be more intimate than the latter and a bit less intimate than the former.

I first met a boyish, sunny Tony Blair more than 20 years ago. Our encounters have always been slightly tense since I reported some clumsy remarks he made about tax when he was still an apprentice PM — and he reacted much as Andrea Leadsom did against the Times last week (though via A. Campbell rather than Twitter). On Wednesday afternoon at Admiralty House he is a stricken caricature of how he was: painfully thin; waxy skin; astonishingly terrible teeth. He is a brilliant actor but not that good: he has been tormenting himself over Chilcot. But he isn’t sorry for the invasion, as he told me, and would do it again if circumstances repeated. His journey from fêted hero in 1997 to perhaps the most isolated man in Britain is a national tragedy.