It’s official: the withdrawal agreement is not going to pass parliament. Theresa May’s last hope was that the revised political declaration – the rhetorical boilerplate about the future that accompanies the binding accord about the divorce deal – would win enough Conservative MPs round to, at the least, bring the number of rebels down to a point where Labour MPs worried about no deal might consider voting for the deal again.

But it swiftly became clear that, on that metric, the revised declaration is a failure from beginning to end.