Theresa May clears first hurdle: Brexit crosses Becher’s Brook for first time

The natural relief that Brexit’s Becher’s Brook has been negotiated at the first time of asking must be tempered by the reality that, just as is the case at Aintree, many daunting obstacles lie ahead. Many of today’s protagonists will not even reach Becher’s Brook to jump it, as winners must, a second time — and it would take Aintree’s sharpest bookie to predict whether or not British prime minister Theresa May will still be in the saddle when the grey gelding Soft Brexit faces Becher’s before — if — it turns into the home straight.

It seems certain though that Ms May will face baying-at-the-moon criticism and charges of betrayal of “the will of the people” from her Brextremist colleagues who imagine the British tail should have wagged the European Union dog. She will be characterised as a Home Counties quisling who, as Jacob Rees Mogg will helpfully point out irrespective of the facts, condemned her country to “vassalage” — vocabulary only a person with a very sheltered, one-eyed understanding of British history would dare use.