For hard Brexiteers to stop May's soft option they must oust her '“ and soon

It looked as though they had been kept in the dark, ridden roughshod over and treated as very, very distant, insignificant players, rather than the king-making, power-brokering party which was propping up the UK government and keeping Theresa May in Downing Street.

And the longer the DUP were kept from seeing the text of the deal – while all around them tweets and rumours were flying – the angrier the DUP became.

So angry, in fact, that they had no choice but to put the boot into the Prime Minister while she was enjoying a late lunch in Brussels.

By the end of the day Mrs May was in a huge hole: politically damaged and psychologically shrivelled just when she thought she was reasserting some authority again.

Brought to heel by a fringe party – which is how one senior Conservative in London described the DUP when I spoke to him on Monday evening – and derided by her own Brexiteers and every other party in Westminster.

In an interview on Tuesday morning I said that she couldn’t be seen to allow Nigel Dodds and Arlene Foster to have the whip hand on the UK’s negotiations: “If she wants to keep her job she’ll have to face them down.”

Which is what she seems to have done in the early hours of Friday morning.

Arlene Foster’s statement summed it up: “However, we believe there is still more work to be done to improve the paper...

“We cautioned the Prime Minister about proceeding with this agreement in its present form given the issues expressed to us by many of her own party colleagues.

“However, it was ultimately a matter for the Prime Minister to decide how she chose to proceed...

“Along with like-minded colleagues across the House of Commons, we will ensure that there is no backsliding on the promises made about the integrity of the Union.”

That language reminds me of the language used by Peter Robinson in response to the St Andrews Agreement: “It is not our agreement. It is not a DUP agreement. It is an agreement between the two governments.”

Let’s be honest, when you have to give a very public message about ensuring “there is no backsliding”, it does tend to give the impression that you don’t entirely trust your partner.

It’s not that the DUP is preparing to walk away from the Tory deal in the next few months; but the evidence does suggest that, as they did at St Andrews, they’re already setting out some caveats and wriggle-room.

My own take is that Mrs May is preparing for a very soft Brexit.

In fairness, that was always my view.

She isn’t and never was in the Leave camp.

I’ve written on a number of occasions that the final deal (and I’ve never dismissed the possibility of a second referendum which keeps us in the EU) could place us in a “constitutional granny flat, in which the UK is neither quite in, nor quite out of the EU”.

House of Commons arithmetic favours a soft Brexit; meaning that if she did decide to face down both the DUP and her own rebels she would probably still have the numbers to get a soft deal through.

And it’s worth bearing in mind that a majority of Conservatives and Labour (along with key elements in the SNP) take the view that a soft deal addresses some of the issues which threaten to undermine the constitutional/geographical integrity of the UK.

May’s real problem, of course, is that, so far, she has been trying to negotiate from a position of weakness; a problem she had hoped would be solved by victory in a snap election.

A leader cannot deliver if she is reliant upon those who oppose her.

Her best bet at this point – although I’m not a Remainer – is to face down those opponents and deliver what she actually wants to deliver.

The key thing for May is hanging on long enough to get most of her preferred solution in place.

If she manages to do that, it makes it much more difficult for those who want to overthrow her to succeed, because the EU is not going to abandon agreements just to suit someone like Boris Johnson or Rees-Mogg.

If they are serious about stopping a soft Brexit then they need to get rid of her very soon.

There will be a special Cabinet meeting next week to discuss all of this, so it will be interesting to see if she is prepared to take on the rebels and plough her own course.

Going it alone requires great courage. Does she have it?

Meanwhile, we still have the same old dreary steeples to deal with in Northern Ireland.

No Assembly. No Executive. No First and Deputy First ministers. No talks process. No sign that the DUP and Sinn Fein will cut a deal.

And no indication that James Brokenshire is prepared to step in and do the job.

He has asked for independent advice on MLA’s salaries, yet doesn’t ask those same advisers for their view on whether he should still be paid his salary (somewhere between £135,000 and £140,000, if memory serves me) while seemingly content to leave NI in a limbo and leaving it to senior civil servants to call the shots.

The Prime Minister could do worse, much worse, than just let him go. He is loyal, but so is a sheep dog; and you wouldn’t leave one of them in charge of the NIO.