NO matter what your view about Brexit, I hope that you will be ready to agree that the PM is playing a pretty canny hand at it. The terms laid out in her Lancaster House speech, reiterated in Florence and fleshed out in the so well-drafted Mansion House speech last Friday, have been clear and consistent.

We will leave the EU as a result of the people voting to do so. That will be 12 months from now, although there will then be a further implementation period. We will leave the Single Market and Customs Union, without which we would not in effect be leaving at all; we will regain control of our laws by liberating ourselves from the European Court of Justice, and we will regain control of immigration, albeit making a small concession with regard to EU immigrants who arrive here during the transition period.

She remains firm that there will be no ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement, although the details and exact working of that still need to be fleshed out.

All of that is now pretty plain, and has the great merit of being fairly pragmatic and giving neither the Remainers nor the extreme Brexiteers exactly what they want, while keeping both camps moderately happy.

It was a great relief to see Dominic Grieve and Jacob Rees-Mogg side by side welcoming the speech. That alone must be a triumph of conciliatory politics, and the PM is to be congratulated for it.

So if the final terms of our departure from the EU are as laid out in the Mansion House speech, then I think most people will be (perhaps a shade reluctantly) ready to accept it as the best deal we could possibly hope to achieve under the circumstances.

My concern now turns to the EU 27, who must unanimously agree to these terms. Will they? Who knows? If they do not, then we will leave the EU anyhow, and will no doubt use these terms as the basis of our continuing relationship with our European cousins. After all that is as much in their best interests as in ours (or perhaps even more so).

I still take the view that leaving with ‘no deal’ would actually be perfectly workable, and that the threat that we might do so should be enough to force the EU to face the realities of our departure.

I was much encouraged in that view by Sir James Dyson’s remarks last week. Dyson, of course, are large employers locally, and make a huge contribution to the local economy. It is Sir James’s view that he imports large numbers of vacuum cleaners and the rest from his factories in the Far East on WTO terms. Dyson are nonetheless one of the largest white goods suppliers across the EU.

So I feel quietly optimistic about the way the negotiations are going. We will leave in 12 months, and the runes are beginning to look very hopeful of a friendly and prosperous relationship with the EU thereafter alongside a free and economically successful future for our great nation.