Boris Johnson won't be sacked
It’s worth saying, because it hasn’t happened much recently: the PM had a decent day yesterday.
In her statement about her revised approach to Brexit talks, she answered a number of questions rather more frankly than is her wont.
So the Brexiteering ultra Jacob Rees-Mogg was told something he did not want to hear, which is that during the two-year period of implementing any Brexit deal after March 29 2019, the UK would still be subject to EU courts and laws.
He didn’t like it. She said hard fromage.
Meanwhile she may have gone further than her soft Brexiteer colleagues would like in her blunt answer to Desmond Swayne, who - as another Leave purist - urged her to put resources behind preparing for a no-deal Brexit (the hardest and starkest of Brexits) and she said that was precisely what the government was doing.
Or to put it another way, if Brexit was a cheese, yesterday the PM maintained the conceit that we want Camembert, while preparing us for something harder than a 25-year-old mature farmhouse cheddar.
So in the white-hot furnace of last week’s Tory conference, has May been transformed from bot to Corbyn blue - a putative "authentic" politician who appears to say what she actually thinks, while leaving us very little the wiser where we are actually heading?
Too early to say, though ingrained caution won't be purged easily.
However she is certainly tougher than many thought - and a chastened Boris Johnson is trying really really hard to do be loyal, against every DNA strand in his corpus.
Will she sack or demote him?
Well only about half of her MPs would like that - which means Johnson would be far too great a danger to her if he was evicted to the backbenches.
And since he might flounce out if shuffled down, I suspect she will continue to regard him for some time yet as the best foreign secretary we have (though, for what it is worth, she has not ruled out TRYING to move him).