“It will be my most challenging about face yet.” The Prime Minister is reported to have informed her cabinet as they prepared to disband for the summer holidays.

“I will need the support of each and everyone of you in order to reverse course on Brexit and begin making the case for remaining in the European Union.”

It’s said at this point she looked pointedly at her foreign secretary.

“That means you Boris, you, you bastard.”

Next she turned to Michael Gove.

“And you, you Murdoch’s mole.”

The Prime Minister is said to have then dangled a significant carrot in front of her assembled cabinet.

“The first one of you to volunteer to say publicly ‘Brexit means remain’ will be rewarded with a peerage.”

The meeting complete May is rumoured to have spent the rest of the day ignoring the country’s other problems (no change there then) and studying ordnance survey maps to locate the best Welsh mountain to practise turning one hundred and eighty degrees on.

The rehearsals are said to be a result of Ms May and colleagues shifting gradually from a land called fantasy to one called reality.

“Take back control.” May reminded her cabinet. “I don’t know what that means? The Japanese have just told me they’re going to ruin our car industry if we take back anymore control. We have to take back control of Brexit!”

It’s believed that means working out how to perform a series of backward steps away from the policy, terminating in a u-turn so perfect the entire country will gasp.

“Let’s leave Brexit to that rent a gob Farage and the inheritance millionaires like the Minister for Silly Walks Rees-Mogg shall we?”

May hopes that this move will also give her a place in the history books as the individual who caused the phrase “u turn” to be reworked to “may turn” in common parlance.