If you’ve been near the high street recently you’ll have seen all the commercial Christmas tat back up. It’s still only November but it’s returned like a bad rash, and you’ll possibly be counting down the days until you can finally open that SmartTV you bought yourself, I mean that you bought for the family. Children are maybe drafting letters to Santa this weekend but in Downing Street, Theresa May’s hoping she’s been a good girl this year as she writes down what she wants and flies off to Europe once again to meet with the leaders of Belgium, Lithuania, Denmark as well as Donald Tusk.

I was going to make some kind of analogy here involving whatever the hot toy is this year that all the kids are after but that would of course imply that the Theresa’s cabinet had a united position on what they were after; right now the demands are something like a train set that comes with hair accessories and plays Nintendo games and costs somewhere between free and £40 billion at John Lewis. Still, it’s probably better than having negotiate the visa conditions for Tracy Island following Brexit or persuading Anthea Turner to come and show Theresa how to construct a Brexit agreement at home with stuff that’s just lying around.

In the mean time though, Angela Merkel won’t be taking part in any of this, she has her own problems at home following the failure to reach a coalition deal and elsewhere in Europe, Ireland’s government faces the similar threat of fresh new elections and the Spanish haven’t agreed on what Spain actually consists of. Perhaps the Christmas toy analogy I should have gone for would be a Rubik’s Cube, except it’s some kind of bizarre unsolvable a cube with 7 sides and Germany’s far right AfD party don’t 6 of the 7 sides. And I just remembered that St Nicolas was actually from Southern Turkey and I try to keep things short and succinct so let’s just leave this metaphor at least for now and we’ll wait and see what President Erdogan gets up to in the next few weeks.