The David Davis resignation crisis is over for today – but this is just the start of troubles to come

David Davis is famous for a baffling resignation. He quit as shadow home secretary 10 years ago next Tuesday to fight a quixotic by-election against the phantasm of New Labour’s assault on civil liberties.

And he has threatened in private to resign as Brexit Secretary so often that rumours of his imminent departure have often become public. In the past few days, his disagreement with Theresa May became so well known that his two meetings with the prime minister this morning were followed by the Westminster media pack almost as closely as Priti Patel’s flight back from Kenya to be sacked in November.

Last night, a source close to Davis put the chances of his resignation today at 50:50. Today, Davis’s unofficial spokespeople declared that he had got what he wanted and would be staying in post. The meetings seem to have ended in agreement that the white paper, which Davis wanted published before the European summit at the end of this month, will now appear next Thursday, although a draft of the key section has been published today.

This is the section on the fraught question of the “backstop” agreement for the Irish border, which was the primary cause of the dispute – the argument over the timing of publication arose out of the failure to agree.

It didn’t help Davis’s case that his position made no sense. He wanted to put a time limit on the backstop deal agreed in December. But the point of the backstop is that it would apply if the UK and the EU are unable to agree better arrangements for the Irish border. The EU would not have agreed to it if it had a time limit, because it would want to know what would happen if there is no agreement by the deadline.

It now seems that the text of the white paper will say the government “expects” that the backstop will be superseded by a free trade agreement “by the end of December 2021 at the latest”. You don’t need a diploma in cryptography to know that this fudge is in the prime minister’s favour: you need merely to observe that the party briefing most loudly about victory is usually the one that has retreated.

May’s approach to Brexit has been to fudge and to delay more than was previously thought humanly possible. This is only partly a matter of her temperament: it has been forced on her by the divisions in her party and the weakness of the UK’s negotiating hand. But every now and again the British government’s negotiations with itself reach a point where a decision has to be made.

Some people have described Theresa May’s approach to the hard Brexiters in her cabinet as boiling frogs: raising the temperature of the water so gradually that Davis, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Liam Fox don’t realise they are being cooked.

But it may be that what is really happening is that the frogs are gradually having to face up to the reality of the Brexit negotiations. They have signed up to a soft border in Ireland; now they have to accept what that means. And one thing it cannot mean is that a soft border expires on a certain date.

Which means there are likely to be more resignation rumours between now and 29 March. Davis may have shied away from tilting at this particular windmill, but the chances are that May will be driven towards a softer Brexit than he and his fellow Eurosceptics want.

There will be more of these semi-public arguments backed up by “sources close to” cabinet ministers saying they are poised on the brink of walking out. One huge complication is that every time a cabinet minister is reported to be standing up to the prime minister in defence of a hard Brexit, their standing among Eurosceptic Tory party members will rise. And therefore their chances of succeeding May as leader and prime minister if, as most Tories still expect, May is replaced before the next election.

Today’s flurry is only a harbinger of bigger storms to come.