This is the real reason Boris Johnson came close to resigning last week

Why did the Foreign Secretary publish an article last week that appeared to put him at odds with the Prime Minister, prompting speculation he was about to quit?

The Foreign Secretary has dominated the news in the past week with rumours of resignation or power play circulating (Reuters)

My latest intelligence on Boris Johnson’s article and his wobble over resigning is that it was all a misunderstanding. He thought that Theresa May was “veering towards” a Swiss-style relationship with the EU, as the long-term objective. That is, Britain would stay in something like the single market – although excluding the free movement of people – and would continue to make contributions to the EU budget for the privilege.

I understand that he was being told by other people that this was the way the Prime Minister was going, but the most striking part of the story is that he spoke to her face to face and he thought it was what she was saying.

In which case, it suggests either a misreading of the situation by Johnson or an absence of clarity on May’s part – or, mostly likely, a bit of both. Johnson was already nervous about being excluded from the Cabinet’s Brexit discussions, and he was being wound up by Brexiteers, always on the look-out for someone to betray them.

But it is also “not uncommon” for people to come away from a conversation with the Prime Minister thinking she has said something she hasn’t, I am told.

Then, as I wrote on Sunday, he missed a Cabinet committee meeting when he was in Anguilla, and No 10 refused to let him deliver a speech – presumably because it would make the Government look divided in the run-up to tomorrow’s speech by the Prime Minister. So Johnson, thinking he was being stitched up, gave his 4,000-word speech to The Daily Telegraph.

He had no need to, because May had no intention of proposing payments for access to the single market beyond the transitional period after Brexit. She has been dead against the idea from the start – even if the EU would allow such a deal while exempting Britain from free movement of people, which is unlikely.

Johnson’s aim in his article was to head off the idea that continuing payments for something like single market membership, such as those made by Norway and Switzerland, were acceptable as a long-term arrangement. Hence what he thought was the most important line: “We would not expect to pay for access to their markets any more than they would expect to pay for access to ours.”

But she agrees with him: she thinks that wouldn’t deliver what the British people voted for in the referendum. She is prepared to pay for specific programmes, such as Europol and Erasmus, but not a general fee for privileged access to the single market.

May and Johnson agree that there has to be a transitional period after we leave the EU, and that the UK will have to pay something during that period. But, although there is a division in the Cabinet over the “end state” after the transition (as James Forsyth details in The Spectator) May is probably more on Johnson’s side than Philip Hammond’s.

But her lack of clarity, as much as Johnson’s paranoia, caused a supposed cabinet split where there probably wasn’t one.