Sometime in the weeks after Mrs May became Prime Minister in 2016, she gave Carlos Ghosn, Chief Executive of Renault and Renault-Nissan a private, undisclosed, assurance that the UK’s leaving the EU would not handicap his firm’s ability to export cars from the UK to the EU, compared with the then situation of the UK in the EU.

Given the huge pressure the principal car makers, all foreign-owned, have put on Mrs May’s negotiating team to somehow ensure the car industry’s protection from tariffs and safety checks at EU borders (totally unnecessary though they are), it would be interesting to know what Mr Ghosn and Mrs May agreed.

We shall probably never know, but since Ghosn signed off the new production line at Sunderland (which was the objective of Mrs May’s intervention) it doesn’t look all that relevant today anyway, since Mr Ghosn has been fired from both his Nissan and Renault jobs.

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