Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. It's hard to know where to start this week. It's hard to know where we're going to end up.

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Luckily we've got someone here who might be able to help, although I...

Oh not.

Helen Thompson and I are here together. It's just us. I don't know what this is talking therapy or something like that. We're going to work our way through it.

So I'm just going to start with how I see it and then Helen you're going to fill in all of the enormous gaps in this.

So there have been moral victories this week and rhetorical victories being claimed and I'm sure there have been some pyrrhic victories too.

But that's all in the eye of the beholder. I've seen to meet two facts that are hard to dispute their significance.

The first is that Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister. We discuss it was unlikely that he was going to be removed but that was an option and he and his advisors calculated rightly that the opposition did not have the numbers for that.

So he couldn't put together an alternative government. So he's still Prime Minister. He's parod parliament. He's for now that has worked.

So he will almost certainly be Prime Minister when parliament comes back unless his health or his nerve give way which is possible because he doesn't look in great shape.

But I think we have to assume that he will be Prime Minister for the Queen's speech and then almost immediately it will be him and his team who go to negotiate the end game of the Brexit talks.

So that's fact one. Fact two is that the opposition did then manage to organize around legislation requiring him to sign a letter which he hands to Donald Tusk seeking if there is no deal an extension for three months.

So these are the two things that no one can dispute. One I think is a kind of victory for Johnson and one is clearly a defeat.

The better I struggle with is how they go together and it seems to me that Johnson's opponents have made a mistake here because though it is true that he can't do what was mooted in the press a couple of days ago, write another letter saying I don't mean the first letter that would clearly be illegal.

I think Johnson's assumption said it would be illegal but he doesn't have to do that. As I understand it if he hands that letter, Tusk and the others, the other European leaders will say to him what's the extension for?

That's almost an unspoken rule of this game that you ask for an extension for a reason and he can give a legal and honest answer which is either there is no reason or the reason is to try and remove me as Prime Minister.

It's a purely political act and if you look at the text in the legislation of the letter that he has to sign, it does not have a reason and actually it treats the Europeans with a kind of contempt.

It says we're playing our political games and this is what we want but if you put that letter in the hands of someone who doesn't believe in it, he's not breaking the law if he says to them, there isn't a reason or this is just designed to do me down and that's a huge gamble.

I entirely agree with you on the second point. On the first, this is as much thinking out loud as I didn't think pretty much anybody's trying to think about this is doing when all of a sudden done.

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