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Welcome to The Spectator Podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. On this week's episode, we'll be wondering whether Theresa May can weather this latest

storm, speaking to a robot expert and a literal robot, and getting the inside story of

male allyship workshops. First up, the Prime Minister's fortunes have ebbed and flowed since

her disastrous election, but a yuletide season of relative calm has been replaced by Theresa May's

greatest challenge yet.

Lead or go.

That's what James Versaith says in this week's cover piece as pressure mounts on Theresa May to cobble together something resembling an agenda.

He joins me now, along with Jars Kenningham, who worked at number 10 under David Cameron.

So James, how bad are things for Theresa May this week?

Last week you wrote about the government drifting.

It seems now more that it's drifted towards a waterfall and is about to fall off it.

I think things are bad because from the cabinet down, there is depression about the level of drift on both Brexit and domestic policy issues. One member of the Brexit in a cabinet tells

me that the Brexit policy making looks

even worse from the inside than the outside. And I think an example of this trip came on Monday,

which is the Brexit inner cabinet met. There are nine questions it's meant to deal with across

three meetings. And the three questions it was expected to deal with on Monday were Ireland,

security and data. And obviously Ireland goes a long way to telling

you what the eventual economic relationship with the EU that the UK is seeking is. But then when the

agenda for the meeting came out, Ireland wasn't on it. And it's just another example of how

Theresa May doesn't want to confront the biggest single question, which is,

what is the end state that the UK is looking for? So instead, they spent their time discussing

...