It’s not about Brexit any more, at least not primarily. It’s about whether we remain a democracy in the fullest sense. Our system depends on unwritten conventions and precedents. We expect winners to show restraint and losers to show consent. We expect our officials – including judges, civil servants and, not least, the Commons Speaker – to be impartial. We expect the electorate to be the final umpire.

All these norms are coming under pressure as the campaign to reverse Brexit intensifies. The EU, as well as being undemocratic in itself, tends to degrade the internal democracy of its member nations. Everyone knows that the Brussels institutions are oligarchic, combining executive and legislative power in the hands of commissars who are immune to public opinion. What is less widely appreciated is the extent to which the 28 member states are also required to alter their domestic constitutions so as to sustain the requirements of membership. Elections are rerun, coalitions broken, laws ignored, parties annihilated, referendums overturned, prime ministers toppled – all for the sake of deeper integration.

I think of it as the EU’s “Hideous Strength” – the title of CS Lewis’s adult novel about a diabolical plot to take over Britain through a seemingly bland bureaucracy. Until now, the most shocking examples were the civilian juntas imposed on Italy and Greece in 2011 to keep them in the euro. But ponder the past three years here. Look at the way our most basic understandings and conventions have been torn up. Look at the policies now being put forward by the main Opposition parties. Labour is proposing to get a better deal from Brussels and then campaign against its own deal in a referendum. The Lib Dems, less entertainingly but more shockingly, want to annul the outcome of the referendum that they were the first party to propose.