Rory Stewart has been spending time at the family home in Crieff this summer and on a journey to deprived areas

In the days after Rory Stewart lost in his bid to be prime minister and watched Boris Johnson take the country in what he saw as a disastrous direction, he began to question why he was in politics at all.

He had, by general consent, performed well as a rank outsider, but the Johnson bandwagon was too powerful to be resisted. His appeals to moderation and good sense had fallen on stony ground.

“You catch me in quite a gloomy mood,” Mr Stewart, 46, confesses. “At the moment I tend to be worried when I wake up at three in the morning about whether this no-deal Brexit episode suggests there are people in government who either don’t understand what they are doing or don’t care.