Sir Oliver Letwin, architect of the parliamentary shambles over Brexit, had the most perfect background for a conservative intellectual. I don’t mean his privileged education (Eton and Cambridge) or the luxury of his upbringing; I mean his gifted and sensible parents, Bill (a professor at the London School of Economics) and Shirley, a confidante of Milton Friedman and part of the ultra-Tory set at Peterhouse in the 1970s and 1980s.

And yet Sir Oliver, an alumnus of Mrs Thatcher’s policy unit, has now revealed himself as a Blairite Liberal Democrat, a toady to Europe and (for there are times when only vulgar abuse will do, and this Letwin-induced mess is one of them) a bloody idiot.

So much that is written about Sir Oliver describes his supposed brilliance, but one wonders why: idiocy has so often taken the upper hand. Most famously, he let two strangers into his house in the early hours of the morning one day in 2002, as one does, because they wished to use his lavatory. They burgled him. Despite the emphasis placed in government on confidentiality, he threw a pile of letters from constituents into a bin in St James’s Park. He is the sort of brilliant man who pulls doors marked “push”.