When I arrived at Chequers a week ago it was plain that something was up. Social media was rife with anonymous comments supposedly emanating from Downing Street, saying that any cabinet minister who resigned would at once lose his or her ministerial car and have to get a taxi back to the station. Taxi phone numbers would be provided! There was a Basil Fawlty element to the whole silly business when it was reported that the taxi firm cited had gone out of business a year previously.

It was a crude pressure play, one that I was quite sure that our famously upright prime minister would have nothing to do with, so I ignored it. Nevertheless it augured a bad day when the cabinet decided