Prime ministers in trouble, or who think they are, traditionally hold a reshuffle. Most famously, after a haemorrhage of support to the supposedly moribund Liberal Party in 1962, and realising he was out of touch with public opinion, Harold Macmillan sacked a third of his cabinet in order to present a fresh face to the electorate. It became known, in an unfortunate analogy with Hitler’s purge of the Sturmabteilung in 1934, as “The Night of the Long Knives”.

It didn’t work: Macmillan was no more in touch with the country after it than before. There is nothing new under the sun, and he was finished by an outbreak of sleaze in the government when the Profumo affair erupted in the spring of 1963. His excuse for not having imagined that his flamboyant minister for war might have had carnal knowledge of a call-girl and then not been entirely open about it was “I don’t go out much among young people.” (Jack Profumo was then 48.)

Mrs May’s own brand of otherworldliness is part of her undoing. Of impeccable character, brought up in a vicarage and happily married, she seems to have been slow to realise that among her colleagues in the Conservative Party are some philanderers, perverts, liars, incompetents, cheats and swindlers.