Johnny Mercer’s collision course with Tory high command can be charted back to a conversation with election guru Lynton Crosby in 2015. Mercer, never having voted in his life, was standing as the Conservative candidate in Plymouth Moor View, a constituency previously represented by socialist Michael Foot. “You ain’t gonna win, mate,” was the election trickster’s grim assessment.

Mercer did though and two years later he could have returned the same verdict to Crosby, who butchered the first Conservative majority for 23 years. Yet different forces were at work in Plymouth and Mercer’s majority increased by a factor of five to more than 5,000 votes. It affords him the security to call his own party’s government “a shitshow.” An assessment made in a previous interview for which he is probably best known. He now characterises it as “wildly optimistic.”

“I feel very passionately about the power of politics for good,” Mercer tells me. “So when I see what's going on at the moment I find it tough to get alongside.

"We are in a very dark place at the moment, people are being badly let down. For the vast majority of people, go and talk to anyone around here, they're absolutely fed up with Brexit."

We are sat in a Cornwall pub that gazes out over Crackington Haven beach or “Cracky,” as Mercer and the locals call it. After an hour paddling through freezing surf and bodyboarding back in, we retired there for beer with scampi and chips. My feet were so numb I didn’t realise the walk back to the Coombe Barton Inn was bruise-inducingly stone ridden.