Jeremy Hunt may well be regretting his most high profile mistake of last night’s Tory leadership debate – accusing his opponent, Boris Johnson, of “peddling optimism”. But in hindsight, I doubt if that was the foreign secretary’s biggest faux pas of the evening.

Because in the sentence immediately preceding that rather odd accusation (voters tend to prefer optimistic politicians to the gloom-mongers – remember Gordon Brown versus David Cameron?), Jeremy Hunt said this: “Being prime minister is about telling people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”

He’s absolutely right, and it has been a central part of my criticism of Jeremy Corbyn that he has spent his entire career telling his audiences exactly what they want and expect to hear. That is not leadership; in fact it’s the opposite.

And you can see why Hunt thought it was an effective criticism of Johnson, who is seen widely as the populist candidate in this contest, the man who will say anything to get his foot over the threshold of Number 10 Downing Street.