For months after the Leave victory in the referendum, I was being accosted – no, I should say graciously approached – by members of the business and banking community who would make helpful suggestions as to what I might write on the subject. Their advice was invariably the same: this is never going to happen.

They would assure me, with sublime confidence, that whatever was being said by the politicians and the official negotiators, the UK was not going to leave the European Union – not in any meaningful sense, at any rate. They did not put it quite like this, of course, but what they implied was that the forces that held power over matters of economic life and death would see to it that the absolute severance of Britain from the EU which the population believed it had voted for would be effectively prevented. Back then, I didn’t believe them. I do now.

If you are wondering why the normal political processes seem so utterly futile, and even those individuals whose credibility is crashing toward career-ending debacle seem to be paralysed, it is because this is now out of the hands of elected leaders and the exasperated legislators who serve under them. It is the people who were sidling up to me back in 2016, with their preternaturally calm assurances that this will never happen, who are running the show – and just as they always knew they would, they are putting a stop to all this nonsense about obeying the will of the people.