Boris isn’t bluffing. Every action, every appointment, every word since he entered Number 10 signals the same thing: Britain is leaving the EU on 31 October. Among Brussels officials, there is still a lazy assumption that the new prime minister will be, as they see it, chastened by reality. The United Kingdom, Eurocrats believe, will not leave without a deal, however harsh and unreasonable its terms. Three years of dealing with Theresa May have convinced them that Brits always back down in the end.

The new PM, fonctionnaires tell one another, faces the same constraints as the old one. He, too, will be boxed in by a Europhile Parliament and a civil service that is dead set against rupture. Boris is also, they believe, frivolous. Sure, he made all sorts of statements to get himself elected; but, now that he is in office, the theory goes, he will have to listen to the serious men, the experts, the mandarins.

Au contraire, messieurs. There is nothing unserious about Britain’s new leader. I have known Boris for 25 years, and he is the cleverest man I have worked with. Sure, he is well-mannered enough to keep his sharpness under wraps, but don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that his Falstaffian persona implies intellectual levity.

He knows exactly what he is doing, especially when it comes to Brussels – the place he went to school, and to which he returned in 1989 as the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent. No British politician has a keener appreciation of how the EU works, how its policies are made, how its deals are brokered. Where Mrs May deferred instinctively to her civil servants, Boris understands this subject better than they do.

Mrs May liked to promote ministers in her own image – ministers, that is, who followed official advice and rarely rocked the boat. Even in normal times, this would have been a mistake: the primary task of a minister, after all, is to make the civil service work for the general public rather than for itself. But at a time when Britain is embarked on a course that its standing bureaucracy detests, cautious ministers are a disaster.