Covering the leaders’ speeches at the last election in small towns in the north west and Midlands, I was struck by how often the same incident would be raised by people in the audience, or by minicab drivers you’d meet on the way: How in October 2014, David Cameron had been presented by his European colleagues with a bill for an extra £1.7bn due to an upwards revision of Britain’s GNI, and how the PM’s insistence he would not pay, and George Osborne’s claim it had been halved, were later shown to be untrue.

The way one Financial Times story among thousands in the year's news cycle had lodged in public’s mind was, in hindsight, a clue to the trouble coming Cameron’s way. But what was really striking was how sharply people could recall the details of an arcane European budget revision - a process we are often told the general public does not understand. They were angry, and well-informed.

A common response to the Brexit vote, particularly in Brussels, was to explain that ignorant British voters had been hoodwinked by a campaign of now-discredited lies (the now-notorious £350 million a week saving, the Turks, an EU army and so on).

The impression is reinforced by TV vox pops with tattooed slobs, some of whom offered plainly irrational reasons – such as wanting to end non-EU migration – for voting out; and stories that Britons were “frantically Googling” what the EU is, hours after leaving.