This was a political row that felt like a family feud. “It was like the parents rowing in front of the children,” said one of those in Downing Street last Monday. The “parents” were Boris Johnson and his most powerful aide, Dominic Cummings. The disagreement concerned the fate of Andrew Sabisky, one of the “weirdos and misfits” hired by Cummings to shake up Whitehall.

Two days earlier it had emerged that Sabisky, a “super forecaster” adept at predicting future trends, had claimed that IQ was somewhat racially dependent and had given an interview in which he stated that “eugenics are about selecting ‘for’ good things”. In a comment on Cummings’s blog in 2014 Sabisky said compulsory contraception could prevent “a permanent underclass”.

Johnson was holed