And third are the sworn assassins who will wait silently for their moment. In the week when opinion polls are dire, when one of your Shadow Cabinet resigns in a scandal; a major donor has defected; MPs have rebelled; foreign leaders have refused to see you; a relative has said something embarrassing; the Prime Minister has seen you off at PMQs; your economic forecasts are shown to be wrong; and you have been photographed standing beneath an “Exit” sign – then they will choose to strike you as hard as they can. And at that moment, all those people who held up banners when you were elected saying “I voted for a new politics” will feel like dupes, because the old politics will be back with a calculated and chilling vengeance and it will take the form of a very sharp knife inserted between a very vulnerable pair of shoulder blades.