It is one of those phrases which goes straight into the memory as soon as you read it. The landslide for the Liberal government in 1906 was, wrote George Dangerfield, “a victory from which the Liberal party would never recover”. Boris Johnson, foolishly, has set himself a task in which he does not believe. He will assuredly become prime minister in due course and has ensured that his time in office will be dominated by an issue that he has pretended to care about in order to appeal to the fixated ideological obsessives in his party.

For all the pious invocation of “democracy” by the campaign to leave the European Union it is worth noting that, not much more than a year ago, this country