The British convention is that Parliament has ultimate authority because the Government cannot continue without its confidence, but that it otherwise has a duty to let the Government govern. This means, procedurally, that it must allow the Government to set the business of the House. From the 19th century, this was never questioned – until Mr Bercow. To frustrate Brexit, he decided that he would let Remainer MPs take control of the order paper.

The same Remainers could agree only on what they didn’t want, not on what they did. They were too scared to permit the logical result of deadlock, a general election. The result was angry stasis, with government unable to govern. So, to break this unconstitutional logjam, Boris Johnson asked the Queen to prorogue.

It was this Bercow-created situation which led to “Miller 2”, the Supreme Court case.

Obviously, the judges of the Supreme Court are very different characters from Mr Bercow. By training and inclination, impartiality is their watchword and understatement is their manner. When they pronounced in Miller 2, many naturally supposed they had deliberated most carefully, blind – as justice is supposed to be – to the bright lights of political drama and media celebrity.

I feared at the time that this was not wholly the case. They were becoming a band, working-title: The Supremes. I was suspicious of the judges’ rare unanimity (in the English law tradition, there are often important dissenting judgments), of their haste, and of their President, Lady Hale, with her spider brooch, her air of ill-suppressed excitement and her propensity for sounding off out of court. I noted their unusually rhetorical way of talking. That phrase about the “extreme effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy” comes from Miller 2. It is the sort of thing that politicians, not judges, usually say.

I also noticed that their tone of angry dismissal led them to contradict themselves. At one point, they declared they could not know what reasons the Prime Minister had given to the Queen, who was sitting in council at Balmoral, for seeking prorogation; yet they also said that the advice he gave her was “unlawful” because it was “a nullity”. If they did not know what he had said, how could they judge it? Did Mr Johnson’s prorogation frustrate the constitutional role of Parliament? “Of course it did,” chorused The Supremes, as if this was self-evident. It was actually hotly disputed.

Many millions of the public felt worried, but we are people unversed in the law. So it is helpful to have our worries learnedly justified by Professor John Finnis of Oxford, arguably the most distinguished academic lawyer of our time. In a forthcoming pamphlet for the think-tank Policy Exchange (The Law of the Constitution before the Court), Professor Finnis identifies the problem with the Miller 2 judgment. He says it runs deeper than carelessness or haste.