There is little evidence to suggest that Sunak will be any less fiscally hawkish than his predecessor

Manifesto commitments are there to be broken, but to see them questioned just two months into Boris Johnson’s new Government takes some beating.

Almost as unprecedented, it might be said, as making your chancellor an offer he couldn’t accept just a month before his first Budget, and only weeks after saying he was the only member of the Cabinet who was entirely safe in his job. This at least confirms the old joke about football managers. You know they are about to be fired when the chairman expresses complete confidence in their continued stewardship.

From the outset, No 10 has treated Sajid Javid with shameful contempt, undermining him at every turn. This is no way for a serious Government to behave. The Prime Minister should complete his night of the long knives by sending his own éminence grise, Dominic Cummings, to the gallows along with everyone else; his chief adviser’s influence is increasingly poisonous, unconducive to gainful government, and damaging to the PM’s reputation. We cannot have the nation run by unaccountable special advisers, whatever the self created myth around their own brilliance.

That said, the writing has been on the wall for Javid from the word go. Johnson never really wanted him in the first place, tainted as he was by his association with the arch Remainer George Osborne.

The situation got so bad that, whispering it quietly in private, even the chancellor’s own Treasury officials would say he wasn’t much longer for this world. Chancellors are normally powerful figures, used to getting their way, as is the Treasury.

Yet here was a chancellor apparently prepared to let No 10 walk all over him, until yesterday that is, when even a footsoldier as compliant as he was forced to say enough is enough. That was presumably the intention on the bridge, for underlying it all was a growing conviction that Javid was not up to the job.