A traitor to one man is a hero to another. So debate rages around the role of David Cameron’s old friend and adviser Steve Hilton — is he a noble Brutus who saved parliamentary democracy by throwing in his lot with Leave, or the traitor who destroyed Cameron’s European dream?

A foundational story of Rome was the expulsion in 509 BC of the last king, the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus (‘the arrogant’), and birth of the free republic.