Conservatives once knew that command and control didn’t work. Even if they didn’t know it intellectually, one former Conservative minister told me as he looked in disbelief at the chaos of Johnson’s dictatorial administration, ‘they felt it in their bones’.

This nominally Conservative government has centralised control, Soviet style, into a triumvirate of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings: two pundits and a maniac.