he deed is done. The Conservative Party has imposed upon Britain, at a time of profound national crisis, a prime minister who is spectacularly unfit for the job, both morally and politically. It has installed in an office once held by the likes of Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee a liar, an adulterer and a pedlar of fantasies who is so utterly lacking in principle and integrity that he is willing to sacrifice the nation’s future on the altar of his own ambition. Boris Johnson’s arrival in No 10 is a mortifying development for the once-proud United Kingdom, one that has astonished a world that used to regard Britain as a model of caution and common sense.

Johnson gained access to Downing Street through a travesty of an election that even Vladimir Putin mocked (though both he and President Trump would have cheered the result). The Tory leadership contest was like a slow-motion coup d’état. It had the trappings of democracy – hustings, a televised debate, policy platforms, opinion polls, endorsements. But 99.75 per cent of the electorate was forced to watch impotently from the sidelines, as in a banana republic, while the candidates shamelessly pandered to the tiny, anonymous cabal of 160,000 predominantly older, southern, white, wealthy, male right-wing Conservative Party members that chose the country’s new leader. And many of those 160,000 were recent Ukip infiltrators.