“Once you deprive people of the right to go to court to challenge the government, you are in a dictatorship, you are in a tyranny.”  The words of Lord Neuberger, former President of the Supreme Court. Serious enough in and of themselves, but truly chilling when coupled with the comment of a former Conservative cabinet minister: “Conservatives believe in parliament, they don’t try to bypass it.  Conservatives believe in the rule of law, they don’t announce to the House of Commons and the world that they are going to break the law.  Conservatives believe in the Union and in trying to hold on to the best aspects of diplomacy like the Good Friday Agreement. This is a bad English nationalist government with no idea of where it is going.”

It is no secret that I do not like the prime minister, I despise him.   But I do not think the situation in which we find ourselves is entirely of his making.  He is, in point of fact, the organ grinder’s monkey, dancing the tune of those behind the scene. The two who are, I fear, truly responsible for our destiny are Piggling Bland (Gove) and his unelected, unpalatable, unsackable henchman, Cummings.  They are driven men.

Men do not spring into being in full maturity. They – we – are the product of our genes and our upbringing: in Gove’s case he was adopted, and, by all accounts, his adopted parents did not have a particularly easy time of it, either financially or personally.   The result of this, I think, is that he is out for revenge: he wants to destroy the system that gave rise to his feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, and the way he has chosen to do so in the manner of every family runt from King John onward, is from within.

And while Piggling presents himself as the polite and superficially decent face of government, his man Cummings – for Cummings is Piggling’s man make no mistake about it – is a psychopath.