With the sort of blind stupidity Trump excels at,  Dr Cable doubled down on a policy selling approach which drove voters to tick the ‘leave’ box in 2016.

At the party conference in September 2017 he urged “sensible grown-ups” to unit behind the Liberal Dems to reverse the democratically granted mandate to exit the EU. Setting aside the Junker-esque take on democracy (“if you don’t vote the right way first time, we’ll make you do it again”), the arrogant, demeaning approach of replacing rational argument with personal slights has the irrefutable implication that those that voted for ‘leave’ are both stupid and childish.

Grumpy’s view is that this insulting ploy, so crassly used by the then conservative hierarchy in 2016, was largely responsible for the ‘leave’ camp winning; they didn’t like Osborne et al telling them they were dumb if they voted leave, so they voted ‘leave’.

It just underlines that the denizens of the rarefied atmosphere of the Westminster bubble missed out on Human Nature 101 at Eton.