After the shale gas vote, I was literally sent to Coventry – to visit the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. It is a remarkable facility that helps take batteries from development through to production. It means companies only need the hundreds of millions of pounds in investment once they have shown that their product works and is saleable. It was funded by the Faraday Battery Challenge, and I was there to announce a further £221 million of taxpayers’ money. This is one of the rather better ways the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy spends money, while some of our policies seem designed to ruin industry. I am particularly concerned about steel, where the price of energy is, in normal times, about 60 per cent more than our competitors. We then give subsidies to steel to keep their operations open. The emissions trading scheme makes this worse, as they lose credits if they do not produce loss-making steel, which they cannot sell. This ought to be sorted out, but the Treasury does not seem interested.

On the way back from Coventry, the news that Liz Truss was resigning came through. Liz is an admirable person and I supported what she wanted to do. Unfortunately, it did not work. The moment she went, the telephone started buzzing with potential candidates and slates. I wanted Boris back, as he had the mandate and his removal was a mistake. His campaign started well but then ran out of steam. This was clear by Sunday morning, when my slumbers were disturbed by the great man himself prior to the Laura Kuenssberg programme. Unlike the famous farmer, the lark is not my morning alarmer, so I was not entirely gruntled by so early a call.

Gruntled is one of the words which really exists, even though the negative is almost invariably used. Some years ago my youngest sister, Annunziata, and I looked at many of these words, such as ‘gusted’ and ‘ruth’. Almost all of them are in the Oxford English Dictionary. And when rereading P.G. Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins at the weekend, I noticed he used ‘ruth’ without the ‘less’. These words ought to be brought back into circulation and I expect Spectator readers to rally to this cause.

The interview with Kuenssberg was set up so that a clock was visible in the background and more people watched the clock than listened to my ephemeral comments. It has M for 12, O for 3 and G for both 6 and 9, spelling MOGG. It was made by the Quarmans of Temple Cloud for Jacob Mogg, after whom I am named, and given to me by my father. Jacob was a local businessman who was one of the early patrons of William Smith, the geologist. Smith lived in north-east Somerset and worked out the strata of rock from the pit at High Lyttelton in which Jacob was an investor. The Quarmans made clocks and were, I believe, also the local undertakers, a grandfather clock requiring similar carpentry skills to a coffin.

The 807th anniversary of Agincourt was the day on which Truss resigned. In a short ministerial career, I have attended two farewell cabinets and stood in Downing Street to cheer people in and out. The Downing Street statement is becoming as much a part of our constitutional settlement as the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, yet it is a fairly new innovation. In days served, Liz is the shortest ever. But unlike her immediate predecessors, she served two terms rather than one. The prime minister is appointed by the sovereign and Liz kissed hands twice. At a general election, a prime minister continues and is not reappointed; thus, since the war, only Churchill, Wilson and Truss have served two terms. All the others did only one. This may make the pub quiz question slightly harder.

As luck would have it, my ministerial career ended on a day when the House was debating the retained EU Law Bill. This is an essential bill to complete Brexit, so the Remainiacs were out in force. I have spent the past eight months pushing it to completion. The obstacles put in its way were manifold and only the determination of Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss saw it to the floor of the House. Dean Russell delivered the opening speech and dealt brilliantly with an array of Europhile interventions. In a few short weeks he has proved himself to be a first-class minister. I had the luxury of speaking from the backbenches, which is much more fun than being a minister. There is no set text, merely the ability to push a cause. No need to suck up to people who make fatuous points, but an ability to debate. As Disraeli said of going to the House of Lords: ‘I am not dead, but in the Elysian Fields.’