Whoever wins the Conservative leadership next week, one can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for them. Even if it’s Boris Johnson. Liz Truss fulfilled her inadvertent promise to ‘hit the ground from day one’, and her successor might do the same.

One of first points of impact could be the Medium-Term Fiscal Statement due on October 31, when Hunt or his successor try to sell a divided party and an unhappy nation on a course of bitter public spending medicine that none of them want.