I’ll always remember where I was when my brother resigned again. I was sitting on the dock of a bay in the Adriatic, one G&T down (plus a couple of glasses of the cooling local white), halfway through the ‘signature menu’ of the Michelin-starred Alfred Keller restaurant, when that dopamine urge made me flip over my phone. Trump had been indicted on dozens of counts and Putin had committed ecocide in Ukraine and the honours list had been published and Nadine Dorries had quit after dark forces had prevented her passage to the Lords, while Rishi had backtracked and gong-blocked my father’s K… basically it was your average Friday. My phone had exploded. Carrie had WhatsApped me the statement. Breaking alerts. The usual flurry of futile bids soliciting my instant views on the news that the boy who wanted to be world king had suddenly dethroned himself. I sent polite noes to each one, but I knew the subject had to be faced. For three hours. On live national radio. With live callers. That Sunday evening. By me. The ‘sister of’. I couldn’t exactly talk about dangerous dogs and Ofsted, not this show, not this time. There was no escape.

After a perfect few days in Lošinj – the Austro-Hungarian empire branded it ‘healing island’ long before Gwyneth Paltrow flogged vaginal eggs – I’ve decided to write a stocking filler called How To Speak Spa. On my schedule, healthful activities, you see, were listed: rest therapy, sea-tox lymphatic shakedown with swim training, Qi Gong and cold-water immersion, forest bathing and floating under the cosmos. Or as our grandmothers would put it: a nap, a dip, a cold bath, a walk, and flopping on a lilo, dear.

The architect Richard Rogers’s memorial at the River Café on Monday was as memorable as he was. Almost everyone who spoke choked towards the end including several sons and Renzo Piano. The finale was Ruthie. She took us through her life with Richard. ‘He lived in my arms. He died in my arms.’ She didn’t cry but she broke everyone else including a battalion of her own staff who stood at the back in soupy heat for the entire time, motionless in their chef’s whites, out of love and respect for la patronne’s beloved other half for more than 50 years.

My podcast, Rachel Johnson’s Difficult Women (which is nothing like Women with Balls, Katy!), is coming up to its 100th guest and I’m trying to find a suitable candidate for this honour, even though my husband keeps saying: ‘But, surely, you’ll be running out of interesting women to interview soon?’ Well, I was at Lady Antonia Fraser’s for Sunday lunch before heading into LBC, and I was pointing out the pub quiz detail that no fewer than two members of her extended family had a direct hand in my brother’s downfall. Alex Chisholm, the permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, who recently handed over more lockdown kompromat to the police, is married to her niece, while Harriet Harman, the chairman of the Privileges Committee, is her cousin. She smiled beatifically at this, as she does at most things, and then inspiration struck. ‘Will you do my podcast again?’ I asked. After all, lots of people do Desert Island Discs twice and, aged 90, she has an acclaimed book fresh out about Caroline Lamb. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This time, will you talk about your life, your children… everything?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ replied Lady Antonia Fraser, CH, DBE, FRSL. ‘What children, though?’

The red light came on. The mic was live. Since Friday, I’d tried as best I could to turn off and tune out the gleeful, spiteful output from the many writers, commentators and broadcasters profitably possessed with Boris Derangement Syndrome (we know who you are). But I knew that as soon as I addressed the unavoidable, listeners would be howling for the sick bags. So in the end I ‘sat in my truth’ as Meghan might say. Boiled down, I said I thought my brother was amazing, and he’d been – apart from Brexit and lockdown – a nothing short of superb PM, with a tiger still in his tank as he heads into his wilderness years. Family comes first. I thought I’d just about got away with it as a show of sincere sisterly support but as I left the studio my producer was looking at his phone. ‘I maybe wouldn’t look at Twitter till tomorrow if I were you,’ he said. I still haven’t – and won’t until I have another very stiff G&T in my fist.