And I should add that for the sake of clarity, in a second comment here, that I don't for a moment believe all of these failures started with Boris; many started with Blair. Not least the pipeline of dark money that flowed into politics with gambling deregulation and policies friendly to Russian oligarchs. Some were worsened under the coalition government, some modestly reversed.

But the acceleration of the problems in just two years of Boris's regime is a failure of democracy to repel populism and the attacks on institutions that populism demands.