Watching Boris Johnson flounder in the twilight of his premiership one couldn’t help but feel that the outgoing Prime Minister had somehow, to apply the words of Cardinal St John Henry Newman, served as a breakwater against errors more fundamental than his own.

With his departure, Penny Mordaunt is emerging as a serious candidate to succeed him and if she wins, what the country will get in the place of Johnson is a leader who will be more authoritarian, more ideological, more woke, more anti-life, anti-freedom, and probably more anti-family and anti-marriage.