“Everyone ignored the Somme,” Camilla Long complained in her Sunday Times column about the week’s news coverage. It wasn’t quite so. Like a sound of distant gunfire, the centenary of the Battle of the Somme rolled on in the background to political events in Britain of the most surprising kind.

After the referendum vote to leave the European Union came the resignation of the Prime Minister, the refusal to resign of the Leader of the Opposition in the face of a vote of no confidence by 172 of his MPs, and even the resignation of the leader of Ukip, Nigel Farage, who, if not “the onlie begetter” of this shambles, was its assiduous wet nurse.

Added to this, like an improbable episode of The Archers, was the sudden thwarting of the ambitions of the nation’s most-liked politician, Boris Johnson. In The Mail on Sunday, Rachel Johnson, in sisterly indignation on behalf of her brother – whose crown as rightful leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party and First Lord of the Treasury had been dashed to the dust by the low treachery (it seemed) of Michael Gove – referred to the deed as a “bloodbath on the anniversary of the Somme”. This seemed to me a step too far in comparing the mundane with the solemn, even if not quite as dissonant as her description a few sentences later of Mr Gove as “a sort of Westminster suicide bomber”.