The setting is King’s Cross Station on the Saturday morning of the weekend when talks in Brussels were intended to craft the choreography that would dance its way to the Brexit endgame. I bump into a friend who was one of the most thoughtful of the Queen’s secret servants in his past life.

Like so many encounters these days, we greet each other by expressing mutual bafflement about what is going on. My chum tells me that his old overseas friends say they can no longer “read” the UK. Once they knew where we stood in the world; now they don’t – which is not surprising, because we can’t read ourselves either.