As the debris from Boris Johnson’s first reshuffle blew around a windy Westminster and Whitehall, I felt sorry for the journalists who had to make sense of the tangle of neural impulses that underlay the prime minister’s thoughts.

I remembered what Jim Callaghan, a PM with a shrewd deftness in handling his ministers, used to say about the day in 1947 when the ever terse, cricket-mad Clem Attlee appointed him to his first junior ministerial post: “Remember you are playing for the first eleven now, not the second eleven. And if you are going to negotiate with someone tomorrow, don’t insult him today.”

That was it; more wisdom packed into a pair of sentences than Johnson could manage in a week. Political HR (human resources) is not the PM’s strong suit. He may even have added a new verb to the vocabulary of British politics – to be “Javided” – given his treatment of his short-lived Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, who on the morning of the Conservatives’ general election triump