Back in the distant past, some time during the three years of the Labour administration led by James Callaghan in the late 1970s, the then prime minister sauntered into the chamber of the Commons in the course of an ordinary evening and slid into a place on his government’s frontbench. It was the sort of thing that prime ministers used to do occasionally, just to hear what was going on, to take the political temperature of the house, to show an interest. These days, if a prime minister turns up apparently unexpectedly, it’s in the tearoom. But it’s never casual, it’s always for a reason and it’s usually a portent of some sort of crisis.

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