What everyone knows but no one says about Brexit

Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if often embarrassing, interlude. Liz Truss has gone in short order. The threat of a comeback by Johnson has been lifted. What a rollercoaster.

Each of these events, in its time, took centre-stage in our politics and each prime minister became for a while the object of contempt, suspicion and rage. I called Mrs May the death star of British politics; I called Mr Johnson a moral toad; I called Liz Truss a planet-sized mass of over-confidence and ambition teetering on a pinhead of a political brain. Invective comes easy and, though I’ve been at the shriller end of the range of media wrath, I was far from alone among British media observers in the energetic expression of reproach.

There will now follow a pause before, one fears, Rishi Sunak finds himself in the crosshairs of a nation and its Greek chorus of media commentary looking for someone new to blame. The wailing will resume.

As a former culprit, I can hardly complain. But this respite is at least affording me the chance quietly to review our (and my own) open seasons on all Sunak’s immediate predecessors, and ask – calmly and with the benefit of hindsight – just this: what big thing did any of these unfortunate souls actually do wrong? What mistakes were any of them guilty of that we’re sure made things a lot worse for Britain than they’d otherwise have been?

I have to conclude that, though you or I could compile a long list of stupid little blunders and regrettable utterances, and though the moral or political or presentational failings of each incumbent might spring easily to our lips, few glaring examples of a great unforced error that cost our country dear suggest themselves to me.