My Somerset neighbour Jacob Rees-Mogg was last week reported as predicting that, if the Government “fails to deliver a clean Brexit”, this will be “the greatest national humiliation since Suez”.

Certainly the reckless Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956 to reclaim the Suez Canal brought home to us like nothing else that Britain was no longer one of the world’s great powers. As Washington threatened to destroy the pound and Moscow to “shower London and Paris with nuclear rockets”, this forced us to make a swift and humiliating retreat.