“It got lonelier and lonelier fast,” he says. “I remember having a rather heated conversation with a major donor of mine and his point was, the guy is far less than perfect but he is a Republican president and there’s only one quarterback and it’s your role to support the quarterback. My point was, no, it’s my role to support the ideas and ideals that the party has stood for, that the quarterback is actually supposed to be supporting too.”

Three years ago Sanford was beaten in a Republican primary election by a Trump-backed candidate (the president tweeted: “He is better off in Argentina”). It was the kind of result that strikes “terror”, as he puts it, into other congressional Republicans and helps keep them in line. But he has no regrets.

“It was a big spiritual night. The four sons were with me and afterward we went over to this place called Cook Out, a cheap burger place. We stayed there until three in the morning talking about life and politics and their investment in it: that’s all they’d ever known, everything they’d grown up with.

“To a boy – or young man now – they all said, Dad, if you had to go out, this is absolutely the way to go out.”