The Chagos fiasco may yet do for Keir Starmer. As well as being calamitous in itself, it confirms the negatives that voters have about him: that he is weak, unpatriotic, spendthrift, lawyerly, a poor negotiator, a champion of every country but his own.

As details of his disastrous deal emerge, Labour MPs are falling one by one into glum silence. When the news first broke, they revelled in the imagined fury of blazer-wearing Tory brigadiers choking on their gins-and-tonics. We live in an age of negative polarisation, a Trumpy and online age in which upsetting the other side is seen as a victory in itself.

As well as their delight in hauling down a flag with a Union Jack in the corner, many Leftists imagined that they were righting a wrong.

About the only thing they knew about the Chagos Islands was that, in the late 1960s, an earlier Labour government had removed the local inhabitants to build an air base. If you didn’t read past the headlines, you might come away with the impression that Britain was somehow letting the Chagossians go home. Hence all the talk about giving the archipelago “back”.