Until last week’s Chesham and Amersham byelection, politics seemed incredibly easy for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. However disastrously they governed, the political outcomes – in opinion polls, elections, and control of the national conversation – were consistently favourable. Johnson has arguably been Britain’s most dominant incompetent ever.

In our often-sour old democracy, politics is supposed to be difficult, especially for parties in their second decade in office, when disillusionment has usually set in. But the government has seemingly defied this convention, as it has so many others.

One of the keys to its unlikely ascendancy has been a willingness to pick fights. Liberals, lefties, lawyers, remainers, antiracists, Scottish nationalists, the EU, Channel 4, the BBC, even the Oxford students who voted to take down a photo of the Queen – no potential enemy has been too large or too small, it seems, for the government to leave it in peace.