On what he had every reason to believe would be the last day of his undistinguished political career Roger Barlow awoke in a state of sexual excitement and with a gun to his head, the one fading as he became aware of the other.

The gun was equipped with an orange whale harpoon, and would have been lethal, had it been more than six inches long and made of something other than plastic.

‘Say your prayers, buddy,’ said the four-year-old. Roger’s eyelid quivered.

If Sigmund Freud had been able to catch this kid’s conversation, he would have been thrilled. Seldom had there been so exuberant and uninhibited an Oedipus complex.

One morning they were lying all three of them in bed, and Roger was trying to persuade the kid to go and watch Scooby Doo. The child turned to his mother.

He spoke prettily, in the kind of voice he might use for ordering another fish finger.

‘I am going to kill Daddy, and then I am going to marry you.’ Today, Roger didn’t want to be rude to the four-year-old, and he didn’t want to exacerbate his complex, but he was damned if he was going to be treated in this way. He grunted, and rolled away, gripping his slumbering wife with both arms.

The four-year-old fired the plastic dart carefully into the back of Roger’s neck.

Barlow’s blow went wide. Ceding his place to his rival, he rose. He tended to wear T-shirts in bed, and this one was a relic of a brief but illustrious former Tory leadership under which he had been proud to serve.

‘It’s Time For Hague’, proclaimed the T-shirt, while the back announced: ‘The Common Sense Revolution’. As a piece of nightwear, his wife claimed that it had anti-aphrodisiacal properties of a barely credible order.