This may be more suited to a confessional than a newspaper column but I have a fascination with Kemi Badenoch that is becoming faintly absurd. As someone who has both a personal passion for and professional interest in British politics, I can’t quite believe the amount of time I spend responding to her every utterance and intervention by wondering whether I have, in fact, gone mad.

Whether policies, polls or performances, the gulf between the reality I think I inhabit and the world according to Kemi seems almost inconceivably enormous, and yet so complete is her belief in her own brilliance that I frequently find myself checking whether my own memory of events is accurate.

This, for example, is the politician who helpfully said of herself: “I never have gaffes… I never have to clarify because I think very carefully about what I say.” And yet she has subsequently insisted that “the last time I checked, Northern Ireland did vote to leave [the European Union]” (it did not); and she has had to clarify that when she said maternity pay was “excessive” she did not, in fact, mean that maternity pay was excessive.

Only today, the gaffe-free zone wrote an article for The Sun that described a new air defence system as being “modelled on Israel’s Iron Dome” – language that echoed a press release announcing the policy issued by her own........

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