No 10: Full Confidence is the game all the lobby journalists and backbenchers are playing on their phones. Westminster hasn’t been so united by an app since the early 2010s, when everyone was trying to figure out what David Cameron saw in Angry Birds.

The game is quite engrossing: you are the prime minister, taking office, and your name is Yusuf Dunmore. Popularity starts high in all the important areas – cabinet, backbenchers, the media, the public. But from there, every decision you are called upon to make, from nominating a chancellor to your answers at PMQs, confronts you with an invidious choice between one crisis and another.

I was ready to resign in my third week – still technically the honeymoon period. The bad faith was all too overwhelming: an opposition that howled blue murder over things it didn’t even disagree with; a press that misconstrued for fun; a public with the aggregated emotional stability of a three-year-old who hadn’t had a nap. Marshalling all that while maintaining your own probity, when you had only intended to be 15% honest in the first place, seemed like more than any decent person could stand. None of this is to cast any shade on the game itself, which is very fun.

It’s always a useful corrective to put yourself in a prime minister’s shoes. Ten years ago, Peter Bull, a psychologist at York University, analysed the ways in which politicians avoid giving direct answers, and submitted that, at........

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