Describing Jenrick as being “from the Left of the party”, she added: “He voted for Remain in the Brexit referendum. He was a big, kind of centrist Rishi supporter. I remember talking to him about leaving the ECHR a year ago and him looking horrified by that prospect.”

Leadership frontrunner Kemi Badenoch was reported to have told the inaugural meeting of the new Tory Shadow Cabinet that Braverman was having “a very public nervous breakdown”. Now Tory MPs are briefing journalists not exactly that Braverman can’t sit with them but more that she soon won’t sit with them, predicting that she will defect to Reform, with whom she appears to share many policy positions. Yesterday, for her part, she warned that the Tories risk becoming “centrist cranks”.

The general briefing against Braverman seems to be rendering her friendless among her peer group. Even before the election, she had been relegated by party whips to the most dismal and cramped office they could find in Portcullis House, the Parliamentary building where most MPs are based. There, she cut an increasingly lonely figure. Now her erstwhile supporters are deserting her for other leadership contenders, such as Jenrick and Badenoch.

Whether victims of bullying tend to behave in errant ways that serve to catalyse their own mistreatment is a debatable point, though groups going through collective setbacks — a heavy election defeat, say — are definitely more likely to single out a member for rough treatment. In Elizabethan times a poor harvest would lead villages to seek to identify a witch in their midst who had brought about the misfortune, thus enabling them to face the future with renewed confidence.

Conservative MPs who think Braverman is on a trajectory taking her into the arms of Farage may well be right, but they are extremely foolish to do things that make such an outcome more likely. For all their ridicule, the awkward fact is that she is one of very few of their number who retain any credibility in the eyes of the millions of voters the party lost to Reform or abstention on 4 July.

In the eyes of such people, Braverman was sacked for being right — about Sunak not being serious in regard to stopping the boats, about his complete failure to reduce gargantuan legal immigration volumes, and about the dangers of permitting pro-Islamist “hate marches”. Indeed, Sunak’s dismissal of her as home secretary was followed by a surge in support for Reform, taking it to double-digit poll ratings for the first time.

Would Reform want such a quixotic character as Braverman? I am told that the party’s former leader Richard Tice has reservations, but that Farage himself is much keener. She is still easily one of the best-known politicians in the country. Her recruitment would broaden the current “five white guys” demographic of Reform MPs, but it would also send a giant signal to right-of-centre voters that the insurgent party is the one with ideas, courage and vitality.

Of course, Braverman and Farage are both big personalities, and there could well be a falling-out further down the line. But right now Reform is looking to sustain its newfound momentum, and getting Braverman on board would be just the job. A wiser cohort of Tory MPs would be throwing arms around her shoulders, not advancing self-fulfilling prophecies about her imminent departure.

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Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express.

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