Hyper-history: why did politics go crazy?

On the day Theresa May signed her Brexit withdrawal agreement with Brussels, Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, resigned. She tried to dragoon Michael Gove, a leader of the Brexit campaign, into taking the job. Dominic Cummings, the erstwhile campaign director of Vote Leave, persuaded Gove to resign rather than take the job. It was mayhem. That day Cummings texted a friend in Westminster to say: ‘Sometimes nothing happens for years. Sometimes years happen in days.’

The phrase was originally Lenin’s, though he referred to ‘decades’ rather than years – but it was apt for the almost revolutionary cascade of events unleashed by the EU referendum of 2016, which we are still living with eight years later. When Sajid Javid announced he was standing down as an MP after serving as a minister for a decade, he said he felt he had lived through a lifetime of political tumult in ten years.

I know how he feels. I set out to write a book, All Out War, about what struck me as an unusually dramatic period in British political history; then it turned into a trilogy. Now the last part has split into two books, the first of which, No Way Out, has just been published. The second has the subtitle A Year of Political Mayhem. Looking back, it has been more like a decade.

I started as a political reporter during the 2001 general election and the first seven years of my career consisted entirely of Blair vs Brown every week. Ten years ago I started at the Sunday Times. The speed at which things have moved since then is extraordinary. Within four months we had printed an explosive YouGov poll which suggested that Scotland was poised to vote for independence: a previously unthinkable proposition that came close to becoming reality.