In 2013, Dr Liam Fox – he insists on the "Doctor" – published a book on the challenges of globalisation, which read as if he had dictated into his phone between meetings. Rising Tides was a meandering work. It took a long time to say little and did as abysmally as you would expect. Nielsen International, which monitors book sales, told me the English edition had sold a mere 1,723 copies in the UK and 1,876 copies in the English-speaking foreign markets it watches. (Most were probably in the US, where Dr Fox has a small following in America’s raging right wing.) ...

But there is a more pressing question, which once would not have mattered and now goes to the heart of this country’s crisis. Until a few months ago, Dr Fox was "disgraced former defence minister Liam Fox", a nobody who had been forced to resign after claims he had broken the ministerial code to deliver favours to his friend and a self-styled adviser Adam Werritty. Brexit has brought him back into government. Theresa May has charged him with cutting trade deals with democracies and dictatorships the world over, including dictatorships as corrupt as Azerbaijan.

Here’s the problem for him and us. Dr Fox wrote a book, whose readers could not fill a non-league football ground. No one else felt the need to translate it into French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi or any of the world’s other major languages. Only Azerbaijan wanted to give Dr Fox money and buy the rights. Buying books and papers is an old Soviet method of giving support to sympathisers abroad. The Kremlin used to order 6,000 copies a day of the British communist daily, the Morning Star. It was hard in the Cold War to imagine anyone in Moscow wanting to read it, but Moscow found the bulk order a useful way to funnel cash to the dictatorship’s friends.