A little over a decade ago, I used to track speculation that the D.C.M.S. was going to be closed. What actually happened was that the ‘D’ was changed to ‘Digital’ and things carried on as usual, but that change was reversed in 2023 and so we’re back where we started: the Times reports that ‘Starmer’s team … wants to abolish the Department for Culture, Media and Sport — splitting it between the business department, the education department and the Treasury — allowing them to fire Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state’.

(Having to abolish a department in order to be ‘allowed’ to remove a minister suggests a more fundamental problem.)

Perhaps this time it will happen. Politics is highly febrile these days. If it does, though, the grand new reallocation of powers will look an awful lot like a decade-old plan, pulled out of a dusty filing cabinet. We may be about to find out why previous governments kept putting it back there.