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Every now and then comes a moment of startling clarity, when the brain shakes off the cobwebs and you see things, as it were, for the first time. The Conservatives’ prorogation of Parliament is one of those moments.

Coming at a time when the government was under parliamentary subpoena to produce the documents it was withholding in the Afghan detainee affair, the decision to disband Parliament yet again—a second time in the space of a year, the third in 15 months—was at first unsettling, a case (so it seemed) of a government attempting to evade democratic scrutiny by suppressing the one institution empowered to hold it to account. But the news that the government now plans to make prorogation an annual event casts this in rather a different light.