This is what it looks like. After 14 years, it’s hard to even recognise it. It seems bizarre, exotic, kind of alien. But this is how serious government behaves. This is how it makes appointments. These are the criteria it uses in decision making.

As the list of ministerial selections came in, it was possible to feel a deep sense of relief washing over you. You could almost sense this dead weight being lifted off your shoulders, a tension just behind the eyes that we lived with for so long we’d almost forgotten it was there.

The primary qualification for a ministerial position in the last few years was not experience, but rather the opposite of it: a complete ignorance of a subject area at best, and an active hostility towards it at worst. We had to watch as culture secretary Nadine Dorries learned that Channel 4 does not receive licence fee money. We had to sit on our hands as Brexit secretary Dominic Raab admitted he “hadn’t quite understood” the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing.

Suddenly, literally overnight, everything has changed. Know-nothings have been replaced by people with expertise. Ignorance has been replaced by specialism. Incomprehension has been replaced by deep domain knowledge.

Richard Hermer KC was made attorney general, a role once populated by people like Victoria Prentis and Suella Braverman. He brings decades of experience in public, private, international........

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