One week, the PM is taking arms dealers on a package holiday to the Gulf; the next, he is lecturing people on the world stage. No one can claim that our David is not prepared to play many roles but, that said, some suit him better than others.

A particular weakness is foreign affairs. The last time I heard him speak animatedly about global politics was when, bored out of our teenage minds, we killed a year or two playing Risk - a game at which, perhaps tellingly, he did not excel.

He is resolutely monolingual. And he spent his gap year in Hong Kong only because the sheep farmer in New Zealand with whom he was hoping to spend six months committed suicide at the last minute. This, so far, has not proven to be a handicap. Indeed, it was seen as an advantage by the "What would Blair do?" obsessives who had used their accumulated wisdom to conclude that the Iraq war did not play well at the polls for TB.

Just as Alastair Campbell used to say "we don't do God", so it was that smug senior advisers to the future PM would say, "We don't do foreign."

It was a reticence that did us no harm during the grindingly parochial election campaign. And, having finagled power, it was only sensible that a party with no foreign policy should appoint a do-nothing foreign secretary.

William has many qualities. It is just that, for a number of years now, he has declined to use them. He was perfectly suited for the job. The square had been circled. And then, because even if you "don't do foreign, foreign can do you", there was the Jasmine Revolution, followed by the Lotus Revolution, with all manner of other storms in assorted varieties of teacup forecast to follow.

William, Yorkshire born and bred, wasn't about to allow "all this fuss" to affect his way of doing things. Rather than get out and about, he followed the unfolding events on the microblogging site Twitter. "It is, Gideon, routinely labelled the Twitter Revolution," he said to me more than once.

This literal approach led to his wrong call on Gaddafi fleeing to Venezuela - "I have on my iPhone a tweet . . ." - and shortly thereafter the ignominy of becoming the first foreign secretary in British history to receive orders from No 10 to ease off from Twitter (@WilliamJHague duly stayed silent for a week).

Not that the man himself was overly concerned: "Frankly, Gideon, and just between the two of us, it's a hell of a lot of effort for very little return."
Perhaps so, but I sense he is playing a different game. The first casualty of a Tory war is often the foreign secretary, and that might suit @WilliamJHague perfectly. This time, he could resign with dignity. If, and when, the Foreign Office is accused of blundering complacency, Hague could, like Peter Carington before him, merrily accept the blame and, whistling all the way, walk away from public life to make some serious money.