No one tells you this, but food is incredibly important. In fact, during their research for the Manhattan Project, US scientists discovered that if people don’t eat food, they will die. But there is a complete silence from the government on the issue. Despite its responsibility for motorway service stations and railway buffet cars, nobody at the Department for Transport has ever issued guidance on what sort of food people should eat, or in what quantity. I sent them over 3,000 emails about this when I was in government, suggesting sample menus, but they simply ignored me.

Neither can you find information on cooking in so-called bookshops. There was not a single helpful guide to the subject in the Popular Science section of Waterstones. The closest I came was a book, somehow mis-filed in the Fiction section, called Eating People is Wrong. This should be in Non-Fiction, because eating people is wrong, as Mary very firmly explained to me when Michael and I returned from the Siberian hunting trip that Vladimir so kindly invited us on in 2015.

So I have decided to publish my own instructions on food preparation, the first such publication ever in history. This “book of cooking”, as I like to think of it, will be released in monthly sections on my new OnlyFans site (subscription £100 a month).

Chapter One: How To Boil An Egg

The mainstream media don’t like to talk about eggs. If you listened to Laura Kuenssberg and other so-called political experts, you wouldn’t know eggs even existed. Billionaires aren’t getting their breakfasts from political reporters. They’re getting them from the trays that are brought into their bedrooms each morning. We could learn an important lesson from billionaires: the Golden Rule of boiling eggs is ignore the Lobby.

The PM wasn’t interested in eggs either. The Golden Rule of boiling eggs is that no one in politics thinks boiling eggs is important. Throughout my time in No10, I would find meetings I had put in the diary to discuss eggs had been cancelled. Despite all the promises the PM made to get me into the building, all he wanted from me once I was there was “come up with a slogan”.

I did, as requested, come up with a slogan – “Before You Go To Work, Have An Egg” – but for some reason the Egg Marketing Board stopped returning my calls.

The core reason is: he does not understand how eggs are boiled and cannot boil them and cannot trust anyone else to boil them for him. Last year his girlfriend persuaded him to sabotage his own breakfast by throwing away the small saucepan that should always be used for boiling eggs because eggs with too much space are likely to career about and crash into one another while they cook. This year she’s persuaded him to sabotage himself further by getting rid of his egg timer.

the Golden Rule of boiling eggs is ignore the Lobby

In his indifference to all this, the PM couldn’t be more of a contrast from Bismarck, who would eat six eggs in a single sitting, although once after he did this he thought he was having a stroke. The Golden Rule of boiling eggs is don’t try to eat six. Of course, Bismarck never had to deal with the Lobby, who are the subject of far too much attention from people who are completely focussed on every utterance of Robert Peston, to the exclusion of What Really Matters.

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew doesn’t talk much about eggs in his memoirs, but I’m sure he would have boiled eggs really well if he had ever boiled them. And if he’d arrested people who didn’t like his eggs, that would have been fair enough. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Or perhaps you can. I will deal with this question in a future chapter when I have had a chance to read around the subject.

Robert Peston hasn’t tweeted ONCE on boiling an egg in the past year, which is just another example of why you shouldn’t scroll obsessively through his Twitter feed looking for information on a particular subject. He did tweet about Scotch Eggs last December, but the Lobby – which I COULD NOT BE LESS INTERESTED IN – is obsessed with side-issues like Scotland. The Golden Rule of boiling eggs is that you can’t boil Scotch eggs without making a lot of mess.

NASA introduced scrambled eggs to the space programme from Apollo 12 onwards. But boiled eggs were only available to the astronauts on the ground, typically for breakfast two days before the flight. The lesson here is obvious.

To boil an egg, simply place it in a microwave oven on “High” for 10 minutes if you like a runny yolk, or 12 if you like a it perfectly set, and just a little bit squidgy at the centre.