You know things are serious if Mr Reasonable has one of his funny turns

A WEEK ago, Michael Gove said it was time to “restore a sense of proportion” to the EU debate. We must avoid hysteria. We must be statesmanlike. We must be calm.

To judge by events since, I’m not sure all his colleagues were listening. Take, for example, the select committee interrogation of Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave’s temperamental campaign director, during which he sat wearing no tie, cufflinks or even shoelaces, and snapped that it was “not Vote Leave’s job to provide figures”.

Then there was Iain Duncan Smith’s mysterious outburst about Lord Mandelson’s cashmere coat, followed by an unsolicited insistence that it had nothing to do with his sexuality.

Plus, of course, there was Mr Gove’s own claim that by voting to stay in the EU we would be “hostages locked in a car boot”.

Restoring a sense of proportion to the debate is a laudable goal, but suggesting that we’ll be kidnapped and driven off to be shot is not the most obvious way to achieve it.

Yesterday, at the London HQ of Vote Leave, it was the turn of Frank Field, the pro-Brexit Labour MP, to support Mr Gove’s appeal for calm. He did so by accusing the Remain camp of “bringing the American president over to bomb us”.

To Mr Field, Barack Obama’s press conference at the Foreign Office had been nothing less than a “bombing” of the British people. After the referendum is over, this country is going to need a very long lie-down.

It was curious, listening to Mr Field. He speaks so placidly, so gently, with a hint of melancholia. His tone is always so reasonable. And indeed, many of the things he says are reasonable. But then, every so often, in the same reasonable manner, he’ll say something totally odd.

For example, urging Labour supporters to vote Leave because it will cost David Cameron his job.

Very possibly, yes. But by whom does Mr Field imagine that Mr Cameron would be replaced, post-Brexit? Not by anyone to Mr Cameron’s Left. The new PM, in those rampantly triumphal circumstances, would surely come from further Right. Mr Field’s slogan might as well be, “Vote Leave, to Make the Tories Even Torier!” Meanwhile, he appears to have little hope for Labour. By supporting Remain, he said, Jeremy Corbyn had “signed the second longest suicide note in history” (the longest being the Labour manifesto of 1983). By 2020, he feared, Labour might “not be strong enough for us credibly to make an appeal for power”.

In short: he seems to think the referendum will wreck both the Tories and Labour. At this rate, there’ll be no one left to run the country. Maybe we’ll have to leave it to Brussels after all.

‘By supporting Remain, said Mr Field, Jeremy Corbyn signed the second longest suicide note in history’