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There was just one problem. We in the media were told Gove had been demoted, he was not a full member of Cabinet, he would take a salary cut.

Gove reacted on Radio 4, saying: "Demotion, emotion, promotion, locomotion, I don't know how you would describe this move, though move it is, all I would say is that it's a privilege to serve."

His wife - the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, who is godmother to the Camerons' youngest daughter - was a little less coded.

She tweeted a link to an article by a fellow hack describing "a shabby day's work which Cameron will live to regret".

For Petronella Wyatt, the episode was a moment for Gove when David Cameron had stopped behaving like a friend and so stopped deserving that loyalty.

"I believe Cameron has been treating him a bit like an under-butler," she tells me.

'Agonising struggle'

For a long, long time before this referendum was called, Mr Gove insisted in private that he would not, could not, abandon his friend.

That is what he told a lunch organised by Rupert Murdoch's News UK. It led Murdoch to use Twitter and editorials in The Sun to urge the man he once employed to put loyalty to his principles first.

This is how Ms Vine wrote about his struggle: "Michael has been like a cat on a hot tin roof, locked in an internal struggle of agonising proportions... The PM was genuinely, and quite naturally, shocked and hurt."

It was a decision that did not just hurt Mr Cameron. It convinced Mr Johnson, the man who confessed he had been "veering all over the place like a shopping trolley" to veer towards Brexit.

It was a dinner with Mr Gove at Boris Johnson's house, which led Mr Johnson to finally declare for Leave.

It is a dinner that may have helped to seal the fate not just of Britain, but of Mr Cameron as well. Or could friends be reunited after next week's result?

Danny Finkelstein thinks that though their relationship will never be the same again, the old alliances will re-emerge more than most anticipate.

But, he adds, if the UK does vote to leave the EU, Mr Cameron will be gone as prime minister.

Anthony Seldon, historian of Downing Street and its occupants, notes of Mr Gove: "I don't think it's his governing desire to become prime minister.

"I think he is a very intellectually driven person and, as we've seen here over Brexit, it is the ideology that trumps the bonds of friendship that existed not just between the two men, but between their wives also."

In just seven days' time, the country will decide whether Gove trumps Cameron and which friend will win the battle of Britain.

Posted By: Chris Peacock, Jun 30, 12:21:23