Graphic: SW19 in 60 seconds | Graphic: Murray v Ferrero

The Edwardian idyll continues. Anyone for tennis? Anyone for a British tennis champion? Will the sun ever stop shining? Is the roof still open at ten to three? And is there Murray still for tea? Oh yes there is, and doubtless he’ll be served up with a Gentleman’s Relish and the melba toast in the semi-finals tomorrow.

Yesterday Murray was immense, immaculate, unstoppable. He beat Juan Carlos Ferrero and used his racket like a razor, slashing his opponent’s game to bits in three increasingly devastating sets and leaving Ferrero’s confidence in ribbons. Murray won 7-5, 6-3, 6-2 and did so with withering authority, as if he resented Ferrero’s temerity in stepping on court with him.

Ferrero, let me remind you, is a former world No 1, has won the French Open and, at 29, is not in his dotage quite yet. But Murray made the Spaniard look like a tyro. It was Murray who looked like the player with prestige and authority and reputation. It was a performance that confirms all that we have been learning about Murray over the past year.

What? No errors? No agonies? No hysterics? No reeling and writhing and fainting in coils? But that was part of the old days: part of Tim’s days. Murray is a different proposition entirely. For him, a quarter-final win at a grand-slam tournament was not a great adventure, it was a reaffirmation of his own excellence.

I shall never hear a word against Tim Henman unless I speak it myself, but Henman didn’t do calm quarterfinals. Every step forward was hard and bitter agony, a drama in which self-doubt and self-certainty fought a continual battle. With Murray, yesterday, there were no doubts, not in his mind, not in the mind of his opponent.

He advances to the semi-finals and it doesn’t feel like a privilege to have a Brit there, nor even remotely a shock. It seems more like simple natural justice. It all feels as inevitable, and yet as amazing, as the weather. One hot day has been following another, while Murray has given us a succession of red-hot performances.

And so the crowd watched and fanned themselves and each other calmly, and though they shouted cheerily enough for Murray, there was none of the edge, none of the desperation we used to get with the other fellow. It was a throwback to those days of British certainty, when champions were always British, just as India would always be British. Perhaps the crowd were telling each other Edwardian imperial fan jokes, like the one about the Indian who offered to cool a lady dancer at a ball with her own fan. “Madam, may I make wind in your face?” Ho-ho, what a card I am.

And I say, another marvellous shot from that Murray chap, and for once he actually did manage to finish before teatime, so let’s go and mangle a sandwich: may I forage for you? And if you thought that the old certainties about British domination had gone, you should have seen that Murray. There was nothing but certainty in everything he did yesterday.

Well, there was one messy bit. Murray dropped his serve in the first game of the second set, a rather callow error, one born of poor concentration; well, it’s nice to have a little touch of Henman in one’s life. But I can almost forgive him, because it led to the best phase of the match, the best phase of Murray’s tournament so far.

At 2-3 and a break down, Murray raised his game decisively. He raised his game with quite devastating certainty. He raised his game — there is only one simile available here — like Roger Federer. Murray conceded a single point in the course of the next four games, breaking to love twice.

That staggering gear change is a Federer trademark and here was Murray doing it just as effectively, and in a grand-slam quarter-final at that. Murray was totally in charge, placed the ball exactly where he wanted, and Ferrero was simply unable to live with it. Very few players in the world could, and one of them is in Majorca.

Ferrero played aggressively and at times with great style, but the third set slithered away from him. He never really had a say in the matter: Murray reeled off the last five games and finished with a second-serve winner, to cock a snook at any fool who has criticised his off-speed second serve.

In fact, Ferrero’s principal contribution from early in the second set to the end was to produce a grunt that sounded like Withnail after he had drunk the lighter fluid? (You’ll recall he was demanding antifreeze as a chaser and was told never to mix his drinks.) That added an unEdwardian touch, but everything else was as calm, as well-mannered and as inevitable as you could wish. Neither the sky nor Murray’s mind held an atom of doubt. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

This was just the match Murray needed after the five-set epic beneath the roof on Monday night. It shows the world that the match against Stanislas Wawrinka was not so much a Murray wobble as an inspired performance by Wawrinka: goaded by the setting, the court and its roof, he played the best tennis of his life. It’s a littleacknowledged fact in sport that the opposition is allowed to play well — and in the end, it wasn’t good enough.

Yesterday was a return to Murray as an aloof, austere, rather intimidating presence: not smiling much, not roaring or c’monning too much either, just getting on with the job of turning a reasonably hefty challenge into a straightforward flat-track bully job. The idyll continues, then. The fans flutter their fans, the sun continues to shine, the winners rain down from Murray at every angle and a hot date with destiny looms. Tomorrow the semi-finals, and it’s not a dream.