Therefore, does the big story ahead of the 2015 general election not go like this? We had two grand political narratives offered to us in postwar Britain and they have both gone pop. The socialist story, which was that the public sector and public servants could be trusted to deliver a fairer and more decent society, could not survive the left’s brief alliance with turbocharged capitalism. Socialist critics of Tony Blair personalise this too much. It was a huge political defeat for social democracy, which began in the Thatcher period and continues today. Meanwhile, the free-market story, which promised a “virtuous cycle” of ever-greater prosperity, shared in by almost all, was also smashed by the events of 2008. The proposition that if you simply taxed people less and regulated business more lightly, you would find a stable, relatively fair and prosperous society growing automatically is one that even leading pro-market thinkers find hard to expound with a straight face.

Thus, the centre is gently collapsing – not simply mealy-mouthed, easy-osy, compromising, milk-and-water centrism or one-nation compassionism but the notion of there being a centre at all, a relatively stable central party system that is able to deliver coherent parliamentary majorities. All around the hollowing centre are multiple populisms, rubbing their hands – a populism that blames foreigners and Europe, a populism that blames the English-dominated state, the populist politics of Protestant Ulster, the left-wing populism of the Greens. These populisms are not the same. Of course not. They are often mutually antagonistic. Yet they each offer a single culprit for all social ills and they seem to be in a position of influence that we haven’t seen before – and that is, to recap, because of the collapse of the two old stories that once dominated Britain’s political imagination.