I WAS still at school when I heard the new prime minister, John Major, proclaim his ambition to create a “genuinely classless society.” Some at the time wondered of this was a softening of the Tory position — “at least he’s accepted there is such a thing as society,” they thought.

Much is made of the so-called Thatcher revolution that he inherited, but what came next was something just as pernicious.

A decade earlier, Michael Foot had once compared the actions to at best allow, and at worst positively encourage the collapse of British industry, by Margaret Thatcher and her very own Rasputin, Keith Joseph, to that of a failed conjurer who has smashed an audience member’s watch only to have “forgotten the rest of the trick.”