There’s only one problem. While the Conservatives could point to private sector job creation, and limited deficit reduction, this all unfolded alongside the biggest decline in real wages — measured as pay after inflation — since Watt’s steam engine. Between 2007 and 2015, wages fell 10.4 percent. This year that is expected to continue, with wages in Britain falling more than any other country in the O.E.C.D.

It’s the same story with productivity. In Britain an hour of work creates less output than it did 10 years ago. As with wages, there is no precedent for this in recent history — at least not since Napoleon invaded Russia. No comparable economy in the world today has endured such extraordinary inertia.

As workers took home less pay and productivity stagnated, Carillion, bolstered by hundreds of government contracts, continued to give its shareholders a profit. The company’s market capitalization returned to around pre-crash levels, as did its total revenue, which was £5.2 billion in both 2008 and 2016. But the figures were delusive: At the time of its liquidation, Carillion held just £29 million in cash, with debts of around £1.5 billion.

It is impossible to know whether the government was aware of just how bad Carillion’s real situation was. But despite multiple profit warnings and the company’s stock being among the most shorted on the London stock exchange, the government awarded Carillion contracts worth more than a billion pounds over the last six months.

While the company wasn’t bailed out in the manner that the banks were a decade ago, the parallels are obvious. The state was propping up the private sector in the name of upholding free markets.

Far from an outlier, Carillion may be the canary in the privatization gold mine. Shares in Interserve, a comparable services and construction company that has lost 80 percent of its value over the last four years, dropped 14 percent the morning after it emerged ministers, in the wake of Carillion’s collapse, had set up a team to monitor the company. Elsewhere shares in Capita, a firm strikingly similar to Carillion, have lost two-thirds of their value since 2015. The future of these companies, responsible for Britain’s roads, railtracks, hospitals, schools and prisons, looks more precarious than ever.

All of which adds yet another layer to a continuing crisis for Britain’s social and economic model. After Brexit, last year’s surprise general election result, the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire and now this, even the status quo’s fiercest defenders view change, of some kind at least, as inevitable.

It can’t come soon enough.