The parliament that has just opened is the most fragile and dangerous of my lifetime — and of postwar Britain. The Queen’s speech was tellingly sparse. The prime minister doesn’t have a parliamentary majority or very much at all. Yet the task of negotiating our way out of the EU is urgent and complex, affecting the prosperity of every Briton. Power and authority, which normally cohabit, are living far apart.

For many people the Grenfell Tower fire has come to symbolise the inevitability of a new direction in politics. Analysts from the right as well as the left swiftly agreed that the disaster had political implications. For the left, Grenfell Tower marks the death scene not only of innocent human beings but of seven years