Such mood shifts often decide elections years before any vote is held. The IMF bail-out of 1976 destroyed Labour’s economic message, clearing the way for the Thatcher reforms. The chaos of Black Wednesday eviscerated the Tories’ reputation for competence, to Tony Blair’s advantage. And now, yet again, we can see conservatives in a state of intellectual surrender. From university tuition fees to energy price caps, the party has been adopting a slew of bad Labour policies, seeming ashamed of its own. The last Tory manifesto seemed, in parts, to be a repudiation of Toryism.

There is a cynical logic in this: steal popular Labour ideas, move the party to the Left, in hope of annexing some of the centre ground. It’s the game the Tories have been playing for more than a decade, with mixed results. But the long-term effect is a Conservative Party that has forgotten how to explain, let alone sell, conservatism. A party that doesn’t remember how to make the moral case for smaller government and lower taxation – and can’t even win a majority against a Marxist Labour leader disowned by most of his MPs.

As the Conservatives found out in June, words like Marxist are losing their resonance. Talking about the IRA and the Winter of Discontent doesn’t mean much to voters with no memory of either: you can’t win a mandate for the 2020s by talking about the Seventies. This might explain why age, not social class, was the dividing line in this year’s election. My mother-in-law, who passed away this week, fled Soviet-run Prague to live in the West: to her generation, there was nothing abstract about the competing ideas of socialism and the free market. So how to make the choice real to those with no lived experience of it?

Indeed, the experience of the young is of a system that seems rigged against them. The problem wasn’t just the crash, but the tools used to recover from it. Flooding billions of digitally created pounds into the economy, through Quantitative Easing certainly succeeded in raising asset prices. But we now end up with home ownership being a cruelly unattainable dream for the young. Unsurprisingly, capitalism is proving unpopular to those with no capital.