In 1977, as a 16-year-old, I felt I had to stand up at the Conservative conference and speak for a “lost generation” who were not then supporting the Tories. Forty years on, the same debate is back – an overwhelming majority of young people voted Labour at last month’s general election.

The Government now has to think long and hard about how to appeal to younger voters before it can contemplate another election, and there are signs that it has begun to do so. Damian Green, the First Secretary of State, is reported as having said the Tories have to be ready to “change hard”, and to have a “national debate” on the vexed issue of tuition fees that did so much to create a surge in Labour support.

The case for some hard thinking is not just electoral, but also that the discontented people in their late teens and twenties have a point. They are the first generation since the 1930s growing up in the expectation of being worse off than their parents. They face house prices bid up to impossible levels because of shortage of supply and permanently low interest rates. Pension funds that hand out index-linked defined benefits to their elders are largely closed to them. Tuition fees their parents did not have to pay are indeed an additional burden for many. Rapid changes in technology and the nature of work make a steady career harder to build. And soon they are going to be hit by having to pay for the long-term care of a vast older generation who live longer than was ever expected.