More generally, it is asking for trouble to draw attention to problems of social mobility and generational injustice when your own party has been at the helm for 13 of the past 14 years. One of the best political books of the past decade is David Willetts’s The Pinch: not a party-political tract, but a scholarly analysis of “how the baby boomers took their children’s future”. As Willetts points out, the greatest burden any generation can impose upon its successors is debt: he notes that our Second World War borrowing from the United States was only finally paid off in 2006. The debt crisis inherited from Labour is, Willetts continues, “tantamount to the burden of fighting a major war. It will leave a debt burden to be paid by younger generations for decades.”