Labour’s 2017 general election manifesto came to me, as it were, in a dream: asleep when my bedside clock-radio activated at 7am and a news bulletin invaded my dreams.

The newscaster was summarising the contents of a leaked Labour manifesto. I heard the words, as yet unawakened to the circumstances: Thursday May 11, 2017; an infantile atmosphere in which it’s hardly thought necessary to challenge Labour’s thinking and all you need to do is call Jeremy Corbyn a mutton-headed old mugwump and leave your audience to snigger at his various “gaffes”; an election whose backdrop and soundtrack were of Theresa May surfing a huge Brexit-blown wave. None of this was in my mind.

So all I heard was some policy ideas, shorn of context. And