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If you wanted a preview of the future of British politics, you should have headed through the back alleys of Westminster to Lord North Street on the last Monday in February. There, in the slightly cramped premises of the Institute of Economic Affairs, you could have seen the early stirrings of a Tory revolution. A group of MPs, most of whom had been in parliament for less than two years, were explaining why nothing less than ‘fundamental structural reform’ of the economy would solve the country’s woes.

Holding a public meeting a few weeks before your own government’s budget to announce what you would do if you were in charge would normally be seen as an act of monstrous vanity. New MPs are supposed to be lobby fodder, their opinions dictated to them by whips, not intellectual gurus. At any other time, these MPs would have been taken aside and quietly told to pack it in.