UKIP, Pierre Poujade and a political class that’s seen to be “out-of-touch”.

Parliament is a “brothel”. The state is an enterprise of “thieves” engaged in a conspiracy against “the good little people” and the “humble housewife”. Time, then, for a party that will stand up for “the little man, the downtrodden, the trashed, the ripped off, the humiliated”.

Not, as you might suspect, the most recent UKIP manifesto but, rather, the sentiments expressed by Pierre Poujade during the run-in to the 1954 elections to the French National Assembly. Poujade’s party, the Union to Defend Shopkeepers and Artisans,  shocked France’s political elite by winning 2.5 million votes and sending 55 deputies to Paris.

Charles de Gaulle sniffed that “In my day, grocers voted for solicitors; now solicitors vote for grocers”, a sentiment with which David Cameron might this week have some sympathy. Nevertheless, as the General (then in self-imposed exile at Colombey) admitted,  Poujade’s success was “simply one of the signs of endemic revolt generated by the… incapacity of the regime”.