Here we are again. Fifty years ago the fashionable view was that Britain was ungovernable. Chancellors wrote their budgets kow-towing to the bond markets, and, if they did not make their obeisance low enough, had to beg from the IMF. The unions had turned out one democratically elected government and were giving the next one a good kicking. People said we needed a ‘strongman’ who did not have to bother with elections, implausibly suggesting Lord Mountbatten. The public had noticed there was another candidate already rehearsing for the role, the Secretary General of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Mr Jones, whom they saw, said the opinion polls, as more powerful than the prime minister. We were the ‘sick man of Europe’. In today’s cliché, Britain was broken.

A hundred years ago,

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