Not long before the 1979 general election the Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, privately and soberly predicted his own downfall. “There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics,” he told an adviser. “It then does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Sunny Jim had heard the sigh of history. Soon after came the largest electoral swing in postwar history, with Margaret Thatcher boasting a bigger share of the popular vote than any Tory leader since. Labour was kept at bay for 18 years.

Over the past year or so I have spent reporting around the country, it has become increasingly clear to me that the public wants another sea change – and this time it is against the children of Thatcher.

It doesn’t matter how many tax cuts Rishi Sunak hands voters, or how sympathetically his wife is interviewed by Grazia: he and his party are finished. They don’t need another rebrand or a new election guru; at this point, it would be kinder to book a reasonably priced but still decorous crematorium.

It’s not just the parties at No 10, or Liz Truss’s kamikaze budget; it’s the fact that food prices are about 25% higher than they were two years ago, while over a similar period interest rates have jumped from about 1% to above 5%. It’s also how stories of deprivation have gone from being headlines to the stuff of everyday life, the forces shaping the society to come.

When David Cameron moved into No 10, food banks were a........

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