But the question above was actually first asked a century ago by Noel Skelton, arguably the most important Conservative thinker you’ve never heard of. Skelton’s general radicalism and social purpose helped to defibrillate a party whose electoral future seemed terminal. But in his focus on property inequality, he has much to a teach a government currently grappling with a distorted and stratified housing market. And this is an issue which is increasingly animating voters: new UnHerd polling shows a majority believe house prices need to come down, rising to around three-quarters among 18-34-year-olds. Skelton’s faith that conservatism was not the cause of, but the solution to this inequality has much to teach his successors today.

The Twenties (the last one) was a decade of general tumult and crisis. A newly-enfranchised working-class electorate was contending with a dark economic depression, and Conservatives needed to convince it of the continuing relevance of their ideals. Skelton, a major in the Great War and later a minister in the Scotland Office, was in his forties when he first entered Parliament in 1923. Nonetheless, he was a member of what older Tories pejoratively called the “YMCA” — a group of younger MPs who would cut their teeth in the age of universal suffrage.

Indeed, that was precisely the question confronting the Conservative Party in the Twenties: what would conservatism mean in the context of mass democracy? The Left had clarity about its purpose. As Skelton put it, the strength of socialism was that it was “making an intellectual appeal at the very moment when the craving for mental nourishment [was] so universal”. In the aftermath of a period of war and upheaval, Labour was offering a vision for the country. The Right could not afford to fail to do the same. In an attempt to answer this question, Skelton wrote a series of essays for The Spectator — essays which have a strong claim to being the most important the magazine has ever published. “Constructive Conservatism” — originally four articles written between April and May 1923 and later collected as a pamphlet — was Skelton’s attempt to offer “a democratic articulation of conservatism”. The “master problem of the new era”, in his mind, was the discrepancy between the “political status and educational status” of the British people and their “economic status”.

While the British public was now entirely franchised and widely educated, property ownership specifically remained the preserve of the few, and many lived in conditions of acute economic insecurity. Consequently, British society had become “lop-sided” and “unstable”. And this lop-sidedness threatened the legitimacy of a political order based on capitalism, as well as the shared sense of obligation between different social groups which had underpinned Disraelian one-nation conservatism. Labour’s solution to these societal conflicts was socialism, state ownership and redistribution; what was the Conservative Party’s?

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“To make democracy stable and four-square” was the goal for Skelton. And his means for achieving it was his most famous coinage: “property owning democracy”, a vision of society in which the wage earner had “property and status”, and in which private property would serve as a vehicle for the moral and economic development of the individual. Far from his ideology dying out in a democratised age, Skelton argued, property ownership would make conservatism and democracy mutually supportive. The teetering “stability of the social structure” would have a new prop. And it would also teach responsibility, self-sufficiency, and pride — values which inculcate a one-nation sense of shared obligations, and which recoil from state dependency. For a still-rigidly hierarchical party, it was a remarkable intellectual and ideological innovation.

Skelton was the first to formulate what has become a guiding ideal of 20th century Britain. Property ownership — and home ownership specifically — is one of our most widely endorsed and deeply ingrained aspirational values. Every major party is ostensibly committed to boosting the number of homeowners in the UK. Indeed, the Labour Party is currently the most ambitious on this score: Keir Starmer has said he would pursue a homeownership target of 70% if elected. Property ownership commands such wide support because its value to society transcends partisan interest: it strengthens both capitalism and democracy, two things that all those in the political mainstream want to nurture and preserve in one combination or another.

But Skelton’s essays also helped to change British conservatism, bursting the assumptions of an aristocratic bubble to create space for the dynamic, constructive forces of the postwar. While his name is largely forgotten, his influence was pronounced. Churchill appreciated “the force of our conservative theme” when drawing attention to the differences between a “personal property owning democracy”, as advocated by Conservatives, and socialist state ownership. “Our objective”, Sir Anthony Eden declared to the 1946 Party Conference, “is a nationwide property owning democracy” — not “the concentration of ownership in the hands of the state”, but “the distribution of ownership over the widest practicable number of individuals”. Harold Macmillan went further than anyone in making Skelton’s ideals a practical reality. For him, “of all forms of property suitable for such distribution, house property is one of the best”. As housing minister, he built 300,000 a year, and it was his logic which resulted in election posters boasting that voting Conservative had produced “New homes for a million folk”.

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The property owning democracy was given new meaning in the Eighties by Thatcher. For her, it meant transferring property away from the state to individuals and families via the Right to Buy scheme. She paid tribute to Macmillan and “the practical way in which he made conservative philosophy a reality for the average person in Britain”, but instead of adding to the already significant portfolio of the state, Thatcher committed to dispersing it amongst the British public. Her legacy was to transform the psychology of a constituency of former social housing tenants, producing millions of proud, self-sufficient property owners with a renewed faith in both capitalism and democracy. They rewarded her and the Conservative Party at the ballot box.

Since then, however, conservatism has lost its way. It has committed the mistake of presuming that the party of property should be the party of the already propertied. Yet the vitality of our democracy — and the continued relevance of the Conservative Party — depends on making property ownership an attainable aspiration for a wide cross-section of the population. Instead, Conservatives have concerned themselves with feathering the nests of existing homeowners at the expense of the aspirant ones. Starting with Thatcher herself, Conservatives have failed to ensure a steady supply of new homes, house prices have exploded, and homeownership rates have accordingly declined, particularly among the younger generations who want to see house prices fall.

Houses have come to be seen not merely as homes but as scarce “assets” which appreciate in value for existing owners but which are thus necessarily less and less accessible to younger generations. Instead of owning their own home, younger working-age people are transferring their wealth to older homeowners in the form of rent. One hundred years on from Skelton’s articles, the status of the property owning democracy today is one of decline. Skelton’s vision has become perverted — no longer a stabilising ideal, but a destabilising symbol of inequity. How can young people support capitalism when they are unable to become owners of capital? How can a sense of intergenerational obligation be sustained when younger cohorts appear to be denied the economic opportunities of previous generations? Currently, property ownership is undermining both democracy and conservatism, not reinforcing them, stratifying society into mutually resentful camps along economic lines.

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There is always a risk that Conservatives fall back upon tired or hackneyed articulations of their philosophy — usually a reheated, pastiche Thatcherism — rather than reimagining it to address the challenges of the present. At the present moment, this would be an error with existential implications. But history gives cause for hope. The force of Skelton’s ideas shook conservatism out of its sclerosis and made it relevant in the democratic era. Who is going to take up Skelton’s mantle and steer the party out of its current crisis?

Michael Gove – a passionate Unionist and, that rare thing, a genuinely intellectual politician — resembles Skelton in more ways than one. His new plan to cut through the jungle of lease holding interests exhibits some of the ambition required. And there is no shortage of parliamentary ginger groups sprouting up that resemble the “YMCA” of the interwar years which provided the party with so much fresh thinking, and to which Skelton, Eden and Macmillan all belonged. But it took two decades before Skelton’s vision for the country percolated to the top of his party. Conservatives today cannot afford to wait that long for an intellectual reinvigoration.

London looks extraordinary from up here, immortal in its way, a proving ground for the capitalist dream of unending growth. In all the time I have lived here, I have never felt so blissfully remote from the economic forces embodied by that view. Since the imposition of the first lockdown last March, I have scarcely crossed the river, let alone loitered in the cultural and commercial districts, which, in times of normality, so often coaxed millions of us into their gleaming centre

In many respects, this has been a tonic. During these months of geographical constraint, our preoccupations have become localised, almost parochial: the vexatious subject of “Low Traffic Neighbourhoods”; the question of which local park cafes serve alcohol.

Only now, as Covid restrictions ease and a mayoral election comes into focus, has that spell started to break. With it comes a need to look back to that horizon, and return to the issues besetting the city at large.

The rogue’s gallery of candidates for the mayoralty betrays a city which, like the wider country, remains ill at ease with itself. To rose-tinted liberals, London is still the ultimate city, a cradle of tolerant coexistence, the place where multiculturalism works. To those on the histrionic Right, London is anarchy, plagued by terror-attacks, no-go zones and spiralling crime.

The truth, inevitably, is somewhere in between. London is not a Powellian ruin. But, for a lifelong resident like me, it is no longer possible to pretend that it is a unified, contented and enviable place either. Indeed, the most disturbing question raised in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire has not gone away: how did London become a place that no longer functions for those who live here?

I suspect the answer, if it could be boiled down into a single word, would be property. In my other life, I do occasional work as a landscape gardener, tending the lawns and flowerbeds of south London’s more affluent inner-suburbs. Recently, a neighbour sidled up to me to complain about the homogenisation of her neighbourhood. I wrote about this very subject last year for UnHerd.

Next door to where I was working, someone with a lot of money had commissioned an overhaul of their semi, and the excavation conveyors were churning all day long, puking up London clay to make space for a new basement. “When we moved here 40 years ago, I was a junior legal researcher, my husband was an assistant lecturer,” the neighbour said, over the din. “This road was all teachers and police officers. Public servants. Now it’s just bankers, bankers, bankers.”

How did this happen? The erosion of London’s social-housing stock, which once inoculated the city against the creation of rich and poor ghettoes, is certainly one reason; the globe-trotting tendencies of the super-rich another. Disproportionate city incomes have furnished a portion of residents with the financial leverage to recast an area overnight if it becomes popular with a certain milieu, while the suburban dream, which only 20 years ago still lured people out of the inner-city, seemed, prior to Covid, to have expired.

Together, these processes have combined to dissolve London’s mixed communities, as well as the post-war history of town-planning which once ensured that no area of affluence could become an island, aloof from the rest of society.

The emptiness of Central London’s commercial quarters over the past year was prefigured long before in the city’s slew of new luxury residential developments, which have been devoid of people ever since they were finished. To walk through places like the Nine Elms Regeneration Area in the early months of 2020 was to enter a grotesque dystopia of late capitalism run amok.

All over town, vast welters of such towers are still in the throes of construction, invariably encircled by hoardings depicting attractive people at rest and play. But residents know that these apartments are less homes to be lived in than bricks-and-mortar commodities; investment opportunities that until recently were seen as safer than any government bond.

The sense of dislocation created by these joyless plazas is in large part architectural. London used to be a low-slung city, but these towers are vertiginous and carbuncular, looming over the besieged remnants of what came before.

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Arguably more significant than their aesthetic dissonance was the social upheaval they precipitated. As these towers grew, socio-demographic lines that once felt blurred became abrupt and pronounced, as people moved into economic enclaves and poverty was pushed outwards into peripheries and ghettoes of disadvantage. Traditional places of commonality, where shoulders rubbed, soon disappeared.

Prior to lockdown, I was frequently struck by the way in which once-diverse high streets were evolving to reflect these more stratified times: the poorer areas with their betting and pawn shops, the wealthier ones lined with estate agents, restaurants and prim cafes. Our civic spaces and landmarks were being commodified, as cash-strapped councils looked to make up budget shortfalls by monetising their assets, repurposing public libraries into private gyms. Boundaries, both real and imagined, had started to rise across the inner-city.

As established communities fractured and dissipated, the streets began to feel more febrile. People in their 30s, unable to afford the cost of raising a family here, were starting to leave in droves. And we who remained were left with a curious sense that we were an inconvenient vestige of a city that no longer exists, obdurate stone buildings amidst a forest of steel and glass.

Pre-pandemic London remained successful in many ways: as a summer playground for the super-rich; as a giant laundromat for the global kleptocracy; as an iconographic background for tourist photos and the glossy pages of a Hong Kong realtor’s brochure. But as a constellation of established communities? Not anymore; London’s covenant was coming undone.

The misery this has imposed in the city’s margins is all too easy to ignore. The more obvious victims, such as the council tenants living in mould-infested tower blocks, are rarely heard. Their abasement, like so much which afflicts the London underclass, is hidden away, in foodbanks concealed behind council estates, or displaced out of town.

But to focus exclusively on such misery is to miss a wider, more inchoate malaise — of a city adrift, changing in ways its residents don’t condone. Cities are always prone to endless flux, but when a city changes this fast, and on such an inhuman scale — when it starts to wear its inequality so gaudily — it is impossible to live here without feeling unmoored.

Suddenly, each new skyscraper feels like an act of violence; each house renovation a desecration. Wealthy newcomers appear not as new neighbours but as colonisers; hipster beards and vintage shops become hallmarks of an enemy within. Each international bar or café, an effigy of the melting pot it supplanted, becomes a reminder that London’s hallowed diversity is often merely ornamental — a desirable backdrop so long as it doesn’t press too close.

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So much of our yearning for the London we’ve lost seems ostensibly counter-intuitive. The city I grew up in was hardly an urban paradise. Many of my most vivid memories are recalled with a maternal hand at my back, ushering me past scenes of a recessional metropolis, rendered in grey. Cardboard shanties still proliferated beneath the Southbank undercrofts; on Oxford Street, grifters peddled counterfeit perfume from splayed suitcases. Back then the air was tubercular, the Thames flowed an effluent brown, and every road seemed dappled with litter, chewing gum, and dog shit in varying stages of putrefaction.

Yet I still yearn for that time before it was all cleaned-up and prettified. Before the pigeon-feed sellers had been turfed from Trafalgar Square. The other day I saw a car with a bumper-sticker which read: “Make Peckham Shit Again”, and I couldn’t help but smile at the oxymoron it conveyed. We have become a paradox: the progressive city nostalgic for the past.

Meanwhile, apologists for the gentrification of inner-London exonerate its degradations with platitudes about “market forces” — it’s just another reality of late capitalism, up there with sweat-shop labour and the atrophying high-street. It is something we grumble about on social media, but, for the most part, can’t bring ourselves to protest over because it would be like screaming at the tide.

Besides, don’t these market forces come with perks? As a tsunami of foreign property investment increased demand for a stagnating supply, and successive governments tailored housing policy to sustain the boom, those of us who own homes have seen their value rocket. In recent decades, owning a house in London has become the UK’s easiest path to fast cash. This is the city’s guilty secret: that so many of us have suckled on this indemnity that we cannot admit its inherent madness.

The 2016 Brexit vote exposed the intractability of these hypocrisies, as the predominantly Left-leaning city found itself in a Faustian pact, at once lamenting the financial sector’s malignant influence but terrified at the implications of its potential evacuation. Combined with the effects of the pandemic, suddenly an economy predicated on casino banking and rentier capitalism feels frail, one fiscal paroxysm from catastrophe.

Perhaps this is why we were so ready to let it go; so prepared, when Covid provided the pretext, to retreat into our respective streets, leaving the inner city to get on with its fire-sale unscrutinised.

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It remains to be seen what long-term impact the Covid year will have on London’s trajectory. It doesn’t seem wholly naïve to hope that its resuscitation of civic engagement might act as a breakwater against the city’s atomisation and its darkening mood. Lockdown has forced its neophiles to engage with their local neighbourhoods, and stalled the speculation that was so ruthlessly reshaping them. In some respects, at least, the last year could prove to be for the city’s benefit.

But, still, London’s reanimation brings with it a sense of foreboding. The fact that the wider city has only really registered over the last year as a backdrop to ill-tempered protest — in images of marching lockdown sceptics and police cordons defending Churchill’s statue — may foreshadow a summer of discontent, as the city’s unleashed energy turns sour and the economic fall-out from Covid starts to pinch.

Amid the excitement of rebirth, the queasy feeling many of us experience upon seeing roads thronged with traffic and parks strewn with revellers’ litter serves as a reminder that one of the intractable problems with London is that there are a lot of people. And people are often unbearable.

Now the giant stirs. The mayor will have a job to do.

Our fascination encompasses both the frivolous and the fundamental, from the avid consumption of television home make-over shows to the bitter frustration of young and middle-aged people who are priced out of the property market. And the naming of Johnson’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, as “Carrie-Antoinette” is a more profound echo than many Twitter wits realise.

Marie-Antoinette, like Symonds after her, was entranced by the possibilities of interior design, and indulged her passion to the full in the Petit Trianon — her Versailles “folly”— as well as in the Chateau itself. She went so far as to commission a model rural village at the Petit Trianon, with 12 cottages clad in artfully distressed stucco to look like aged and cracked brickwork, concealing elegant comfort within. Similar flights of fancy were in vogue on the estates of her admiring aristocratic friends. The rumblings of popular discontent at the extravagance seemed churlish to them. “All that fuss about a Swiss village!” pronounced the Baronne d’Oberkirch after her visit.

“The cost is totally out of control, she’s buying gold wallpaper!” It could so easily have been Louis XVI complaining about his wife; but it is Boris Johnson fretting to aides about the lavish redecoration of his flat in Downing Street in 2021. Reportedly, the cost lies somewhere between £85,000 and £200,000 — small beer by Marie-Antoinette’s standards.

An anonymous “friend” told the newspapers that “Carrie has exquisite taste”. One might well ask why, if that is the case, Carrie had to pay such an exorbitant sum to the interior designer Lulu Lytle to choose wallpaper and sofas for her, rather than simply doing it herself. But that is to misunderstand the language of the milieu in which Symonds moves, or aspires to move. There, “taste” means the ability to select the correct interior designer.

That much Marie-Antoinette would certainly have understood. The problem was, however, that Marie-Antoinette’s eye-watering expenditure on interiors and fashions stood in stark contrast to the tightening circumstances of the French people. As David Garrioch notes in his book The Making of Revolutionary Paris, between the periods of 1726-41 and 1771-89 wages in Paris rose by about 17%, but the prices of necessities went up by 62%. Rents in Paris rose by 130-140%. Parisians generally were getting poorer: “the percentage of Parisians able to leave something to their children diminished across the century: an increasing proportion left only debts.”

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Today, our Prime Minister is meant to be a public servant, yet Boris’s premiership carries a growing whiff of divine right. It grew stronger on Tuesday, amid one of those telling juxtapositions that politics has a way of casting up. Even as the war of Johnson’s wallpaper hogged the headlines, another wall-covering made a more modest and tragic story. It lay in the news that the Commons had voted down a House of Lords amendment which would have protected leaseholders from being forced to meet the exorbitant expense of making their homes safe in the aftermath of the Grenfell fire.

The cause of that inferno, which left 72 people dead, was unsafe external cladding. And homeowners in similarly affected buildings — below the 18m height which qualifies for government help — can now be held liable for the cost of altering cladding which was never their fault in the first place. Often at the lower end of the income scale, they now find themselves facing bills upwards of £25,000, and in some cases as much as £100,000.

Without the necessary repairs, which so many can little afford, these residents’ homes are both potentially dangerous and unsellable. Their dream of owning property — which Margaret Thatcher once nurtured so effectively among working-class and lower-middle-class voters — has turned to an inescapable nightmare. And the decision to abandon these property-owners to their fate has been taken by the Conservative Party under the leadership of Boris Johnson.

Nor are they the only voters in dire straits. We have not yet reckoned on the degree of economic devastation caused by the Covid pandemic, but it seems clear that a significant proportion of those who were already struggling are now sinking. A Resolution Foundation survey in January found that household spending decreased among the highest-earning families with children since the onset of Covid-19, but increased almost as noticeably among the lowest-earning ones. As the health effects of the pandemic begin to ease, the social cost will become ever more glaring.

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The Electoral Commission investigation into the Number 11 redecoration will play out against this backdrop. It will unfurl partly as entertainment — the whole country now yearns to gawp at the ridiculously expensive refurbishment — and partly as fodder for genuine outrage. Although Johnson is the one officially in charge, or supposed to be, there is already a powerful element of cherchez la femme, just as there was in the late 18^th century, when Marie-Antoinette was routinely depicted as a spendthrift, libidinous schemer who ran rings round her hapless husband. In her later years that was increasingly unfair, and the feverish libels against her were often malicious and untrue, but the die had been cast.

King Louis XVI, however, once mistakenly imagined that popular devotion to the French monarchy was unassailable, just as Boris believes himself perpetually lovable simply for being Boris. He dislikes being held to the rules by which others are routinely judged. But it’s the brazen contrasts that infuriate people in the end. The cladding and the wallpaper. The hardship and the profligacy. In at-risk flats across the country “ordinary, hard-working people” — the kind many Tories once considered their natural electorate — are being driven to financial desperation by the cost of fixing life-threatening construction flaws that they played no part in creating.

Not only did their Prime Minister break his earlier promise to support them, but his political energies are entirely focused elsewhere: on preposterous expenses which he seemingly sought to palm off on party donors.

I’m not sure he sees it yet, but the walls are closing in.