Music hall grew out of pubs in the mid-19th century and reached its peak in the 1890s, the most popular form of entertainment in the country. It provided a full evening’s show of short unrelated acts, including singers, comics, acrobats, jugglers, dancers, eccentric dancers, trick cyclists, drag performers, animal acts, and any permutations of the above. It was like Britain’s Got Talent. With talent.

Older viewers may also remember The Good Old Days, a stalwart of BBC television for 30 years, up to 1983, with contemporary TV stars reviving old material in front of an audience dressed up in Edwardian outfits. That was a heavily sanitised version. The original halls were raucous, boozy venues, with crowds who weren’t reticent in expressing their opinion of the performers verbally and even physically. These stages were no place for the faint-hearted. Nor for the understated: there was no amplification to help in projecting across the pit-band, through a dense fog of pipe and cigar smoke, to a couple of thousand drunken patrons. Towards the back of the hall, prostitutes plied — and sometimes practised — their trade. And then, right at the back, was the bar, from where the waiters emerged to provide table service, sometimes with the bottles chained to the trays, to prevent them being seized and used as weapons. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere.

Unsurprisingly, all this met with extreme disfavour in polite society. It was coarse, vulgar and degrading. First, the entertainment onstage was disgraceful. When the can-can arrived from Paris in the late 1860s, it was so scandalous that the Alhambra in Leicester Square and the Highbury Barn in North London both had their licences suspended for staging what The Times called “this daring outrage on public decency”.

The behaviour offstage was equally reprehensible. In 1894 the London County Council (LCC) insisted that screens be erected at the back of the hall in the Empire in Leicester Square so that decent-minded punters might be shielded from the prostitution. That didn’t work, though; on the first night, the screens were torn down by a group of young hearties, led by a Sandhurst cadet. “Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty!” declared Winston Churchill (for it was he), in what he described as his “maiden speech”.

The fact that it was the Empire that was being targeted by moral campaigners was revealing. There were working-class halls in the East End of London where immorality, and even obscenity, was far more prevalent, but the great fear was that the corruption was seeping out, infecting those places frequented by wealthy young men — in the same way that, a century later, the moral panic over gangsta rap was prompted by its spread beyond the black ghettos where it had originated.

It wasn’t just the Right-wing moralists who objected to the music hall. In 1907 the LCC voted to ban from London stages the tableau vivant. This was an act in which a woman wearing a sheer, close-fit bodystocking (“so nearly naked that you can’t tell the difference”, according to the papers) struck poses based on classical statues. And it was noticeable that most of those voting for the ban were sober-minded Liberals, while all but two of the 43 who voted against were fun-loving Conservatives.

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Liberals objected to music hall partly on moral grounds and partly on cultural: all that drinking didn’t go down well with the nonconformist rank and file, who had a leaning towards teetotalism. But there were also political problems. Particularly suspect was the intense patriotism of the halls, shading into jingoism. Indeed the word “jingoism” itself came from music hall, from a bellicose song performed by the Great MacDermott in 1878, when conflict with Russia seemed imminent: “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!”

The Boer War brought that tendency to the fore. The message coming from the stage was encapsulated in the song “Stand by Your Country, Stand by Your Queen”, while the Boers were promised there’d be “A Hot Time in the Transvaal Tonight”. Decent-minded folk were quick to condemn politicians who exploited such “music-hall jingoism”, and chief among the alleged offenders was the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Formerly on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, now serving under a Conservative prime minister, he was a populist figure for whom politics was a question of drawing dividing lines. “A seat lost to the government is a seat won by the Boers,” he declared during the Khaki Election of 1900.

Three years later, Chamberlain left the Cabinet to campaign for the policy of imposing tariffs on goods imported into the Empire — imperial preference, as it was called, one of the regular occasions on which the Conservatives have torn themselves apart over the question of free trade. In that campaign, he allocated a substantial budget to getting the issue raised in music halls and related arenas. It was said that at the Christmas of 1903, more than 200 pantomimes featured a pro-tariff song such as “The John Bull Store” and “Good Old Joe”, the majority of them paid for by Chamberlain. He was the first British politician to recognise the power of popular culture, and his patriotic arguments — as broad-brush as any comic of the time — got a good reception. Possibly, though, he was too far ahead of the game: barely half of adult males had the vote, and the predominantly working-class audiences in the halls were disproportionately disenfranchised.

They remained, though, stubbornly patriotic. And stubbornly attached to the Tory cause. There were songs that grudgingly gave Asquith and Lloyd George credit for introducing pensions, but the latter’s supposed weakening of ale during the First World War couldn’t be countenanced. “At the brewery, there’s nothing doing; all the water works are brewing Lloyd George’s Beer,” sang Ernie Mayne mournfully, and he concluded: “The worst thing that ever happened in this war is Lloyd George’s Beer.” Come the National Government of the early Thirties, when ex-Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald fronted a Tory-led coalition, it was Stanley Holloway, king of the music-hall monologue, who provided the most vocal endorsement: “No government ever was perfect, but the National’s the best in the land, so let them as thinks they’d do better, stop grousing and lend them a hand.”

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By then, though, the music hall was on its last legs. The rise of cinema, radio and paperback fiction had already dismantled its cultural dominance, and television and rock ‘n’ roll were shortly to deliver the final blow. Though it survived in the working men’s clubs, those were far from the centres of media power and consequently attracted little attention.

Beyond that, the cultural memory began to fragment. Yet there were occasional sightings, even in the world of politics, and especially in the Labour Party. When James Callaghan, born in 1912, wanted to address media speculation about an early election in the autumn of 1978, he choose to do so by singing Vesta Victoria’s music-hall classic “Waiting at the Church” to the TUC Congress. (He misattributed it to Marie Lloyd, whose song “A Little of What You Fancy” had been used by Harold Macmillan 20 years earlier to sell the introduction of Premium Bonds.)

And when Michael Foot, born in 1913, wanted to mock the Conservative government in 1980, he told a long, rambling story about visiting the Palace Theatre of Varieties in Plymouth as a child. One of his favourite acts, he said, was a stage magician, who would take a watch from an audience member, “enfold it in a beautiful red handkerchief, place it on the table in front of us, take out his mallet, hit the watch and smash it to smithereens”. Then a look of utter bewilderment would descend on his face, as he was obliged to admit: “I am very sorry. I have forgotten the rest of the trick.” And this, Foot suggested, was precisely the same look that could be seen on the face of Keith Joseph, the Industry Secretary, as he surveyed the wreckage of the British economy in the midst of the first Thatcherite recession.

Then the Labour Party decided to skip a generation, and elected as leader Neil Kinnock, an honorary member, and sometime Vice President, of the Gene Vincent Appreciation Society. As in real life, rock ‘n’ roll seemed to have displaced music hall. In both cases, though, that wasn’t the whole story. “Bryan [Ferry] and I always joked about the fact that rock and roll was basically music hall,” said Andy Mackay of glam-rock group Roxy Music, and that trio of figures with whom we started suggest that the same is true of politics.

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The ability to play a crowd at a rally, or in the bearpit that used to be the Labour conference, has become much less important, but the House of Commons remains a tough gig. “Prime Minister’s Questions often resembled my father’s description of a raucous night at the Glasgow Empire,” observed John Major. And even though he himself wasn’t particularly good at PMQs, nor at delivering big speeches, it was striking that his finest moment came in the 1992 general election; standing on a soapbox in town squares and market-places, facing down hostile crowds and demonstrators, he looked surprisingly at home. “I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business,” he wrote in his (rather good) history of the music hall.

His successor, Tony Blair — born more than four decades after the previous Labour Prime Minister — was the grandson of Charles Parsons, better known as Jimmy Lynton and described in the press as a “comedian, illusionist, conjuror, thought-reader, lightning cartoonist, paper-tearer and anything else common to the music hall”. Blair’s middle names, Charles Lynton, honour his memory, though his own performing career was less impressive, singing in a band named Ugly Rumours while a student at Oxford. “We were rather tragic, and had precisely zero presence on stage,” remembered the future music journalist Mark Ellen, who played bass. As a politician, on the other hand, Blair could play the role of entertainer better than any of his contemporaries, especially in the pre-Iraq years, when he could deliver jokes and put-downs like a pro. And no one was better at wrapping himself in the Union Jack.

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But the one who really seemed in touch with his roots was Ken Livingstone, whose mother had been a dancer with a trio called the Kenleigh Sisters (maybe his name pays tribute, as well). When Livingstone became leader of the Greater London Council in 1981, he was cast as the pantomime villain of politics. “The IRA-loving, poof-loving, Marxist leader of the GLC” (to use the words of the Sunday Express) was, said The Sun, “the most odious man in Britain”. But he rode out the barracking like a trouper and re-emerged with a new act as cheeky cockney chappie, thumbing his nose at the government. In this role, he became, said the Daily Mail, through gritted teeth: “The man running rings round Maggie.”

Much of his new-found popularity in the mid-Eighties was achieved through a use of popular culture that echoed Joe Chamberlain. Livingstone’s GLC staged a long string of concerts, festivals and comedy gigs, attracting huge crowds, and then slipping in the political messages amid the entertainment. This time, it wasn’t even his campaign funds footing the bill, but the public purse.

And, like Joe, he found himself feted in song. “I know one thing,” declared Kevin Rowland on a Dexys Midnight Runners track; “Ken Livingstone’s a folk hero.” Or, as Kate Bush sang: “Ken is the man we all need, Ken is the leader of the GLC.” Admittedly, that was tongue-in-cheek, recorded for an episode of The Comic Strip, but still: he got namechecked by Kate Bush. When The Smiths played a GLC show, he posed for a publicity photo with Morrissey, an artist greatly indebted to music hall. And when Billy Bragg and Paul Weller toured under the banner of Red Wedge to campaign for Labour, the only politician allowed to travel on the musicians’ coach was Livingstone. His mum would’ve been proud. Not of his politics, though: she was a Tory, like so much of the music hall.

To impress the English you must be overly kind to dogs and horses, extremely wealthy, or gushingly enthusiastic about football. Abramovich was at least two of these. Previously unknown outside of Russia, his purchase of Chelsea FC in 2003 made him England’s favourite oligarch.

He stood for all the others. Like them, Abramovich bought Francis Bacons, yachts, and football clubs. He was expensively divorced. He purchased a Kensington townhouse for 90 million pounds, then plotted grandiose subterranean extensions to it. His security detail were told they were not allowed to bring firearms into the West London private schools his shoal of children swam through. His weirdly thin background, like his face, was enigmatic. His trajectory — from penniless orphan, to middling rubber duck salesman, to billionaire tycoon — mirrored the unlikely CVs and fluke-strewn ascents of so many mega-wealthy products of Russia’s insane Nineties. Unlike Abramovich though, many of his old rivals and partners from that time met… abnormal ends.

But so what? Abramovich entered London high society when views of Putin’s Russia were charged with hopeless optimism. Putin, wrote Neal Acheson in 2004, was an “agent of sweeping change”. His reforms might one day make “a relatively law-abiding and governable Russia” a fact, rather than a dream. In the academy, favourable verdicts (grandly blessed by Perry Anderson in 2015) rained down on Russia. It was a vibrant, investor-friendly middle-income country; it was a respectable member of OECD; it was less statist in its control of energy markets than Brazil! Abramovich then, was an envoy from a developing country, not a one-man image-softening operation sent from an anguished, ramshackle, authoritarian state, still held together and animated by the most salient, deathless force in Russian political history — imperial ambition.

These wonky arguments added a watery academic gloss to London’s embrace of Russians like Abramovich. Ever since John Major’s Conservatives introduced ‘Golden Visas’ that fished for millionaire investors in the Nineties, every British government, and London Mayors Johnson and Livingstone, had courted Russian money. A butler class formed to enthusiastically count the cash.

Behind the biscuit tin version of London — Union Jacks on the Mall, Notting Hill selfies, and recumbent deer in Richmond Park — was a bleaker reality. To arrive here from Russia was to find networks of bankers, estate agents, accountants, wealth managers, PR flacks, politicians, and a legal system all eager to take your money, over-educate your children, Harley Street your wife, Isle of Man your taxes, gag journalists, and angelify your reputation.

None of them cared where the money came from. London could bury your secrets for you. “This country’s nothing but an off-shore laundry”, spits Logan Roy in Succession, “for turning evil into hard currency.”

That quiet part was rarely said out loud. The English are a discreet and sentimental people after all. In 2005, Ken Livingstone, at a Westminster address to 1,200 Russian political and business leaders, invoked the “warmth and sympathy” the English felt for their old wartime ally against Hitler. Sympathy was a sound basis for deal-making: “Russians,” he said, “are welcome in this city, both as individuals and for the business that they bring.” Since 1998, according to anti-money laundering groups, around a hundred billion pounds of Russian money has washed through London, and into property and commodities. The welcome was accepted.

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If Livingstone represented the grasping yet oddly dewy-eyed side of Londongrad’s rise, his successor articulated the jokey cynicism the English felt towards the oligarchs. Boris Johnson was just as enthusiastic about Russian money as Livingstone, but prepared to laugh — like so many other toff-adjacent Brits — at Russian vulgarity too. In 2012 he urged oligarchs to flood London’s courts with libel actions. “If one oligarch feels defamed by another oligarch, it is London’s lawyers who apply the necessary balm to the ego,” he told the CBI’s annual conference that year. “I have no shame in saying to the injured spouses of the world’s billionaires: if you want to take him to the cleaners, take him to the cleaners in London…”

It was like a joke. Except the estranged wives and litigious oligarchs were components of Putin’s increasingly despotic regime. The key figures of Russian state capitalism, who were now building nests in London, had begun the 2000s calling the President Mr Putin. Then they called him Boss. Then — another joke, at least to begin with — Tsar. Abramovich found ways to deal with Putin. Against a backdrop where oligarchs were assassinated, exiled and imprisoned, the Chelsea owner did everything he could in order to keep himself safe.

The pair were close. Just how close was revealed by Abramovich’s successful defence of a landmark high court claim brought by his fellow oligarch and mentor Boris Berezovsky in 2012. “Mr Abramovich enjoyed very good relations with President Putin and others in power at the Kremlin,” the judgement recorded. “It was also clear that Mr Abramovich had privileged access to President Putin, in the sense that he could arrange meetings and discuss matters with him.”

That somebody who had folded so neatly into the scrim of English life — celebrated on Stamford Bridge’s terraces to the tune of the Only Fools And Horses theme, lunching on his yacht with Sir Paul McCartney — was so close to a despot ought to have caused alarm. The press preferred to write about his fleet of supercars, his record-breaking transfer deals, and a floated West End musical about Abramovich’s life. The Premier League’s attitude was summed up by its then chief executive, Richard Scudamore: “Football is not a business but a sport dependent on… speculation… there’ll always be rich men ready to pour more money into clubs just to be part of the game.”

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Abramovich was not on equal terms with Putin, even as he became lauded in London. He was a boyar to Putin’s Tsar. “I don’t think there is a percent of independence in him”, said one analyst who knew Abramovich in the Nineties. He was just like the others. The oligarchs’ power and privilege was theoretical, and utterly dependent on Putin. He could ruin them on a whim, as he did to Boris Berezovsky soon after he came to power. The truth was that the oligarchs were more like hostages than independent actors, more like courtiers than policy-makers, and more driven by venality than belief. Putin made them dependents, and walked them over a plank with a very deep drop.

Perhaps English politicians such as Johnson and Livingstone thought men like Abramovich could be moderated by the West, and could help to remake Russia in its image, as the academics thought was already happening. None chose to see the umbilical cords that ran back to the Kremlin. As the 2000s passed into the 2010s, it looked like the West was becoming as corrupt and irrational and nihilistic as Russia, rather than bringing Russia in line with its rules based system. “It was as if a virus,” wrote Catherine Belton in Putin’s People, “was being injected into it.”

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Now the virus is burning itself out. Two weeks of war have forced British politicians to shift 30 years of oligarch-tickling policy. They would no longer be able to take whatever they wanted. Abramovich has been hit with sanctions ranging from asset freezes to travel bans. Johnson says there will be no “safe havens” for Putin allies, not even in London’s courts. Yesterday’s West End final edition of the Evening Standard: “ROMAN’S EMPIRE IN RUINS.” Discarded copies, with crumpled Abramovich faces staring blankly out from them drifted through Berkeley Square.

Given his wealth and notoriety, Abramovich barely left a paw print on English life. Yes, he increased the bank balance of butler class functionaries; yes he will most probably leave Chelsea, his plaything and ornament, tarnished. But his wallflower shyness and refusal to be interviewed make him a ghost. Just as he reportedly moved through his A-List New Years Eve parties on St Barts barely saying anything, Abramovich’s time in England will be defined by his silences not his actions. He will not be ruined though. So much of his wealth is stored off-shore in secret bank accounts that there will always be a fallback for him.

Londongrad will be rebranded, and its lackeys will find new clients. Money from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and above all China will need to be laundered. Their tycoons will need crisis PR. Their powerful urges to litigate against each other will need to be satiated. Other Romans are here already. They keep buying football clubs. Not even war will break London’s filthy habits.

The stereotypical middle-class Conservative voter is conventional and stable, conscientious but unadventurous; blessed with common sense and terrible taste in music. My parents were bohemians, to put it mildly, living in a rackety, messy flat surrounded by a mountain of books, with a circle of friends who were mostly quite unconventional in their habits (ie they were alcoholics). Yet they believed in a philosophy that supported convention, order and tradition because, as much as political leanings can fit personality types, it often just comes down to who annoys you the most.

My first political memory is of my dad chuckling one morning while reading the paper, and when asked, telling me that the GLC had been abolished. London was no longer in the hands of Ken Livingstone, the man seen as leading the “loony left” who ran local politics: the Trotskyites, CND-supporting peaceniks, radical feminists, various insane Marxist race campaigners who compared Britain to apartheid South Africa or even Nazi Germany; and the crazed teachers union, forever closing our progressive primary school down in opposition to FATCHA. Rick from The Young Ones was a brilliant fictional character, but people like him did exist in the Eighties.

I was eight, and my main interest was The A-Team, so I had no idea what any of it meant, but as time went by, I became aware of the sort of people who my parents were against – the Sandalistas, as dad called them, a pun on the Nicaraguan guerrillas who were the current flavour of the month among Guardian readers. Dad read the Guardian every day, and had worked there a long time before, yet he had an intense love-hate-but-mainly-hate relationship with the paper and what it stood for; in his politics he was motivated by an intense dislike of sanctimonious and hypocritical Lefties.

He didn’t particularly like the Conservative Party either; he seemed to loathe most of their MPs, thought they were only interested in enriching themselves and wasn’t convinced by the Thatcher revolution. I was never entirely sure what he stood for, except for a world stuck at a certain point of time.

For progressives, history is a succession of steps forward whereby the lives of the poor and vulnerable are liberated and the forces of darkness pushed back; it’s a view of the world they inherit from Judaism and Christianity, and which they share with Marxists. Faced with this glorious vision of unending change, conservatives can only offer a point at which the process should have stopped.

For dad, as he got older and more reactionary, that date went further back in time, until in his mid-70s he was arguing that western civilisation had reached its peak in the 14^th century. After that, everything had gone into decline.

Back when I was still young and innocent, the number of people who might now be termed “progressive” was relatively small; “political correctness” was yet to be popularised as a term, although academics such as William Hamilton had already begun to privately complain about a new atmosphere of intolerance on campus.

The chief political argument was about economics, characterised in a recent BBC documentary on Thatcher as being a great battle between economically liberal pointy-heads in SW1 and working-class men with sideburns and donkey jackets out on strike. Thatcher won that argument, but it sped up the social transformation that made Britain far less Tory; indeed it’s an interesting question who would now be regarded as more “Right-wing”, the strikers or the pointyheads, now that politics has become all about identity and values.

Thatcherism helped turbocharge the sexual revolution as more people acquired disposable income; the raunch culture of the late Nineties owed a lot to the economic liberalisation of the previous decade. Maggie’s government also vastly increased the number attending universities, which would become the main means by which progressive ideas were spread.

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I knew I was a Tory from quite a young age, but only joined (and left) the party in my thirties. I always assumed that any Young Conservative event would be largely filled with freaks and mutants. I don’t have to necessarily like or empathise with the people I broadly agree with, after all.

We’re less social than the Left; we’re also not credal about core beliefs which everyone must sign up to, which is why the Right is far more politically diverse, being more an alliance of groups that fall foul of the orthodox Left – from libertarians to Christian socialists. Conservatism also provides far less of a moral lodestar, which is why the decline of Christianity has drastically shifted people’s politics to the Left – because when religion is no longer a moral anchor, politics fills its place.

Our philosophy is more of an anti-religion, if anything. The origins of English conservatism lie in the conflict of the 17^th century and in opposition to “enthusiasm”, or the politics of Puritanism. The Godly, as the Puritans called themselves, wished to overturn the social order by basing status not on land or ancestry, but on religious fervour, and their moralising made them hugely unpopular.

Later, most famously with Edmund Burke, the Tory worldview was articulated into a coherent philosophy about the wisdom of preserving institutions, even those – especially those – which in theory didn’t make sense.

The Conservative Party then evolved into opposition against the Whig and Liberal Party merchant interests, and in defence of crown and altar, before becoming a coalition of liberals and conservatives opposed to socialism. Thatcherism was part of that struggle, but with the Great Realignment, we’re now back to where we started, with the Tories there to oppose moralising fanatics who are creating an atmosphere where dissenting opinions feel threatened.

Family history has a nice cyclical air, and a generation on, I vote for a Conservative government I dislike mainly because the Opposition are sanctimonious fanatics. Except the difference is that there are far more progressives today, and Rick from The Young Ones is no longer an aberration but the norm. And in the medium term, let alone the distant future, they are going to win.

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One of the curiosities of the modern world is that everyone thinks they’re losing, and the Tory Party is certainly good at elections – in my lifetime they’ve come top in 8 out of 11. It’s better than the alternative, as Woody Allen said of old age, but they’ve hardly spent the past decade in power reshaping the country in their image.

Under their rule we’ve had anti-natalist child tax credit cuts, the introduction of no-fault divorce, restrictions on stop and search, Theresa May’s equality report Burning Injustices and the publishing of gender pay ratios. Very little has been done to make family formation more affordable, which more than anything would make the country more Tory-leaning.

Cuts to police spending have seen crime levels rise once again under the Conservatives; this year my 12-year-old daughter has seen one knife fight and the aftermath of a second, and in-between those exciting days out a teenager was murdered about 100 yards from my son’s primary school. The Tory Government was way ahead of Black Lives Matter when it came to defunding the police.

David Cameron made promises about immigration, but the economy had already become too reliant on it; high immigration satisfied the financial needs of Telegraph readers and the moral needs of Guardian readers, and the Government didn’t want to upset either. So we got Brexit, which helped speed up the realignment, giving the Conservatives a solid majority. And for as long as Labour is captured by a relatively extreme minority and spends its time debating the dictionary definition of woman, the Tories are able to cruise along with their winning mixture of centrist policies and reactionary vibes.

But time is not on their side, for the least Tory social categories are now the most demographically ascendant – the young, the single, ethnic minorities and renters. The youth problem might be alleviated by housing reform, but it also reflects a significant generational shift in values.

The cohorts born after about 1975 and especially after 1990 tend to hold a range of views that will make it hard for the Tory Party to win their support, without abandoning their values to the point of meaninglessness. On most of the key identity issues, such as racial diversity, immigration, sexuality and gender, and (increasingly) our treatment of animals, there is a generational shift that dwarfs anything seen before.

The causes are varied; the globalised digital economy and the rise of English has weakened nation-states; the decline of religion has made utilitarian arguments about bodily autonomy impossible to resist; increased urbanisation makes people more liberal; progressivism financially suits the ruling class in a way it never did previously, and because politics is much to do with status, others imitate them.

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Such a generational shift has only happened twice before in European history; during the Reformation, and in the period when Christianity itself replaced polytheism. Just as with progressives in our own time, in the fourth century Christians had started off as a small, cranky minority, but had come to dominate the education system; they won because they were popular among the young, and especially young women, and were concentrated in cities where they could control institutions.

Their numbers grew until, at some point, in the words of one Christian apologist, the pagans would have to “wake up” to the fact that they were now a minority. Soon the temples were left to rot not, most likely, because of Christian persecution, but because no one believed anymore. It would seem absurd, and embarrassing, to profess a belief in Jupiter. Julian the Apostate had tried to turn back the clock, but it was impossible to fight Roman institutions which were now controlled by Christians.

Just as in Rome, conservatives today face professions that are dominated by their opponents, the most profound example again being the education system. Like Julian, Boris Johnson has recently made attempts to ensure that cultural institutions are not entirely controlled by the new religion, but he is fighting a losing battle.

The problem is not just with institutional control; the most important comparison with the last days of Rome is in the control of taboos. Whoever owns society’s taboos comes to win, and Christians just believed with greater force that to blaspheme their God was an offence against public morals, while the polytheists had stopped caring to defend theirs. And the ancient world impiety was often viewed as a worse crime than murder.

Today it is progressives who own taboos, and those who offend the sacred ideas of race and sexual identity face the terror of being charged with impiety (or “cancelled”, to use the secular term). And if you don’t control society’s taboos, it doesn’t really matter how many elections you win — you won’t shape the future.

And so, there you have it, it all went wrong in the fourth century. Even my dad would be impressed by such a reactionary view.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is published by Constable