Then his neighbour in the first-class carriage leaned over and tapped him on the knee. “You are Baldwin, aren’t you?” the man said. “You were at Harrow in ’84.”

The Prime Minister nodded. The man sat back, satisfied. Then, a minute or so later, the man leaned forward and tapped him on the knee again. “Tell me,” he said affably, “what are you doing now?”

Even if that story isn’t true — and if it is, it could only have come from one person — it tells you something about the modest man who first became Prime Minister on 22 May 1923, exactly 100 years ago.

In many ways, Stanley Baldwin dominated the first half of the 20th century. He was Prime Minister three times in the Twenties and Thirties, for a total of more than seven years, and co-ran the country alongside Ramsay MacDonald for four more. He was the first mass-media premier, with a grasp of radio unmatched by his contemporaries, and appealed to a new, genuinely democratic electorate, including women as well as men. He stood for democracy in the age of the dictators, and steered his country through the General Strike, the Depression and the Abdication. And he weathered the storms of office to step down in 1937 at a moment of his own choosing, admired and respected even by his opponents.

That Baldwin is barely remembered today, then, could hardly be more unjust. His reputation took a crippling blow when he was traduced as one of the so-called Guilty Men, savaged in a thoroughly mendacious short book for his supposed appeasement of Nazi Germany. Even now some writers, foolishly parroting the clichés of the past, accuse him of sending Britain defenceless into the Second World War, even though Baldwin actually commissioned almost 100 new RAF squadrons in the teeth of fierce opposition from a near-pacifist Labour Party. And when he appears on television or in films, it is only as a dithering foil for the dynamic Churchill, never as the brilliantly canny operator who effectively invented modern Conservatism.

Yet whenever people lament the passing of an age of decent, serious, public-spirited politicians, they could be talking about Stanley Baldwin. In almost every respect, he was a walking rebuke to his modern-day successors. And what’s more, he was a far more interesting character than almost all of our current MPs put together.

Born in 1867, the son of a paternalistic Worcestershire industrialist, he did indeed go to Harrow, where he got into trouble for writing his own pornography — this was, of course, an age before teenagers were spoon-fed — and sending it to his cousin at Eton. This cast a serious blight over his schooldays, and young Stan hoped to make a fresh start at Cambridge.

But then — disaster! His old headmaster, who despised him, was appointed as Master of Trinity, Stan’s college. More misery. In the end, he graduated with a Third in history, having made virtually no impression on his contemporaries at all.

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When he got back home to Worcestershire, his father Alfred — a stern and serious man — said grimly: “I hope you won’t get a Third in life.” Fortunately, he didn’t. Quite the opposite.

Baldwin didn’t inherit his father’s Bewdley constituency until he was nearly 41, having spent the intervening years working for the family iron-making firm. No doubt today he’d be mocked as a nepo baby. But like his father, Stanley was a deeply dutiful man, who prayed on his knees every night and took his Anglican faith enormously seriously.

Perhaps the best illustration of his sense of national responsibility was his letter to The Times on 24 June 1919. Baldwin, who was now Financial Secretary to the Treasury, noted that the country had run up colossal debts to pay for the Great War. This, he said, gave “the wealthy classes … an opportunity of service which can never recur … Let them impose upon themselves, each as he is able, a voluntary levy.”

For his part, he announced that he was giving up 20% of his fortune — a donation worth about £33 million today — to pay off the debt and relieve poor taxpayers of the burden. A nice gesture — but there was a twist. Baldwin didn’t sign his name: indeed, he made the editor of The Times promise not to tell anybody who had written the letter, because he didn’t want the attention. If you want to make your head ache, just try to imagine Matt Hancock doing that.

Even at that stage, nobody would have tipped Baldwin as a future PM. Compared with the man of the hour, the charismatic, flamboyant, monstrously priapic David Lloyd George, he seemed utterly ordinary. But Baldwin’s ordinariness — or his appearance of ordinariness, which isn’t the same thing at all — was his superpower. At the crucial meeting at the Carlton Club in October 1922, when the Tories decided to ditch Lloyd George and break up the wartime coalition, it was Baldwin’s voice that carried the day.

In private, Baldwin thought “the Goat”, with his taste for flogging peerages and interfering with other people’s wives, a “corrupter of public life”. And so, calmly, devastatingly, he plunged in the knife. Lloyd George, he told his colleagues, had once been called a “dynamic force”. But, said Baldwin, “a dynamic force is a very terrible thing; it may crush you”.

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That was the end of Lloyd George — and the making of Baldwin. Less than a year later, after an election had smashed the Liberals and brought the Tories a crushing majority, George V invited him to become Prime Minister. Once again our hero stepped over the bleeding body of a flashier, louder rival — this time Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, the most arrogant man on the planet. Curzon thought Baldwin a man “of the utmost insignificance”. When the King told him that he was picking Baldwin anyway, he burst into tears.

So, armed with his religious faith, his boringness and his Cambridge Third, Baldwin ascended to the highest office in the land. In reality, of course, he wasn’t boring at all. Time magazine called him “a perfect John Bull in physical and mental makeup”; but as any lecturer in beauty therapy will tell you, makeup takes work.

Baldwin’s background was in industry, but he was brilliant at playing the country yeoman. In his most famous speech, a paean to romantic nostalgia, he evoked “the sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill”.

All this was pure fantasy. The sounds of Baldwin’s England were record players, radios, motorbikes and vacuum cleaners. They were motor cars chugging through suburban estates, builders hammering away at Tudorbethan semis. But as he realised, if only unconsciously, middle-class suburban modernity came with a deep longing for what had been lost.

Baldwin offered his voters stability, rootedness, a sense of tradition. Watch one of his YouTube clips — my favourite is this tremendously endearing speech at a retirement home for elderly actors — and it’s hard not to feel immediately reassured. He seems the very embodiment of old England. But of course the whole thing is a performance — and given the medium, a very modern one.

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To some of his better-remembered contemporaries, Baldwin’s success was utterly baffling. Churchill, when playing chess, would gesture at his opponent’s pawns with the words: “Bring out your Baldwins.” Orwell said that he was “simply a hole in the air”. They were both wrong. Voters in the Twenties and Thirties understandably shrank from the reckless, belligerent adventurism that had sacrificed so many lives at Gallipoli. Most voters were more like Bilbo Baggins, the very personification of Baldwin’s England, who made his first appearance during the great man’s final months in office. “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”

As for being a hole in the air, that too was all part of the performance. Baldwin’s appeals to unflashy common sense were a brilliant way of presenting the Conservatives as the sensible, unthreatening, alternative to Labour’s supposed crypto-Bolshevism. And in reality, he was a much more nervous, restless figure than people realised. Colleagues watching him on the front bench noticed how he would twitch and fidget with nerves, exhibiting tics you can still detect on YouTube today. His oddest quirk was his habit of picking up books, lifting them to his face and sniffing them, which has never been properly explained. Some strange Harrovian fetish?

A century on, then, Baldwin ought to be much better known. To academic historians like his biographer Stuart Ball, his accomplishments are obvious. In an age of seething political turbulence, he turned the Tories into the dominant party of government, enlisting working-class and middle-class voters beneath the banners of common sense. His affable, consensual style meant Britain entered the late Thirties as a relatively contented, cohesive country — especially when compared with future allies such as France and the United States, let alone Germany and Italy. There will always be questions about the pace of rearmament. But Baldwin’s contribution to victory was arguably deeper and more important. Thanks to him, Britain entered the war united — perhaps the greatest asset of all.

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Today people love to judge our predecessors according to our own moral and cultural standards – and here Baldwin also comes out remarkably well. His eldest son Oliver, traumatised by his experiences in the trenches, became a Left-wing Labour MP, opposed to everything his father believed in. Stanley confessed to his daughter that he “nearly died” when he first saw Oliver glaring at him from the Opposition benches. But he was not a man to hold a grudge; father and son were reconciled eventually, and their letters make for deeply moving reading.

And there’s something more. Oliver wasn’t just a socialist; he was gay. Some Conservative MPs would have had a stroke at the very thought, and Stanley’s cousin Rudyard Kipling was so appalled by such “beastliness” that he severed all relations with his nephew. But Baldwin remained the ever-loving father. Whatever his personal convictions, he accepted his son’s partner, John Boyle, as part of the family, and would often drive over to visit them at their Oxfordshire farmhouse. If he ever murmured the slightest syllable of criticism, there’s no sign of it.

So perhaps the last word should go to Oliver, whose memoir of his father’s final days in December 1947 is reprinted in Philip Williamson’s wonderful collection of Baldwin’s letters. “He died as he would have wished,” Oliver wrote, “peacefully in bed. No bed-clothes were ruffled, no attempt made to ring a bell or turn on a light.”

That was entirely in character, and perhaps that’s why he’s barely remembered today. But Stanley Baldwin deserves better. He wasn’t just a great politician. He was a great man.

Sound familiar? It should do. It is now, and it is us.

On the one hand, we have a property-owning class with a particular interest in restricting housing supply at the expense of those who want to get on the property ladder. On the other, we prioritise pensioners at the expense of all other welfare recipients: between 2010 and 2020 the value of the state pension increased by around 8%, whereas unemployment benefits have fallen by 6%. Real disposable incomes are set to fall by 7.1% over the next two years – but not for pensioners, who are, as ever, protected by the triple lock. Economic pain for thee, but not for me.

These conflicts overlap heavily with what feels like the main divide in society: of the old vs the young (although the “young” increasingly stretches up to 50). We are engaged in intergenerational economic warfare. Younger people are forced into a worse quality of life than their parents’ generation. They are expected to live with less space, and spend more for the privilege. They are expected to work for less, and travel further to do so. They are expected to wait longer to buy a property, and rent in an increasingly unstable market while they save up. They are expected to pay ever-more tax, to fund a generation who are actively hostile to their interests.

This two nation country is the result of 12 wasted years of Conservative government. Instead of fixing the roof while the sun was shining, as George Osborne told us he would, the Conservative Party has built “a political economy that relies on the votes of the anti-growth coalition of home-owning pensioners”: a voter base that relies on increasingly tetchy boomers who are happy to pull the ladder up after them. Fundamentally, the Conservatives have presided over the intensification of a two-nation country.

It is a particularly baffling state of affairs given most of our most recent Conservative prime ministers have described themselves as one-nation Conservatives — Cameron, May and Johnson have all laid claim to that mantle. Sunak has been cagier, but he did win the support of the One Nation group of MPs.

Even Ed Miliband tried to appropriate the ideology! He saw one nation as “A vision of a Britain where patriotism, loyalty, dedication to the common cause courses through the veins of all and nobody feels left out. It was a vision of Britain coming together to overcome the challenges we faced.”

In his Autumn Statement, Jeremy Hunt (another self-described one-nation Conservative) told us that “You do not need to choose either a strong economy or good public services”. And in a sense he’s right – we do not need to choose either of them, because we have chosen to have neither.

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This is not some abstract policy debate. Presiding over a two-nation Britain is dangerous for the Conservative Party and for society. As Disraeli also said: “The Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing. It is not a confederacy of nobles, it is not a democratic multitude; it is a party formed from all the numerous classes in the realm.”

CCHQ should be petrified of that fact that a Tory voter under 50 is almost as rare as an affordable property in London. A recent YouGov survey found that just 14% of 18-24s and 13% of 25-49s would vote Conservative, compared to 59% for Labour among both groups. Recent polling by Ben Ansell finds that just 15% of all private renters would vote Tory, and among under 50s just 14% of undergraduates and 10% of postgrads would go blue. Demography is not destiny for any political party, but these are worrying numbers.

A two-nation system is bad for society. It is not for nothing that Disraeli warned against it: a perpetuation of the unfair status quo would, he feared, lead to social instability. Improving the lot of the people was not only morally right, it was also a clever act of self-preservation on behalf of the Tory elite.

The real kicker is that it does not have to be like this. We do not have to worship at the altar of the NIMBYs. As far back as 2010, the Conservatives were level-pegging with Labour in terms of winning the support of 18-24-year-olds. Across Europe, young voters often back parties of the Right. There is no iron law that says the Conservatives cannot win the youth vote. It’s a demographic they need desperately to win over.

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To do so does not mean they need to look to the past. As Stanley Baldwin noted in 1934, “The responsibility – and it is a great responsibility – that rests with a leader is to try and adapt the policy according to the deep-laid foundations of the Party principles to meet whatever may come in this world.” The Tories they need to recognise that the status quo is not working. And if they want, as they profess, to be the party of one-nation principles, they need to change, and fast.

The key thing is to address intergeneration unfairness. This would mean stronger protection for renters and higher standards demanded of landlords. It does not mean rent freezes, which have consistently been shown to crash supply and reduce quality, but it does mean that extortionate fees, demands for up to 12 months’ rent in advance, and onerous deposits should be ended. Of course, the housing market will not be fixed until the planning system is fixed. There is a plethora of ways to do this, but a move to zoning, alongside design codes and allowing councils to benefit more from changes in land value due to planning permission decisions all seem like good places to start. Areas with increased house building should be rewarded.

A one-nation platform would also mean re-evaluating some of the punitive elements of our current system. The sky-high interest rate on student loans, the five-week wait for your first universal credit payment, and the two-child limit on child benefit should all go. Nobody in receipt of welfare should be living in absolute poverty – as a country, we are better than that. We currently spend more on pensions than we do on education (which somewhat reflects this government’s priorities) and it is not unreasonable to look at means testing pensions, which come in at around 10% of total spending and 5% of GDP.

Levelling up would also be key, recognising how much pride people feel in the local. This would mean investing both in physical and cultural infrastructure. Ratcheting up council tax for funding is not the answer, given the inherent unfairness in the model. A proportional property tax, of around 0.5% of the current value of a property (double for empty second properties), would see 77% of households pay less tax, but increase the overall tax take. There should also be some element of redistribution between councils, in recognition of the fact that some places have a greater need than others. We should all be in this together.

One-nation Conservatism is often seen as being on the Left of the party – a home for bitter remainers, wets, or secret social democrats. That is not true. It is simply a recognition of the core principle of conservatism: a nation cannot survive if it is at war with itself. The Conservative Party has forgotten this important insight, and sadly Sunak and Hunt are unlikely to remember it anytime soon – this is boomer Britain, after all.

It feels weirdly incongruent, then, that the monastery where Bede lived and prayed is now adjacent to the vast car park where Nissan’s output waits to be exported around the world. The vast Port of Tyne complex sits on the edge of Jarrow Slake, a tidal lagoon, known locally as ‘Jarra Slack’, a name that hints at the town’s ancient history: ‘Släcka’ is the Norwegian word for slake, or quench. In 794 a Viking raiding party met a sticky end here when they were repelled by the local Anglo-Saxons and their retreating longboats were dashed on the rocks at Tynemouth.

Over a thousand years later, Jarrow was once again the site of bloody violence. In the febrile decades of industrial unrest that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a local magistrate was murdered, ostensibly by a striking miner called William Jobling, though the case remains controversial. Jobling was hanged in 1832 and his body was tarred, hung in chains and bolted into a gibbet that was toured through the colliery districts to intimidateee the striking pitmen. At Jarrow Slake it was then attached to a 21-foot wooden post to swing in the wind as a warning to all others (and in full view of the house where Jobling’s widow lived).

Jobling’s trial took place amid what the general commanding the British Army in Northern England called an “almost military occupation”, and his hasty execution was undoubtedly meant as an example to the newly formed miners’ unions of Northumberland and Durham who were striking for better working conditions — including reduced working hours for children from 16 hours per day to 12; indeed the sentencing judge described their strike action as “illegal proceedings which have disgraced the county”, and urged them to take “warning by his fate”.

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The pitmen’s final defeat by starvation and intimidation had a profound influence on the generations that followed. In 1939, the local Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson published a famous j’accuse against the capitalists who had laid waste to her constituency of Jarrow: The Town That Was Murdered. She argued that ruthless tyranny abounded in the coalfields, citing the strike-breaking actions of aristocratic coal-owners like the pantomime villain Charles Vane Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (who is known for his forceful opposition to the ban on child labour in collieries.)

Londonderry’s was an example followed by the heartless Victorian plutocrat and Liberal MP, Sir Charles Mark Palmer. It was his vast shipyards that turned Jarrow into the archetypal one-industry town, with all the attendant socioeconomic problems. The yards attracted thousands of migrants, especially the Irish, whose presence saw the town become known as Little Ireland, and rekindled in that part of Tyneside a Catholicity that Bede might’ve recognised (“Our Father who art in Hebburn, Jarrow be thy name.”) In matters of industrial relations and employee welfare, Palmer shared the same outlook as The Simpson’s Mr. Burns. Although overblown tributes to civic worthies are not uncommon, it’s rare to see a lie as brazen, and frankly laughable, as the encomium on his statue opposite the town hall: “a life devoted to the social advancement of the working classes”.

The experience of crushing defeats at the hands of coal-owners in the 1830s and 40s, and then in the General Strike of 1926, had bred a cautious and conservative approach among the trade unions of the North East. It partly explains why the Durham Miners Association became the last of the miners’ unions to affiliate to the Labour Party. This pathological resistance to confrontation meant that even as the “hungry thirties” bit hard following the closure of Palmers in 1931, with unemployment levels reaching up to 80% in places like Jarrow, there was surprisingly little unrest, or much in the way of Communist stirrings. This was met with disbelief from those who knew how miserable conditions were for the unemployed — and caused Wilkinson to muse, “if not Jarrow, then where?”

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By 1936, as crippling unemployment dragged on, and promised government support failed to materialise, Jarrow Council made a decision. In the conciliatory traditions of North East England, 200 out-of-work local men would march to Parliament and petition Stanley Baldwin’s government to provide work for the town. 85 years ago this week, they set off.

The strategy of the march organisers was astute: they knew that, unless handled carefully, political demonstrations can repel as much as they can galvanise. Therefore, the march organisers were careful to demonstrate discipline and dignity in their demand for work, not handouts. Churchmen were courted and Communists were wheedled out. And, as over 60% of these unemployed riveters and platers were Great War veterans, they presented a disciplined picture of men marching smartly in step, blankets tightly rolled, demonstrating their endurance and good order in a deliberate appeal to Middle England.

And yet, despite all this, what they got at the Palace of Westminster was not government action, nor even a formal reception, but cups of tea. The reaction was captured brilliantly by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale’s painting “Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London”, where a socialite in a cocktail dress peers out of her drawing room window at the throng outside, while her bored companion blows smoke rings with studied indifference. After causing a little inconclusive chatter in the Commons, the marchers got the train home.

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But it wasn’t just that Londoners didn’t care; it’s that they couldn’t understand. Though the depression may have bit hard in the industrial heartlands of the North, Southern England was booming in the 30s: new light industries producing consumer goods were sprouting along the Thames Valley and London was experiencing an incredible housing boom. Back in Jarrow, the old joke was that Hitler saved the town — albeit temporarily — by providing war-work for the old shipyards.

Still, by 1945, middle-class people had felt “the call of conscience,” as AJP Taylor put it. The immiseration of Jarrow and places like it were uppermost in many voters’ minds when they cast their votes in Labour’s first landslide. But the fundamentals of the British economy did not shift, and have not since — success stories such as Nissan notwithstanding.

Just in recent weeks it’s been reported that the North East has not only the highest levels of child poverty, and the greatest number of deaths from opioid abuse, but it has also seen the sharpest fall in life expectancy of any English region. So, I find it hard to shake the pessimistic view that the North, having experienced a relatively brief few centuries of industrial prosperity, will never again throw off its subordination to the South, or indeed the legacy of its century-long economic decline.

Although there are some signs of optimism, especially in low carbon and renewable energy, with giga factories being built and wind turbine blades emerging from old dockyards — a pleasing narrative arc perhaps given our disproportionate role in carbonising the planet – the ability of the British state to level up the North East will always face the brute facts of geography and history.