The moral legacy bequeathed by her beloved father (who was killed in a car crash in 1981) has no doubt informed her whole political career. Her more recent explicit concern for the poor and those “just about managing” (now dubbed the “Jams”) was fired up by another man. Nick Timothy first came to work for her when she was still in opposition. He is the son of a steel worker and a school secretary. Raised in Birmingham, he took a First in politics at Sheffield University, which he is said to have chosen because he thought that living there would be cheaper than anywhere else. Timothy is suspicious of the Establishment (he had numerous set-tos with the Cameroons), pro-Brexit, and communitarian rather than libertarian in his political beliefs. For him the Conservatives are the natural party of the working class. He is an example of that relatively rare breed — a Tory intellectual.

More than anyone else, Timothy has shaped and refined Theresa May’s ideology — as well as, according to Prince, exhorting her to be more clubbable. It is he who is the fount of rhetoric about helping ordinary people, though we may be sure she believes it from the bottom of her heart. Still only 37, Timothy is a joint chief of staff at Number Ten. The other chief of staff is a Scottish former journalist, Fiona Hill, no less viscerally loyal to Mrs May, who also won battle honours scrapping with the Cameroons, especially Michael Gove. Hill is no intellectual slouch, having been the mainspring of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act (designed to counter trafficking and slavery in Britain) which Mrs May pushed through as Home Secretary.

One could scarcely exaggerate the importance of these two people in the Prime Minister’s — and the nation’s — life. When they were separately forced to resign after run-ins with the Cameroons towards the end of her time as Home Secretary, she was bereft. They were reinstalled as soon as she entered Number Ten. One source quoted by Prince told the Guardian that Mrs May won’t come to a firm view in front of officials. “She goes away for an hour with Nick and Fiona and — boing! — a decision is made.” The third member of the Prime Minister’s inner circle is her husband Philip, whose opinion is often sought. In policy terms he is possibly the least influential of the triumvirate, but in other respects he has been her rock since Oxford days.

It is one thing to stretch out a hand to hard-pressed ordinary people, quite another to offer them concrete help at a time when the Exchequer is hardly overflowing with loose cash. If anything, Philip Hammond’s recent Budget, with its ill-judged and ham-fistedly presented provision for higher national insurance payments for the self-employed, went out of its way to penalise some of the very “Jams” with whom Mrs May had identified. (The reaction in the press may have been all the more incandescent because so many columnists are self-employed, an inconvenient fact the Chancellor may have overlooked.) Nor did the government’s somewhat cavalier hike in business rates in the south of England seem obviously calculated to assist those scraping by, though Mr Hammond did toss them a few sweeteners in his Budget.