Rosa Prince provides no instances of Mrs May using this sort of language before 2013, and I doubt that there were any. (Her infamous and surely ill-advised 2002 speech in which she told Tories they were regarded as the “nasty party” did not contain any special pleading on behalf of the poor.) For the most part, she has sailed under the colours of “One Nation Toryism”, seldom sticking out her neck in promoting radical policies, though she did champion the cause of more female MPs. Her recent siding with what the Left would describe as the “victims” of society has propelled her into virgin territory.

Some commentators have ascribed these most unThatcher-like sentiments to her childhood as the daughter of an Anglo-Catholic vicar in two different Oxfordshire villages. In a recent column in The Times, Michael Gove (for whom Mrs May formed a dislike during the Coalition years, according to Prince) floated the notion that she is “our first Catholic prime minister”. Although Gove meant “Anglo-Catholic”, he placed her in the tradition of continental Roman Catholic “social teaching”, with its “emphasis on the cultivation of virtue rather than the exercise of liberty or the accumulation of prosperity”. In fact, there is no need to peer over the Channel for illumination since Anglo-Catholics — such as Mrs May’s father, the Reverend Hubert Brasier — are for the most part inspired by the adherents of the 19th-century Oxford Movement, with their newly-built inner-city churches.

Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May were both grounded in religious practice and observance. While the young Margaret Roberts attended Methodist chapel several times on a Sunday, and sometimes preached as a young woman, the young Theresa Brasier observed her father visiting the sick and ministering to his flock, which in Church Enstone and Wheatley in those days would have constituted most of the village, and included many poor people. To oversimplify, Thatcher’s Methodism led her to place more reliance on individual salvation, whereas Mrs May’s brand of High Anglicanism encouraged her to regard religion as a more socially based enterprise.

I happen to have grown up in a rectory in a similar sort of parish, only a hundred miles away at around the same time, and my clergyman father’s churchmanship was similar to Mr Brasier’s, so perhaps I can understand some of the influences that may have affected the young Theresa. If she appears aloof and ungregarious (though friends attest to her personal warmth) it may be because in the small community in which she grew up she was inevitably set apart as the daughter of the vicar, who in those days in the countryside was a respected but necessarily distant authority figure. With such an association it would have been difficult for the daughter in the rectory to fraternise on entirely easy terms. If she had had siblings, Theresa May might have been able to make up for this social impediment, but she was an only child.