Having said that, my theory might be said to have a Thatcher problem and a Reagan problem. Was Mrs Thatcher not a successful Tory fundamentalist? And was President Reagan (unlike Barry Goldwater) a Republican fundamentalist who won? No and no. In the Thatcher case I almost entirely agree with the thesis of my late colleague Jim Bulpitt that she must be understood in terms of her statecraft. She took over a state which had got itself into an untenable position and managed the agenda in such a way as to make government possible. Michael Foot made speeches saying that if unemployment reached a million civil order would break down completely; under Mrs Thatcher it reached three million. She did the same things as Ramsay MacDonald did in 1931 and as any other British prime minister would have done in the 1980s. There really was no alternative. The late Tony Benn used to take a kind of encouragement from Mrs. Thatcher, saying that her career demonstrated that "conviction politics" could win, but he was quite wrong to do so.

Reagan, on the other hand was a deceptively professional politician and an excellent faker who could talk the language of fundamentalism without having to bear its costs. Remember the old boy banging on about shining cities on hills? Nobody knew what he was talking about, but they liked it. He seemed to be embodying some pure version of Republicanism. Then compare the role of the state in the US economy under Reagan with its role under anyone else and see if you can find a difference.

Thus the fact remains that, for different reasons, the Conservative party and the Democratic Party do not really have fundamentalists. Ask yourself what a Tory fundamentalist would propose. The restoration of the pre-1832 constitution? A completely free market . . . in land? . . . in labour? The concept is absurd. Keep the bad guys out and muddle through such events as history throws at you — that's all it can ever be about.

It is both frightening and exciting that the fundamentalist wings of the two parties are in the ascendancy and it is instructive to consider the range of similarities between the two leaders. Both despise and are despised by the established moderate wings of their parties. Conversely, both succeed in giving political energy to many people previously disillusioned with politics. Both naturally portray their party as a movement and a crusade. Both are capable of causing enormous offence without understanding (or admitting they understand) why. Both use language in the same appropriated fundamentalist way. A Corbyn example is "better": he wants to build a "better" society. Well, don't we all?: I'd like a society that was better defended, had more stringent punishments, fewer people etc etc But he doesn't mean any of this and, crucially, his use of the word carries a kind of pseudo-objectivity, as if there could be only one valid conception of what was better. A principal Trump example is "American"; this isn't any conception of what it is to be American in terms of facts or rights, but an appraisive distinction, as in "un-American activities".