Coupled with the pain is the question of risk. David Cameron has launched us on a risky course of action. As a Labour politician, I am in favour of a more Keynesian and collective approach, but the country might be more sympathetic to Cameron's policies if they felt he was taking some of the risk himself. Churchill was a popular leader when the public felt that he was facing the same risk of invasion by the Nazis as they were. They liked him much less in peacetime when he was a toff who was not.

And that is the problem with Cameron and his mates. We guess that they will be all right because they will buy their way out of trouble, bail out to some tax haven or retire to a grouse moor while the rest of us are left behind to pick up the pieces of their failed experiment. Worse, we think they might end up enriching themselves vastly from the deals which are being done with the private sector over education and the NHS. 

A socially regressive Britain, dominated by white men, sold off to the highest bidder to pay debts we are not even sure all need settling, to the sole profit of a small privileged elite, is not the country that even the deepest blue ladies of the Tory shires dream of. It is certainly not the country most of us, reliant on public services and with financially precarious lives, want our children to grow up in.

After 1964 the country rejected the old patrician class of politician and voted in people more like themselves: Heath, Wilson, Thatcher, Major and Blair. The problem with the Tories is that since 1997 they have been unable to find anyone to lead them who is at all like us. David Cameron is a terrible mistake. The party overrated him, and now they are facing the consequences.