It was the French scholar Émile Durkheim, often described as the founder of the discipline of sociology at the turn of the  twentieth century, who said that every successful society needs “an idea that it constructs of itself”. It was another remarkable Frenchman, General Charles de Gaulle, who began his memoirs with the sentence: “I always had a certain idea of France.” Stories irrigate and buttress both individual lives and the life of a nation though, of course, not everybody signs up to a shared notion of a country and its people, their past and present.

Trying, like everyone else, to distil the frenzy of the extraordinary 2019 autumn of discontent, a first-order question, alongside how the rest of the world is seeing our travails, is whether or not our Durkheimian self-image is melting and flowing towards a new mould?

I think it may be. For example, it has become increasingly hard over the three-and-a-quarter years since the European Referendum to sustain the belief that, give or take the occasional aberration, we possess a political society suffused with a high degree of civility and courtesy, and no little effectiveness, provided a government commands a viable majority in the House of Commons.