When I was young, women were encouraged to act like men, and “unpleasant, ruthless” men at that, says India Knight in The Sunday Times. It led to “depressing and bizarre situations” where professional women were embarrassed to be seen to care about “domestic life in general and the parts involving children in particular”. We applauded female executives already back behind their desks, “still bleeding”, just 48 hours after childbirth. And if a woman dared enjoy “cooking, or pottering about at home making things look pretty”, she was dismissed as a “tragic, birdbrained throwback”. Domesticity was a “dirty word”, symptomatic of a “mistakenly nostalgic longing” for the “oppressive drudgery” of housework.

When Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng drew up the plans that led to the turmoil of recent weeks, says Owen Jones in The Guardian, they were working to a blueprint devised in a Swiss mountain resort in 1947. Gathered there were the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and the philosopher Karl Popper, and they were all “profoundly depressed”. The “central values of civilisation” were in danger, they declared, thanks to a “decline of belief in private property and the competitive market” after the Great Depression and two world wars. What turned their ideas into government policies was turmoil. “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change,” said Friedman. “When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas laying around.”