In this, we were assisted by the nature of our democracy. Democracy is nowadays a greatly over-hyped blessing, particularly by Americans, who have no pre-democratic history to provide a perspective. It is clearly less important than freedom, the rule of law and constitutional government, which ideally it should entrench, but may well not do so.

Essentially, it is the means by which the people are provided, at regular intervals, with the opportunity peacefully and constitutionally to remove a government in which they have lost confidence. But between elections it is necessary for strong government, which is frequently required, and certainly was during the 1980s, that it has a secure parliamentary majority. That is what our electoral system (unlike proportional representation) normally assures.

It is also, incidentally, why a sensible opposition party should be more concerned with re-election than with election to office. Election will occur as and when the people lose confidence in the incumbent government. Re-election depends on results.

We were assisted, too, by the fact that the opinion-forming classes recognised that the thinking that animated the post-war consensus, the Butskellite settlement, had reached the end of the road. This was in particular true of a demoralised Whitehall. A properly sceptical mandarinate may have had little faith in the policies we proposed to implement but they had nothing better to offer and were in no position to stand in the way of a government which had done its homework in opposition and knew what it wished to do. Nor, in the Treasury, did they have any desire to do so.