Over the last nine years, it’s become a pretty standard rhetorical trick to compare the progress of the Conservative party with that of Labour’s years in wilderness during the 1980s. David Cameron bangs on endlessly about the party’s need to come to terms with the modern world, while pundits endlessly debate whether the party has yet had the “clause 4 moment” that will symbolize its break with the past. “Oh, I think Cameron was a mistake,” someone said to me the other day. “They’ve chosen a Blair when they needed a Kinnock.”

Passport weirdness - born in Britain with a British father? Sorry, not British enough…