Truss can afford to be unpopular – for now.

‘Consensus’ was a swear word for Margaret Thatcher. She once declared:

“To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects. … the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.

“What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?”

She enjoyed an argument and thought that if everyone agreed with you something must be wrong. Paradoxically, when at a Conservative Party Conference, she was as enthused by the Socialist Worker demonstrators screaming abuse outside the Hall as she was by those granting her a standing ovation within it.

So she was not afraid of a certain degree of unpopularity. But, of course, she was also keenly aware of the importance of winning elections. Partly it was about remembering that the most vocal were not necessarily a majority – that was Edmond Burke’s point about “half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink” but are not “the only inhabitants of the field”.

Timing was the other key point. General Elections only have to take place every five years. Controversial reforms might provoke strong opposition and leave you well behind in the opinion polls. That would not necessarily matter if the policies succeeded and the naysayers were confounded. In the case of the early period of Thatcher we had monetarism – to “squeeze out inflation” – and the cutting of subsidies to nationalised industries which required cuts in overmanning. There followed a big increase in unemployment but she argued that economic reality had to be faced or we would continue to decline. Plenty disagreed. Terry Beckett, the Director General of the CBI, promised a “bare-knuckle fight” with the Government. The TUC were not supportive either.