If only this were a one-off. Essentially every time working-class people have revolted against the establishment in recent years the left has joined with the centrists to denounce them as fascists. The Brexit vote? Fascists! The Trump revolt? Super fascists! The gilets jaunes? French fascists! It’s like a tic at this point, a form of political Tourette’s bred of the left’s profound disorientation.

Not all populist revolts are the same. Some are more positive or coherent than others. A previous generation of leftists might have hoped to shape such bubbling discontent with the neoliberal status quo. But today’s leftists are so cloistered, so bourgeois, so much more comfortable in the faculty lounge than on the factory floor, that they not only can’t lead these revolts, they really don’t want to.

Instead, time and again, they have lent credence to elite campaigns to demonise working-class movements, to paint them as the death rattle of the old white man. Supposed radicals – up to their eyeballs in divisive intersectionalist politics – have become the useful idiots of a neoliberal ruling class keen to put voters firmly back in their place following the populist revolts of 2016 onwards.