The West did not collapse in a weekend. It did not wake up confused about gender, debt, borders and meaning because of a poorly moderated comments section. The long unravelling began, as most respectable catastrophes do, with a monk, a hammer, and a document pinned to a church door in 1517. The moment Martin Luther decided Rome required a theological performance review, Europe’s spiritual plumbing was knocked loose. Five centuries later, the pipes are still rattling.

Britain has perfected a modern agricultural ballet: paving over fields at home while ordering dinner from abroad, preferably via several borders, two currencies, and a shipping lane having a nervous breakdown. It is a choreography of cranes, lorries, planning notices and supermarket aisles, all moving in opposite directions with absolute confidence and no visible sense of irony.

There are many ways to unsettle the powerful. One may march, shout, draft legislation, or commission a commemorative mural of interpretive despair. But nothing quite rearranges the furniture of authority like a simple, inconvenient sentence spoken aloud at the wrong moment. The old Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci once observed that telling the truth is revolutionary. He was correct, not because truth carries a red flag, but because it carries a crowbar.

Money collapses, socialism rises. Socialism rises, society wobbles. Society wobbles, capitalism strolls back in wearing a hard hat and carrying a ledger. It is less a Theory than a recurring British pantomime — except nobody enjoys the interval and the popcorn costs £11.

Civilisation, on closer inspection, has always been run by people who read quietly, doubted themselves often, and took far too long to clear their throats, while being shouted over by louder specimens who mistook volume for wisdom and enthusiasm for competence. William Butler Yeats spotted the problem over a century ago and summarised it with surgical efficiency: the thoughtful hesitate, the reckless roar, and history usually hands the megaphone to the wrong lot.

The line arrives like a dropped pint glass in a carpeted committee room: sharp, sudden, and impossible to ignore. Moral issues, it suggests, do not become complicated because the world is subtle, but because the people charged with judging it have misplaced the measuring stick. The observation belongs to G.K. Chesterton, though it now wanders the modern age like an unattended suitcase, growing heavier with every mile.

Britain has developed a curious surplus of weathercocks. They occupy television studios, ministerial offices, think tanks, conference platforms and occasionally entire front benches. They swivel magnificently. Every breeze receives immediate acknowledgement. Every passing gust of public opinion produces a fresh adjustment. Every opinion poll sends another metallic creak echoing across Westminster like a church steeple caught in a North Sea gale. The country has become crowded with men and women who can detect a shift in public sentiment from three counties away, yet somehow remain incapable of explaining where the nation ought to be heading.