“Democracy has not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of our public men,” the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone told his biographer, John Morley, towards the end of his life. And he had no doubt that “For all this deterioration one man and one man only is responsible: Disraeli. He is the Grand Corruptor.”

No one can have paid even cursory attention to the presidential election that just ended without hearing echoes of this same lament from every quarter, though in our own case the man so roundly accused of being the “Grand Corruptor” was also the man who won the election: Donald Trump.