Is Theresa May a fascist? Obviously not. She may talk the talk these days, but has never walked the walk.

This is the leading Tory who spent years in opposition decrying the party’s reputation as the “nasty party” and urging it to drop its attachment to the insurgent phase of Thatcherism. She was a modernizer, a liberal. This is not to claim that she lacked the authoritarian malice to also make her a convincing Tory. In a number of cases, she demonstrated that she would cheerfully crush a life in the interests of maintaining a right-wing base, and flip off those whom she has now contemptuously scorned as “activist, left-wing human rights lawyers.”

But her recent speech to the Conservative Party’s annual conference made use of some distinctly Poujadist rhetoric, contrasting “international elites” with the “people down the road.”