He sought to fight free from a revisionist social democracy, wherein his odyssey began. Yet his solutions flow from a revamped, decentralist version of it. As AJP Taylor might have observed, that is yet another of history’s “curious twists”.Kenneth O Morgan’s books include ‘Callaghan: a life’ and ‘The People’s Peace’. Britain’s appropriate model is the contractual European one, not an American frontier individualism with which few Britons identify.Marquand has written yet another stimulating book. He could strike a massive popular chord as Will Hutton did in The State We’re In, and re-ignite British political thought In 1957, he asked how we “marry Keir Hardie with A J Ayer”.

But his book opens up wider perspectives, notably how Britain’s weaknesses reappear in Europe. He is wonderful on restoring the civil service, Lords “reform” and demolishing that monumental cop-out, the “royal prerogative”. Marquand sees how enemies of the public domain adopt an anti-intellectual populist style.Ironically, under Thatcher, market capitalism meant more regulatory controls; the state grew in size as we were, Rousseau-like, “forced to be free”. Under Blair, dirigisme and devolution have proceeded side by side. Worship of the private ethic goes on: the PPP for the Tube, foundation hospitals, unaccountable agencies. The Hut- ton evidence, revealing Downing Street’s interference with the intelligence services, makes Marquand’s case with new force.

He brilliantly redesigns a philosophy that would restore the public domain through democratic discourse, not a machine-led “Big Conversation”. It enshrined an ethic of service and altruism, a domain of trust.Since the 1970s, the assault on the public realm has been remorseless, as many patients and commuters know Market economists have derided the public ideal. Public professionals have been attacked as complacent and self-serving. Attlee and Churchill embodied it, as did Macmillan and Callaghan The public domain was far more than public ownership. Britain’s philosophy of the “public” is centuries old, rooted in equality before the law and 17th-century civic republicanism. Its high noon came from non-Thatcherite “Victorian values”: Gladstone’s vision of a “public conscience”, Joseph Chamberlain’s gospel of civic activism, the emerging ethos of detached expertise, stemming from the reformed civil service and extending into the voluntary sector It reached its zenith after the Second World War.