It says a great deal about the current time that in London this week at one of the biggest gatherings of centre-right politicians, commentators and academics since World War II, Antonio Gramsci was mentioned more times than Adam Smith.

Gramsci was an Italian communist who died in 1937 in jail at the age of 46 after being imprisoned by Mussolini. Gramsci is credited with the origin of the concept of “the long march through the institutions”. By this, he meant that socialism would not come from the “bottom up” when the workers seized the means of economic production as Marx predicted. Instead, socialism would arrive from the “top down” as intellectual elites captured the centres of social power.