Will Hutton may be surprised to find himself compared to Bob Dole. In 1996 the 73-year-old Republican US presidential candidate called his election campaign ‘one more mission for my generation’. After losing to Bill Clinton, he then went on to advertise Viagra on television. Hutton is only 64, but this most indefatigable voice of centre-left radicalism – a former editor of The Observer and now principal of Hertford College, Oxford – has clearly popped the blue pill, intellectually speaking, and come back raging.

His own ‘one more mission’ is to reinvigorate the ideas for an inclusive society, a responsive democracy and a less rapacious corporate world that he first set out in The State We’re In two decades ago. At the time it briefly seemed that he had written the gospel for the