The long-running sore of ‘Plebgate' which has brought relations between the Government and the police to a new low underlines how dramatically the Conservative Party and the boys and girls in blue have fallen out of love with each other in recent years.

The reason quite simply is that many Conservative politicians regard the police – along with the teachers – as the last bastion of unreformed ‘producerism' within the public sector while seeing the Police Federation as scarcely less militant than Unison or the National Union of Teachers.