Jeremy Corbyn stands accused by his opponents of wanting to turn the clock back to the 1970s and 1980s. But wanting to turn the clock back isn’t unique to today’s left wing. Forget for a moment the religious dimension: with his notoriously frugal expense claims, cheap clothes and “plain speech” he could pass muster for a seventeenth century Puritan. Indeed there is something about the Left in Britain which has never abandoned its Puritan roots: “champagne socialist” is a term of abuse hurled not just from the Right.

But there is another parallel: the English like their revolutions conservative. The word revolution comes from the Latin “revolutio”, a turning round: it came, in England from the fifteenth century onwards to be applied to political changes from its original use to describe the motions of the celestial bodies. But it was not to gain widespread currency with its present meaning until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which arguably marks the true end of the English Civil Wars. Edmund Burke proclaimed:

“The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.”

When Burke set out the nature of what might in a parallel universe, be described as the “Great Dutch Invasion”, he wanted to emphasise the protection of “ancient rights” against those who wanted to introduce new and novel forms of government. But this has been the rallying call from Magna Carta onwards – the English must fight to protect their ancient rights against the innovation of despotism.

At no time was this desire for an idealised past more intense than during the English Civil Wars, also a period of unparalleled radical thought and change. The end of censorship in the 1640s unleashed a published tide of yearning for an idealised past – before the Norman yoke or even, for many, before the Fall of Adam.

Paradoxically a Corbyn-led Labour Party’s best hope for electoral victory may be to portray itself as the truly conservative party.