So too Westminster would be transformed in the national imagination, from Turner’s fiery vision and Whistler’s monochrome view, the twinkling landmark of the tower of Big Ben would loom out of the metropolitan fog in the opening scenes of the Disneyfied Mary Poppins and Peter Pan and into its twentieth-century hubris, lying like some landbound Titanic on the banks of the Thames. I’m thinking of a sepia postcard lying by my desk, of the Victory Parade of 1919: a photograph of wedge-shaped First World War tanks slouching across Westminister Bridge towards Parliament. Are they celebrating the end of Armageddon? Or are they augurs of a new class revolution, an English Soviet – just as the same tanks had been deployed in Glasgow’s St George’s Square during the war to quell urban unrest?

I’m also reminded of the Independent MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, a Lothario, aviator, inventor and futurist who drove round London in a self-designed car which looked more like a torpedo, and who had a ledge of skin grafted onto his cheekbone by plastic surgery so as to keep his monocle in place. In 1918 Billing alleged that the reason why the Allies were losing the war was because the German Secret Service had a Black Book containing the names of 47,000 members of the British Establishment addicted to sexual perversion. These men and women – many of them presumably habituees of Westminster – were being blackmailed by the Huns and thus the British will to win was being sapped. At the same time proposing other notions of the enemy within – not least the German Jews of Whitechapel, whom he demanded should wear cloth badges to denote the alien status of these long-established asylum-seekers – Billing’s proto-fascist presence in the House of Commons was a challenge to the government; so much so that the then prime minister, Lloyd George, engineered to have the rebel MP thrown out of the House.

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