Apart from his conceit that the Tory party he joined was enlightened and competent, Matthew Parris is quite right about this. When it comes to solutions for "red wall" places, the cupboard is bare - and will remain so.

But by the same token, the EU is guilty of much the same with its regional development funding. Tinkering for propaganda purposes, leading them up the garden path.

The other thing Parris is right about... we will get more tubthumping rhetoric about law and order and immigration - but he's wrong if he thinks that will translate into action. Thus it essentially remains the party he joined. And that's the problem.

Essentially, though, the thrust of his article is right. The snake oil salesmen who sold Brexit as a remedy for forty years of deindustrialisation and globalisation (largely the lexit merchants as it happens) will struggle to show their faces when nothing anyone does makes a dent

The Tories have really only capitalised on the "left behind" bollocks since the referendum. That narrative did not exist until after we voted to leave. Having no ideas of their own, they co-opted lexit as a flag of convenience when their no-deal WTO fwee twade nonsense collapsed.

The bottom line is that Brexit is not of itself an economic remedy and should not have been sold has such by Vote Leave Ltd. The most we could have expected was to maintain 2016 levels of trade. But that absolutely won't happen under the TCA.

So when free ports fall flat, and we've built all the wind turbine factories we need, and Lowestoft is still a derelict shithole, and the illegal immigrants keep coming, and there's no subsidy left in the kitty, what is this pack of inadequates going to do then?

This is also why Labour activists are right to tell Paul Embery to fuck off. He's peddling the same snake oil as the Tories - on the assumption that industrial policy can give purpose to places that only existed for the industries of yesteryear.

More than likely, with an economy in the doldrums for the next decade or more, we're going back to the late eighties and an explosion of addiction, and these places once again become dumping grounds for the human wreckage city rehab hasn't got room for.