The longer you work in policy the more you realise new ideas are extremely rare. Even ideas that seem new are usually old ones repackaged and given a different spin. It’s why so many people who’ve been around politics for a long time develop an air of weary cynicism. When you’ve heard the same idea in a hundred different panel sessions, with a glass of cheap white wine warming in your hand, it’s hard to get excited.

I’ve been around for a while now and have occasionally found myself drifting into the cynicial “it’s been tried before” mode. So I’m trying to avoid it by taking a different approach. When I’m talking to a young think-tanker or political aide, whose enthusiam is not yet dimmed, I try not to dismiss ideas that have been doing the rounds for a while, but ask a different question: “given you’re not the first person to think of this why hasn’t it happened before?”