The fall of the clans meant that, once a child grew to adolescence and found a partner, he or she was not just a member of the extended family but a separate individual.

And as both Larry Siedentop and more recently Tom Holland have emphasised, the Christian sexual revolution, by creating the radical concept of consent in marriage, also led to individualism and, therefore, liberalism.

Individualism is quite unnatural; throughout human history people have thought of themselves in relation to their extended family, and countries in which the nuclear family is not the norm still find it difficult to create functioning democracies.

Both the western liberal and conservative traditions are tied up with the nuclear family and its inevitable compromise and friction between the individual and the wider community, although liberals have tended to lean towards the former and conservatives the latter. For example, in the US the marriage gap between overwhelmingly liberal single women and conservative married women is substantial, and there is evidence that having children makes women more conservative.

So what happens when western societies move beyond the nuclear family and towards singlehood as the new norm? Do we become ultra-individualists? Or does our need to be part of a wider community mean we instead increasingly turn to – often intolerant – pop-up political tribes?

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Ed West’s book Tory Boy is published by Constable

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