George Osborne and Tony Blair took some time out of their busy, and well-paid, post-government lives to talk to a conference in Dubai about the "moderate, pro-business, socially liberal, internationalist" gap at the 'centre of politics'.
The centre that both have in the past claimed and which both have claimed to be a non-ideological space. It's a common claim, mostly levelled at Labour and it's Bennite left-wing, which Theresa May has used against both them and the EU.
But the use of 'ideology' as a pejorative misses one crucial thing: there's no such thing as politics without ideology - just policy made within the context of hidden or unexamined assumptions.
So what is an ideology? In short, it it comprised of: a philosophy of what the world is, an ethics of how people should behave in that world, an ideal of how society should function, and a politics laying out how to get there.
Politics is active element of ideology. It represents the structures, or absence of them, intended to shape society in a particular way, towards particular outcomes.
Comprehending this is crucial to understanding the Tories' time in government. While accusing their opponents of abandoning the centre for polarisation they oversee policies that, from a progressive perspective, have impoverished working people amid widening inequality.
When the evidence appears to be staring us in the face, when it seems so obvious to progressives, and yet conservatives do not see it, there has to be a bigger picture. That is ideology.
Consider the government's housing policy, born during the Coalition. The plan was to convert social housing into affordable housing, to support private sector house building with a higher rent threshold, thereby saving taxpayers money by reducing government housing spending.
This came with the acknowledged cost of a rise in housing benefit payouts, but it was believed that it would balance out in the public favour. It was, in basic, an attempt to shift an expenditure off the public books.
Yet the move in favour of privatised house building has not delivered for ordinary people. If there are benefits to tax payers, they are not balancing out the rise in average rents that has come with the collapse in social housing construction.
The government pursued a similar course with tuition fees. The cost of higher education was shifted onto the shoulders of students. This private, regulated, debt burden was deemed manageable by the Treasury and preferable to it contributing to the the national debt.
That demonstrates a rather cavalier attitude to private debt and Theresa May recently promising a review shows the government is feeling the need to moderate it's position against pushback from opposition.
So why continue with such policies - on housing, on tuition, on healthcare, on welfare, on so many core parts of society - even after it seems so clear, to progressives at least, that it isn't working and people are suffering?
The only sensible answer is ideology - the belief that the pain is a transitional phase, in a journey towards an ultimately more beneficial light at the end of the tunnel. Or, more darkly, that the pain is the point.
