As the government withers this column falls to ennui and visits Pizza Express. As David Cameron, who left the world stage humming, said of Tony Blair: ‘He was the future once.’ So was David Cameron, and so was Pizza Express: I bet they meet often. It was founded in 1965 by Peter Boizot, who shipped a pizza oven from Naples and a chef from Sicily and opened in Wardour Street. That branch closed in 2020.

Boizot grew up in Peterborough but lived in continental Europe for a decade, and he learnt three things: an Italian restaurant must be bright; good pizza must be slightly charred (burning food is underrated); children need restaurants too. These changes were sensational, and Pizza Express was launched on the stock exchange in 1993. It outclassed Wimpy, made Pizza Hut look stupid – who eats pizza from Kansas? – and even now is better than Domino’s, which produces food I am afraid to touch. (Domino’s is my River Styx, plus Subway.) It was ambitious: I think the early design owed something to Corbin and King’s monochrome Le Caprice, but I may have imagined it.

In 2014 it was bought by Hony Capital, a China-based private equity firm. I’m not sure I want pizza brought by private equity: the pizzas (we know as of last week that Pompeii-ans made frescoes featuring pizzas, but without tomatoes, which are not native to Italy) got smaller. Even people eating pizza, which is a powerful anaesthetic and downer – which is why people give it to children – notice these things. Other restaurants imported pizza ovens and did what Pizza Express did, but better: Temper in Covent Garden, for instance. (You will have your own favourite. I pray it is not Domino’s. There are better ways to die.) Pizza Express was the first and most successful: its function was to wither away.

I was going to visit the Woking branch due to its notoriety: the Duke of York said he could not have had sex with Virginia Giuffre, as she claimed, because he was at Pizza Express in Woking, which is the best excuse I have ever heard for not committing sexual assault. (Ladz, ladz, ladz!) He did not say which pizza he ate there. I would suggest the Veneziana, because it used to include a donation to the restoration of Venice and is therefore pizza for an aristocratic ideal fallen to over-tourism: pizza for a lost cause, twice over. It was certainly a signifier: Pizza Express is now as edgy as Poundbury. But the joy of a chain restaurant is that it is self-replicating, and so I go to Falmouth instead.

It sits in a wonky modern square by a carpark – the Cornish Elysium – covered in wood, like a big shed: its neighbours are a sullen Tesco Metro and the National Maritime Museum, with its small boats for lunatics. It is on two storeys, decorated as a 1990s brasserie and, on a Sunday lunchtime, it is near empty. From its windows you can see a stationary battleship.

Pizza Express has tried to renew itself: with calzone, with doughnut-shaped pizzas with salad in the hole (what for?); with vegan and gluten-free pizzas. The American Hot – essentially a hot open sandwich – is fine, but smaller than I remember, as I said; the lasagne is barely adequate (lasagne is about balance, and this doesn’t have it); the puddings are great masses of sugar.

All this was revolutionary once, but now it feels like dining in a 1997 that was worse than I remember. It is devoured by time, and its own child, as we all are: Kronos the pizzeria.