Sir Ed Davey, who leads the Lib Dems, declared last week: ‘Squatter Sunak is holed up in Downing Street, desperately clinging on to power.’ It was odd of him to remind voters of the origin of this little joke about squatting. On 8 May 2010, two days after Labour’s defeat in the general election, the Sun ran a big headline: ‘Squatter holed up in No. 10.’ A subheading read: ‘Man, 59, refuses to leave Downing Street.’ That was Gordon Brown, of course, but anyone who remembers those uncertain days will know that he was waiting to see whether the Tories and the Lib Dems would form a coalition or whether he had a chance with the Lib Dems himself. In the event, Nick Clegg went into coalition with David Cameron, making Ed Davey a minister but securing oblivion for his party at the next election.

The Sun’s joke depended on the phenomenon of urban squatting. Although the verb squat has been around for more than 600 years (formerly meaning ‘to squash’, from Latin coactum, ‘compressed, compelled’, via French quatir), one day cemented the squat in the public mind: 8 September 1946. On this Sunday of the Great Squat, 1,500 people took over empty flats in Kensington, Pimlico and St John’s Wood. The exercise was resolved within a fortnight, but thousands more squatters occupied government military camps empty since the war. On 10 October Aneurin Bevan told the Commons that 1,038 camps in England and Wales were occupied by 39,535 people. Against their unideological inclinations, the squatters were backed by the Communist party, which resented Polish ex-servicemen (whose homeland had been taken over by communism) being allowed to stay on in military camps. At Gladstone Park, Cricklewood, the camp remained occupied into the 1950s. The milkman called, the coalman delivered, the rent was collected. Sir Keir Starmer has joined in jeering at Rishi Sunak as a squatter. But neither Gordon Brown’s experience nor Nye Bevan’s should make him comfortable in using the word as an insult.