“Good God, how much bloody flux must a people bear before you provide them with food?”

For 30 years in the first half of the 19th century, Britain was obsessed with the price of bread. Waves of unrest swept the country as bad harvests, food shortages and dire living conditions stalked the poorest in society. Calls for parliamentary reform grew ever more insistent as citizens demanded that politicians be more responsive to their hardships. The first modern pressure groups – among them the Chartists – hounded the government regularly.

At the heart of this political and social turbulence was a growing row over the cost of food – an imbroglio we now know as the Corn Law crisis. On one side of the argument stood those who argued for strict tariffs on the import of foreign cereals into Britain; on the other were those who contended that such restrictions were bad for the economy and bad for those at the bottom of the nation’s social ladder.

When the two sides clashed in the 1840s, what followed was a parliamentary battle every bit as divisive as the struggle over Brexit, and a Tory civil war so bitter that it kept the party out of majority power for nearly 30 years. In 1845, the Tory home secretary James Graham wrote: “We have lost the