All politics is about pain. Governing is a matter of deciding who is hit and how hard. Sometimes this can be a virtue. “If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working,” was the mantra of Sir John Major, a former Conservative prime minister, who embraced high interest rates and high unemployment in order to bring down inflation during the early 1990s. Ronald Reagan opted for a similar slogan when suffering the same ailment: “No pain, no gain”.