Is the profession losing faith – both in itself and the future? We ask because the Gazette’s letters and web pages have metamorphosed into agony columns. The underlying refrain is that solicitors are no longer respected as professionals; no longer due the degree of deference and consideration that reflects a societal status now seriously eroded.

The evidence is impressive and varied, from the amused contempt with which the justice secretary regards legal aid lawyers who have the effrontery to demand a respectable professional wage, to veteran solicitors having their bags rifled by uppity court officials.

There is something in this. When a profession doubles in size in 15 years, it is bound to become less exalted. But there’s more to it than that.

Here’s a grossly simplified, more general explanation. When Thatcherism destroyed organised labour and unleashed freemarket fundamentalism 25 years ago, the middle-class professions cheered, wearied of power cuts and grateful for tax cuts. But the bell tolled for them too. ‘Professionals’ replaced miners as the ‘enemy within’; they too had to be neutered as one of the remaining bulwarks against the power of the state and untrammelled markets. And so the assault began, through privatisation, commoditisation, the sweeping away of restrictive practices, and an obsession with costs and targets at the expense of amorphous ‘value’.

That the status of professionals should have diminished in consequence was only to be expected.