I once had lunch with a bastard.  A real bastard.  I know he was, because the prime minister of the day,  Major Minor,  said so.   Towards the right of the Tory party, the gentleman concerned was an anti-European and if he were alive today would, undoubtedly, be a Brexiteer.

Sir Richard may have had extreme views on Europe, but he was far from a fool and he knew how the world works.  The art of politics, he told me, is compromise: “we work together.”  There is good bluster, on both sides, to keep the troops happy, but when they get down to it, in the back rooms where policy becomes reality, politicians work together.  And that spirit of co-operation can be seen today – 25 years after our conversation, in the functioning of the Parliamentary Select Committees.

In recent years it has been the Select Committees rather than the Opposition that has held the government to account, at least to some extent. That may change somewhat now that Keir Starmer leads Labour, but the spirit lives on.  Starmer has a track record of working with politicians from other parties to achieve his goals.   And that is well and good, because as pressure grows – not least in the fetid ranks of Tory backbenchers – to release the lock-down, we enter its most dangerous phase.