In the early 1970s, the BBC Radio’s Robin Day presented a series of discussions featuring leading parliamentarians of various ideological persuasions. The conservations were cordial enough, but the surviving tapes are interesting mostly because of the profound political and philosophical differences they elucidate. Whatever superficial terrain of agreement they might have found, the likes of future Labour Party leader Michael Foot and arch-reactionary Enoch Powell certainly did not spend their appearances on the program engaged in jocular backslapping.

Today, a burgeoning and popular genre of political frenemy content replicates the format of such discussions while straining it of all ideological weight and gravity. In 2017, after left-wing MP Laura Pidcock was raked over the coals for saying she would never share a beer with a Conservative, the Guardian ran a fluffy feature in celebration of friendship across Westminster’s partisan divide. Pidcock, it declared, was actually “an exception rather than the rule . . . in a place where even fierce ideological opponents rarely hate each other half as much as outsiders think.”

Whenever it’s invoked, this framing is intended as a warm and fuzzy one. Beneath the poisonous rancor and division that so often characterizes politics today, the story goes, many elected officials actually spend their time cooperating and are just as able to share a friendly libation as they are to trade barbs in the halls of power.