Watching our exasperating Brexit dispute from the safe distance of Vienna, where I was staying for the past month, it struck me how strangely Europeanised our party politics has become, with the prospect of it becoming even more so as our party system reconfigures.

In one respect, however, we remain proudly uncontinental. Talking to Austrian friends about the great Brexit “mess”, I detected, along with a fair amount of Schadenfreude, a sneaking admiration for the democratic theatrics that the House of Commons has been providing.

In a Europe of often sterile national parliaments – where people tend to read out pre-prepared texts and vote along the lines of deals agreed between party leaders – our domestic drama has provided a refreshing alternative. Since the 2016 referendum we have been having an intense family argument and, unlike the gilets jaunes challenge to the authority of the French state, with little violence.

That said, the lack of a government majority since the 2017 election has had the effect of “Europeanising” party politics by creating a kind of nascent multi-party democracy within the tottering structures of the old two party, first-past-the-post, system.

The case for the traditional two-party system is that it provides decisive government, albeit at the price of disenfranchising quite large parts of the electorate and making it harder for new political forces to emerge. By contrast European-style multi-party democracy with various forms of proportional representation (PR) is more fluid and open but tends to hand out vetoes to more political players and can therefore lead to stasis.

So May’s Withdrawal Agreement has been blocked not only by Labour but also by the SNP, the DUP, the Liberal Democrats, the inner Tory party ERG grouping, and could in plausible scenarios even be blocked by the new Independent Group of MPs.

European political classes have developed over decades the skill of cross-party consensus building to unlock vetoes that our own adversarial political class lacks, admittedly exacerbated by two further factors: the rigid political style of Theresa May and the fact that the main opposition party is led by members of an unclubbable, far-Left political tradition.

A further Europeanisation looks likely as the parties reconfigure away from socio-economic class politics to socio-cultural identity politics. Initially this is likely to be a top-down movement, exemplified by The Independent Group of MPs, as the parties adjust to the fact that less than a third of voters strongly identify with the party they voted for in 2017 but more than three-quarters strongly identify with their Leave or Remain vote.