Brexit has divided Britain – everyone says so. Families have been fractured, friendships blighted. Fury – yes, fury – hangs heavy in the air. Well, maybe. Perhaps it’s just the furious – the politicians, the punters, the pundits – who are getting all the airtime.

Just after the referendum I made a Panorama documentary in the West Midlands asking people why they had voted the way they had. The leavers, the majority, thumped their tubs in triumph. The remainers hung their heads in despair at the simple-mindedness of the leavers. Standard stuff.

Two and a half years later, for Radio 4, I went back to speak to some of the same people. Having been told – and even blithely said myself – that we were all at war with ourselves, I prepared for the worst. My interviewees’ positions would surely have hardened.

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But I didn’t need my political flak jacket at all. All but one of the leavers were studies in pragmatic moderation. They still wanted to leave, somehow, but understood it was more complicated than they had been led to believe, and immigration issues weren’t so easy to sort after all, and so on. And surely we could muddle our way through it.

The remainers – even more encouragingly, to my mind – weren’t giving it the old I-told-you-so. One of them said: “I think I understand better now why leavers voted leave; perhaps there might now be more understanding all around and some good could come out of this.”

The sobering thing for me was the realisation that I only heard these moderate voices because I was stuck with them – this being the whole point of the programme, to go back to those I had heard from before. In the normal run of things they wouldn’t have made the cut and they would never have got on air. What good is a moderate, considered voice in a news vox pop? If I had been doing a radio phone-in and one of this lot had been put through to me, I’d be mouthing annoyance through the glass at my producer, asking what they were playing at.

All power to the meek, the mild and the moderate: one day you shall inherit the Earth.