The Tories are heading home from their hols, thinking about what to say when they get back to work. My tip: speak softly, with maturity. The public is sick of fury in politics. Debate is fine, democracy is beautiful. But partisanship can tear us apart.

I’m thinking of Laura Pidcock, a recently elected Labour MP who said she’d never be friends with a Tory because they are so irredeemably awful. It’s a childish sentiment but a widespread one: I recall a Facebook post by a friend the day after the EU referendum announcing that anyone who voted for Brexit had betrayed her children. Which is super, because it means I no longer have to fork out for Christmas presents for them.

Pidcock’s views blend the personal and the political, and they’re nothing new. British politics has always seethed with class anger. In John Osborne’s 1957 play The Entertainer, the eponymous comedian recalls a working-class acrobat he once knew who used “Tory” as a swear word. “If you gave him a plate of badly cooked chips, he’d hold them up and say: ‘Who done these no-good, blank, blank, stinking, Tory chips?’ ”

Osborne was labelled an “angry young man” by the critics, and the anger articulated by his heroes was a howl of fury at a Fifties Britain that was deeply unjust and too smug to do anything about it. I sympathise. If Tories appear more socially relaxed than socialists, it’s often because they’ve got less to be angry about – although never mistake their politeness for niceness, because it can be condescension in disguise. Pidcock is right: class is a reality. It affects your wealth, your health and the scope of your dreams.