That is what I meant to say. It is what I mean by the moment ‘when we agree about what we disagree about’. I must have expressed myself very badly. Another blow to the old self esteem!

In my many years of traveling and working around the world, I have long thought that we are more the same than we are different – so the best way to communicate and to work together is to find the common ground.

I still believe this fundamentally true – yet somehow Michael manages to pose a question that we have in common yet it can lead to different answers.

Fascinating.

I thought you were going to say almost the opposite, namely that contemporary British politicians resist explicit divergences of values and goals altogether. Politicians now claw over the identical goals, language and values (‘hard working families’, ‘community’, ‘inclusion’, ‘enterprise’ etc), then accuse their opponents of being thwarted by incompetence and/or disingenuousness.

The ‘culture wars’ in the US create a very different context. Liberals and conservatives are divided on substantive ethical questions, meaning that politicians must either take a side or avoid having an opinion at all. Obama’s ambition has been to develop a unifying political vocabulary, but already we’ve seen how quickly this becomes undermined by real political conflicts.

A ‘transcendent moment’ in British political debate might be when two opposing sides suddenly discover and accept that they want incompatible things. Imagine how exciting that would be!