Lancaster was as impressive as you may have seen from the YouTube clips people post on Facebook. He took ten minutes to neatly sum up his position. British isolationism has always been associated with Continental disintegration. Not to mention the harm we would do to ourselves in terms of trade. Furthermore, its focus on stopping immigrants from the EU will do little to slow the changes to our society that the anti-immigration voters are justified in wanting to be acknowledged, even if they’re wrong about what to do about it, easily manipulated by nostalgic rhetoric. Looking up at him from the front row was the student I suspected he was sleeping with, the one who looked a bit like Emily, the one I had assumed was his daughter. She wrote something every so often in a little notebook, and I kept myself interested by imagining this was a list of all the delicious transgressive fantasies that had occurred to her while watching his commanding performance, which she would later push under his office door along with instructions to come round to her flat in Kentish Town as soon as he was able, so she could submit to the force of his powerful arguments. I was too distracted by thinking about what I was going to say to Emily to fully follow the man arguing against Lancaster, though when I remembered to listen to him I found that what he was saying about the interests of those on low incomes, people who might claim reasonably that the worst thing that could happen to them would be that things stayed the same – all of this sounded plausible enough to be worth further thought, even though Leo, a little to the front and right of me, was screwing his face up while listening to him.

Lancaster set about explaining why what had sounded plausible was not plausible, and I resisted the urge to turn around again to look at Emily, resisted it again, and again, and wondered if she was looking at me, at the back of my head, and then the audience was applauding and I did look round, curious to observe Emily’s style of clapping, which from where I was sitting seemed only to be delicate and dutiful and not rapturous, unlike the student in the front row, one of a number of people there who had let out a mini-whoop, who was still bashing her hands together and flapping her elbows as if she were trying to take off.