Imagine that Britain’s Labour party had replaced Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband before they contested a general election. In all likelihood, there would have been no Tory government, and therefore no referendum on the EU and therefore no exit from it.

Imagine that Hillary Clinton had swung 100,000 votes across three US states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — that elected and re-elected Barack Obama. The world would now be stifling a yawn at the resilience of mainstream politics against reactionary stresses.

Those of us who follow politics are suckers for the epic: when electorates do strange things, we want to believe we are living through a kink in history. When the world’s two stablest democracies vote for change, it must be the end of liberalism or the hollowing out of the middle class or something comparably grandiose at work. To blame it on particularities, such as the left’s saintly patience with mediocre leaders in recent years, is somehow unsatisfying.