“You shouldn’t be afraid to hear an argument being made,” he said. “It’s not a threat.”

He said it so calmly, so casually – indeed, so charmingly – that you could easily have believed it. And he was speaking just as calmly, casually and charmingly less than a minute later, when he said that if the UK thought it would get a free trade deal with the US after Brexit, it was frankly dreaming.