“Believe it or not,” Bill Clinton said in a speech at Georgetown University on Monday, “we thought it was pretty polarised” back in 1992: “we had income inequality, we had alienation, we had unequal opportunities, and we had a lot of social division”. But, as he reflected, America now looks even more polarised.

It’s 25 years ago this month that the boy from Hope, Arkansas, was elected president of the US — an event that he celebrated from the steps of the Old State House in Little Rock with the resonant pay-off (made possible by his birth town): “I still believe in a place called Hope.”

He has an enduring reputation as one of the most effective speakers in the modern history of the presidency. But there are two Bill Clintons that we tend to remember, oratorically. There’s the great empathiser who said, “I feel your pain”; and there’s the Jesuitical lawyer who could argue straight-facedly about “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” or redefine “sexual relations” in a hitherto unique way.