If there’s one thing that people across the political spectrum can agree on, it’s that they cannot stand a hypocrite.

In our polarised political climate, the charge of hypocrisy is one of the most powerful weapons, often used to silence anyone with whom we don’t agree without having to actually engage with their arguments. Once someone has laid out any kind of moral principle, if they are ever found to have so much as come close to breaching it, it is as if they have effectively forfeited their right to say anything else on the subject.

“Hypocrite!” a woman shouted at Dominic Cummings as the British prime minister’s chief adviser entered his home back in May, shortly after it emerged that he had broken the government’s own lockdown rules by making a 264-mile trip across England.