It was plain that Christian Bale is the actor of our times when he made constitutional jurisprudence sing on screen. As a fearsome Dick Cheney in Vice, he encounters, digests and then implements the “unitary executive theory”.

This lavish construal of White House power, touted by right-wing lawyers in the 1970s, sidelines those bothersome checks and balances. It was the intellectual alibi for perhaps the mightiest vice-president in US history.