This is partly because a long and expensive international PR campaign has fooled a willing elite (many of them drug abusers themselves) into believing that cannabis is safe when in fact it is one of the most dangerous drugs there is. So we shut our minds to all the evidence of the terrible harm it can do – even highly publicised killings by cannabis abusers.

It is also because our politicians are even more useless abroad than they are at home. Here, they try to persuade us that they alone, armed with surveillance and huge police powers, stand between us and a terrorist peril that is a far smaller threat to life than the motor car.

Abroad, they seek to pose as modern-day Churchills, never happier than when pictured among soldiers or climbing into helicopters.

Having destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state in Iraq, and boosted Islamist fanatics against the secular Assad state in Syria, and urged on the plainly dangerous ‘Arab Spring’ with rhetoric and bombs, they now claim to be surprised and horrified that Sunni fanatics are close to taking over the Middle East.