Let me say that I personally don’t care for Rubio, who is the kind of canned over-disciplined on-message candidate that makes me despair of politics: in media interviews, his answers to almost any question are like modular furniture, with the same half-dozen stump-speech lines chopped up and re-assembled and invariably concluding with the ultimate banality of the hustings that “this election is about the future”. But, if you’d never heard Rubio speak before Monday, he came over as a crisp effective candidate making the most of his time on national TV. By contrast, Cruz’s unfocused ramble of a victory speech left you wondering how the hell this guy won the state.

It can’t all be down to ethically dubious mailers and sabotage emails, can it?

Time magazine cautions that “criticizing Ted Cruz seldom works”. But, whatever the truth behind these two incidents, they are (as Cruz’s former fellow British subjects would say) not cricket. To go back to where I came in, I would like to be governed by honorable men. The Cruz campaign’s behavior in Iowa does not meet that test.