I used to read my children a lovely book about a little monster who’s frightened to go to sleep in case there’s a boy under his bed which, by way of a largish, lateral leap, leads us to my thought for today.  The necessity of a collective bogey man in a modern society.  Actually in any society because a good way to keep the masses in order is to keep them in a state of terror.

Even in my brief lifetime (What? Ed.) it has been never ending.  My parents had only just recovered from the very real threats of the Second World War when we were all cowering under the stairs thinking that the Russians were about to drop a nuclear bomb on our heads and thanking God that we’d never taken down the black-out curtains which would surely save us from an atomic fireball.

The Americans were so nervy of the prospect of Communist world domination that they spent years fighting the totally unwinnable Vietnamese war. Obviously they lost in entirely predictable fashion but staggeringly the world did not, as we had been warned,  instantly think Marxist Leninism was the way forward.  That didn’t get a lot of publicity.

There were decades of worrying about the IRA but as soon as they’d signed a peace deal up popped a World Wide Web of loonies – not a million miles from the Taliban, who if memory serves we had been supplying with arms in an attempt to rid Afghanistan of the Russians – and we all obediently began to submit to endless security checks in case they were lurking round the corner, ignoring for the time being that virtually all murders are committed by someone known to the victim.  Like the 2 women a week in Britain who die at the hand of their partners.  Not much publicity for that either.

There has been a brief respite while the lily livered Metropolitans warned that we’d be eating grass after Brexit but now we have returned to our old adversary, the Russians, bringing sudden death to a restaurant near you.

Here, we are led to believe, is a man who has been a double agent, whose wife and son have both met mysterious deaths and yet he lets his daughter travel to Russia and then decides to go out for lunch taking with him a parcel she’s brought back from Moscow.  A man who is an obvious target for both sides but has he changed his name, elected to live in a witness protection programme, moved to a country that he hasn’t betrayed or taken the most fundamental precautions when dozens of other Russians have met the wrong end of an umbrella?  No, reader, he has not.

The ‘passing’ policeman was hardly your average bobby on the beat either. Check him out.  And best of all they were handily close to the Porton Down research facility, the only place in England where you can obtain this obscure substance.  This must  explain why the local hospital happened to have supplies of the antidote which they administered within hours although the poison wasn’t identified for a week.  And I hear that only yesterday, Porton Down had millions of pounds of extra government funding slipped into their coffers.

No wonder Mr Putin is so dismissive. Perhaps it wasn’t him.