Like all the other responses — public, media and political — this one was shot through with mistakes, zig-zags and incorrect assumptions. If Europe is going to find its way through the current crisis we will first have to find our way through these misperceptions. But, like peeling an onion, it is going to require care and undoubtedly cause tears.

First, we need to address the idea of our alleged “responsibility” for this crisis. Much though many British people are willing to berate the former Labour government for its 2003 intervention in Iraq, our country has notably had extremely limited military involvement in Syria. Qatar and the UAE — two countries which have set up quotas to accept precisely no Syrian refugees — certainly have done. And Iran — whose Hezbollah and other militia have been fighting for Iranian interests in Syria for at least four years now — has now even berated Europe for not doing more. In early September Iran’s President Rouhani had the gall to lecture Hungary’s ambassador to Iran over Hungary’s “shortcomings” in the refugee crisis. Saudi Arabia — which has made no Syrians into Saudi citizens — has been backing its preferred sides inside the country. It has also refused to allow the use of 100,000 air-conditioned tents used only for only five days a year by pilgrims on the Hajj. But the Saudis have offered to build 200 new mosques in Germany. Explaining the failure of Gulf countries to take in Syrian refugees, one Kuwaiti official said: “In the end it is not right for us to accept a people that are different from us. We don’t want people that suffer from internal stress and trauma in our country.”

Throughout most of human history it has been easier for people to refuse rather than accept responsibility for things that they have done. Only in the modern West have we landed in the unnatural position of finding it easier to accept responsibility for things we have not done than to profess the truth of our innocence.

But there are even worse truths underneath all this, not least the fact that even our best policies are unattainable. If this has been clear for some time, it is only making itself felt now. The problem might be summed up in the economic migrant/asylum-seeker debate. For the consensus that a lot of mainstream centre-ground politicians in Europe have come to is that the jury is out or unpersuaded by the cause of economic migrants, but that all asylum-seekers must come in. Pretending that we could invent tomorrow an instrument to perfectly differentiate between the two, even that policy is impossible. Consider one example. European law dictates that people fleeing a country because of persecution for their faith, race or sexual orientation (to give just three examples) will be given asylum if they can find their way to Europe. If the number of gay men and women in Africa and the Middle East is — as there is no reason to think it is not — around the same percentage it is in other societies, then that means just for starters that around 5 per cent of the populations of those countries should (providing they can find their way here) be given asylum in Europe. We do know that this is not possible, don’t we? But we pretend it is — pretence based on the quiet hope that they will not find their way here. But what if they do? What if all those people our policy assumed wouldn’t come here now do? The problem of not facing up to any of these failures of thought is that they stop our politicians being able to think their way through to any political leadership.