There wasn’t so much progress the week before when I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate on taking action against IS alongside General John Allen and against Ken Livingstone and Rula Jebreal. Aside from talking over her opponents incessantly, the strangest thing about Ms Jebreal was that she began her case by complaining about having to listen to “two white men” on our side. She seemed to have fewer problems with the other person on her own side, who was not just white and a man, but also — crime of all crimes today — old. I hope that in my lifetime the use of someone’s skin pigmentation will become unacceptable as a means of attack. But for now it appears to remain fine so long as it is in one direction. It leads me to wonder if there are things I would not say against an opponent. I think so. For instance Ms Jebreal is married to an American multi-millionaire, a fact some people might suggest undermines her strident pose as a poor suffering Palestinian. But — as when debating left-wing heirs and heiresses far richer than I shall ever be — I always think this too personal a point to make.

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The closure of the Independent is sad for the editor and staff, but the paper itself is not a loss. Though the final editor reined in its worst excesses, it is hard to forgive the organ’s shift from independence to extreme far-left activism. During the 2000s in particular, it was an unrelenting source of anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism and anti-Semitism. Everybody has their favourite example, but my own will always be their correspondent Robert Fisk’s description of being beaten up by a mob in Afghanistan. Only a journalist at the Independent in those days could have been attacked in such a way only then to write a piece explaining why he — as a Westerner — deserved it. I am sorry for the loss of jobs but cannot be sad that the masochistic tendency in our press has been reduced.

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How polite our European partners are suddenly being. In discussions with Germans I am now told that they need the UK to stay in the EU to protect them from the French. The French, by contrast, tell me that they would like Britain to stay in the EU to protect them from the Germans. The Scandinavians and Southern Europeans, meanwhile, say they need us to remain to act as a ballast for them against the French, Germans and each other.  From being vilified as headbangers, we outers are suddenly being not just pandered to, but wooed. We should enjoy it while it lasts, because however Britain votes in June, this flattery will not last much longer.