Despite it being early morning, Hatton was bouncing around the green room like a chirpy northerner as played by Eric Idle. It transpired that each morning he goes for a run and takes about 50 pills to keep trim and healthy. When he mentioned this the lesbian vicar said, in an effort at badinage, “Fifty Viagra?” Without missing a beat, and giving the rest of us a wink, Hatton replied, “If I’d just taken 50 Viagra even you’d be at risk.” I may be the only conservative who, whenever he sees Derek Hatton, always comes over with uncontrollable laughter.

***

Humour may be the first casualty of a society addicted to locating “micro-aggressions”. But ideas suffer next, as we saw this summer. Despite the terrible scenes in the Mediterranean and at Calais, the only meaty discussion in Britain was over whether or not the Prime Minister should have used the “s” word in relation to some of the migrants (the “s” word on this occasion being “swarm”, not “swamped” as in the Labour years). Politicians and bishops castigated the PM and warned about how important language is.

But language hardly matters if it’s not remotely connected to actions. I suspect these faked language games are a way to console ourselves over the fact that here are problems far beyond our control. Yet we have to keep pretending that we are players, must at all times show we care and must absolutely not invite negative reviews.

Just about the only person this summer to make any suggestion of what to do was Paul Collier of Oxford Univeristy. He was subsequently howled down by the left-wing mob as a racist. So I predict there will be no more ideas. More migrants will come to Europe. More migrants will drown or survive for lives of quiet hardship. More and more Europeans will think more and more unthinkable thoughts. But so long as we all mind our language, what harm can such censoring do?