Given Krauthammer's prominence, you might think him a poor candidate for a column whose title is "Underrated". But neither prominence nor political influence is quite the same thing as public esteem, and in that court Krauthammer has yet to get his due. A comment on the FT website when Krauthammer was named the most influential American columnist epitomises the reaction among the bien pensants. "You can't be serious," wrote an outraged reader, who went on to describe Krauthammer as "an apologist for the hard Right."

In fact, Krauthammer is exceptionally difficult to categorise. He started his career in public life working as a psychiatrist for Jimmy Carter (not, alas, as his personal shrink, merely advising him on policy) and went on to be a speechwriter for (Vice-President) Walter Mondale. Not much aroma of hard-rightery from those precincts. Irving Kristol famously defined a "neo-conservative" as a liberal who had been mugged by reality, and perhaps Krauthammer suffered some such ambush while watching Reagan pit America against an "evil empire".

Krauthammer's greatest gift as a political commentator lies in his combination of political acumen with moral clarity. During the last US presidential campaign, for example, the herd of independent minds was unanimous in heaping ridicule on Sarah Palin after her interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson. The coup de grâce was identified as the moment when Gibson asked Palin whether she agreed with the Bush doctrine. "In what sense, Charlie?" she asked. "After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained that the Bush doctrine 'is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defence'.

Wrong."