The American critic, Paul Berman, wrote recently that “neocon” had become a show-stopper in upmarket liberal circles. The mere use of the word was enough to convince an audience that a man was a monster. “You should say it out loud in falsetto, as if a mouse had just run across your foot,” he explained. “Otherwise you will not have captured the right tone.”

Jon Snow is no stranger to the hitched-up skirt and high-pitched scream. It echoes through his autobiography, Shooting History. Snow tells us that he is the son of a High Tory bishop, and in my view, he retains a part of the traditional conservative’s resentment of the Americans who usurped Britain’s status as a world power and shrank the horizons of his father’s class.