What is a fitting tribute to Stephen Hawking? It’s probably not to ask, as John Humphrys unaccountably did, whether the “science community cut him a lot of slack because he was so desperately disabled?” A more insulting idea is hard to imagine: that you spend your life overcoming adversity to get to the top of your field, then the minute you’re dead, someone speculates that you’d never have made it without the adversity.

Instead, the question we should be asking in homage to this extraordinary man is what life would be like today for a 22-year-old, recently arriving at Cambridge for graduate studies, diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Well, he would have a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment, and – despite the severity of the disease – would have no guarantee of being successful. Of the nearly one million people moving from Disability Living Allowance to PIP, almost half have had their payments downgraded or stopped. There is a very high error rate – 69% of appeals against the decision are successful. PIP, as the journalist Frances Ryan describes, is a “gateway benefit” to other allowances such as the carers one, so had his been refused or delayed he would have been unlikely to be able to continue his studies.

'I would not have survived': Stephen Hawking lived long life due to NHS Read more

Play Video 3:09 Cosmology's brightest star Stephen Hawking dies aged 76 – video

But let’s say he gets it: cuts to local authority budgets mean care packages are designed to cost as little as possible, which often isn’t compatible with maximising the independence and potential of the people who need them. Two brothers in Crewe, Ryan and Ashley Worth, who both have Duchenne muscular dystrophy, had to share one carer, which meant that Ryan couldn’t go to university. All the principles around disability provision – that the state exists to overcome the obstacles, and nobody’s life should be mapped by what they can’t do – have been quietly jettisoned by the raw reality of cuts.

However, imagine that our 22-year-old, by some stroke of luck, is living in an affluent area and, chancing upon the right disability assessor, gets the support he needs. He would still need a wheelchair, another postcode lottery: across the UK, a quarter of people referred to wheelchair services by a GP get no equipment at all. In some areas, three-quarters are offered nothing, and have a choice between crowdfunding their equipment and being bed-bound. Hawking, of course, needed more than a wheelchair; able to communicate using only the muscles of one cheek, he used a speech-generation device, which it is impossible to imagine as routine provision from a system with so little interest in what disabled people have to say.

Having won all these battles, our hypothetical physicist now needs the NHS to keep him alive. As Hawking wrote in this newspaper: “In my case, medical care, personal life and scientific life are all intertwined.” He was campaigning against the crisis in the health service, underfunding, privatisation, the public sector pay freeze and untenable pressures on staff. He was quite plain on this point: he could not have been the physicist he was without the medical care that he received. And, he argued, with a scientist’s rather than a health secretary’s command of the data, that that care was under sustained political attack.

He was a genius and a visionary; he had determination and stoicism in superhuman amounts, and arguably nothing so tawdry as bureaucracy could have stood between him and his discoveries. But it is hard to imagine those qualities, abundant as they were, surviving in a world where fighting for what you need to leave the house is itself a full-time job. Genius isn’t a freak event: it’s something we all build together on the principle that human potential is precious and infinite; or all snuff out together, having ditched that principle.

London is the Berlin of the new cold war

Vladmir Putin looks spookily unperturbed. Elections looming, international disapprobation heaped upon him and a deadline from the British government whooshing casually past like the expiry date on a coupon for a McDonald’s cappuccino, he has the manicured and easy air of a man cast in an advert for successful pension planning. The world unfolds to his design: fear in the hearts of his enemies, impotent flapping from his detractors. Throw in a live tiger for a photoshoot and he will represent the all-seeing modern tsar he has decided his people crave. Plus, his pension is going to be epic.

The normal rules have been suspended. A foreign government, charged with an attack on British soil, simply brushed off the whole business and walked off stronger. The Sun took the painfully principled stance of wanting to boycott the World Cup, but Putin’s main rival in Russia, Alexei Navalny, warns that won’t be enough: Britain needs to target the oligarchs whose money swills round the capital. It may not be a popular solution when so much of it spills into the Conservative party. Theresa May has a strong but less expensive solution: expel the diplomats. They don’t cause as much mayhem as the intelligence agents, but at least you know where they live.

There are more Russian spies on British soil today, according to John Bayliss, ex-GCHQ, than there were at the height of the cold war; but that’s less dramatic than it sounds, because there were only 30 back then, all the cool ones going to Germany. London 2018 is the new Berlin of the 80s, nidus of nefariousness, mysterious assassination capital of Europe. It could be the readiness of British banks to launder Russian money, the alacrity with which our political class will receive it, or merely the magnificent architecture. Exactly how it happened, only Len Deighton would know.

School lunches: a menu for government hypocrisy

It must be confusing to be a kid. Until you’re eight, you’re worthy of a free school lunch; then suddenly, you no longer need one (huh?) and free school lunches are vigorously means-tested, with your parents having to earn less than £7,400 (at which income, they are themselves probably strangers to lunch) or be Northern Irish.

The Spring budget, meanwhile, features 50m quid to make sure, according to education secretary Damian Hinds, “that all children learn the values that underpin our society – including fairness, tolerance and respect”. Would it be cheaper to practise these values, rather than preach them? Not really; but it would be better.