The Saudis are going to get away with it. Muhammad bin Salman , too. They may pay a price – we’ll travel in that direction later – but they remain the “vision of light” against Iran ’s “vision of darkness”, in the words of Saudi Arabia ’s ever more egregious foreign minister.

We are all, alas, making the same old Middle East mistake: of thinking that the bad guys will get overthrown or punished for their murders and transgressions and that the good guys (whoever they may be) will come out on top.

Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of murder most foul. But in the Middle East’s sectarian civil war, the Sunnis have got to win over the Shiites and the Saudis have got the money, and America’s president – for whom the epithet “insane” is now as irrelevant as it is obvious – has managed to quote the Saudis as claiming that Khashoggi was “an enemy of the people” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Even if his murder was “terrible” and “a horrible crime”. It could very well be, announced the leader of the free world this week, that bin Salman had knowledge of the murder. “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”