Did World War Three begin last Thursday night? I fear it may have done. Forgive my language, but on this occasion I think it justified. How can anyone possibly have been so bloody stupid? We know from history that assassinations can have limitless effects. And when the President of the United States orders the state murder (for this, alas, is what it was) of an Iranian general, it is hard to see a good end.

There will be retaliation. Other countries will be drawn in. Our own ability to make moral objections to such acts is gravely weakened because Donald Trump’s action lies miles outside the laws of civilised war. Iran has no long-range drones (as far as we know) but can you begin to imagine the justified rage in the USA if a senior American general was shot dead on the steps of the Pentagon by an Iranian hit team? Yet what, in the end, would be the moral difference between the two acts?

Now we can only tremble at what might come next. Any fool can see that this action was perilous beyond belief. Anyone wise and mature enough to say ‘That’s enough!’ after the first retaliation would have had the sense not to start this in the first place.

For the first 40 years of my life we were supposed to be living on the brink of nuclear war. But it never came, because even the stupidest and most evil politicians could see that you could not win such a war.

Now, the nuclear threat has slipped away into the background. I am not saying it will not return. But a US President can now start a war, if he picks his enemy carefully, without needing to fear a nuclear exchange. We have seen this already in Iraq, a continuing disaster, and in Afghanistan, where, as newly released secret papers show, nobody ever had a clue what they were doing. We see it Ukraine, where American and EU aggression finally came up against hard resistance. We see it in Syria. Britain and France started their own war in Libya, so destroying that country and beginning one of the biggest waves of uncontrolled migration in human history, and unqualified disaster.

How odd it is that we persist with these follies. Modern non-nuclear weapons are quite terrifying enough in themselves. I visited Baghdad soon after the 2003 invasion and was repeatedly astonished by the vast destruction caused by the power and accuracy of 21st century conventional munitions. Ramadi and Fallujah later ended up as moonscapes. Pictures from Syria after the war we caused show a country that has truly been bombed and shelled back into the Stone Age.

And now we have drones, which turn murder into a videogame. You can sit in front of a screen and arrange the killing of another human being, at no direct risk to yourself, thousands of miles away. Then you can lock up your office and go out for a beer or, if you don’t like beer, you can have a cheeseburger.

But above all, what is all this about? It does not defend us, but exposes us to danger which may reach our towns and cities. At least in the past we could say we were defending liberty against a defined menace which would not stop threatening us until it was defeated in the field. But in these cases, what precisely are we fighting for? How will we know if we have won? Or are we heading for the permanent war envisaged in George Orwell’s 1984, in which we can switch from one enemy to the other in the blink of an eye, and pretend nothing has changed, but the fighting never stops? You think this far-fetched? Then bear in mind that this country has been supporting an Al Qaeda faction in Syria for several years. These are crazy times.

Only Grammar Schools can Save Poor Children from Ignorance

I can quite understand why Winchester College and Dulwich College turned down the offer of a legacy to pay for bursaries for poor white scholars. It is easy to see how they would have been smeared as ‘racist’ if the story had come out in the left-wing media.

But in any case it would have done almost no good. Britain’s white working class cannot be saved by a few bursaries. It has been the main victim of the hideous social experiment of the last 60 years.

Its settled communities have been broken up by council house sales and mass immigration. Its steady jobs have been abolished by free-market fanatics. Its families have been devastated by the state’s long war against lifelong marriage. And its schools – decent, disciplined state schools which taught real skills and real knowledge - were swept away by comprehensive zealots in both parties.

I will here repeat my favourite statistic, from the Gurney-Dixon report of 1953. It states that 64% of grammar school pupils in that year were working class. Now children from poor homes who would once have gone to such schools fail in horrible sink establishments full of noise and bullying, and the nation loses a huge store of talent.

The German-speaking nations of Europe, far more economically successful and less class-prejudiced than we are, still have selective grammar schools. The old Communist East Germany abolished them, but when Communism fell they were rebuilt and now flourish there too.

The reintroduction of such schools would do more for the white working class, and everyone else in the country too, than any number of scholarships.

That's enough Profumo Dramas . We need a drama about the much bigger scandal of Suez

Dramatisations of the Profumo Affair come along as regularly as flu epidemics, and, while I am quite enjoying ‘The Trial of Christine Keeler’, may I make a plea for this to be the last?

For the truth is that nothing really happened. A junior minister (John Profumo was not in the Cabinet) slept with a prostitute. It came out by accident. He lied. He resigned. That was it.

Probably the most enduring thing that came out of it was the performance of Mandy Rice-Davies, in many ways the enduring spirit of our age. Her dismissal of an incredible denial with the words ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ is the thinking person’s response to most statements by public figures. Her later material success (unlike poor Christine Keeler’s unhappy burned-out life) showed just what an amoral era this is. She rightly reckoneed that if Tory politicians could behave as John Profumo did, she was free to behave as she did.

But can someone now make a decent three-part documentary drama about the Suez crisis, in which the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary lied us into war, the Americans crushed us as if we were an insect, and we ceased to be a world power? Not much sex, but such a drama.

Flop after Flop, but Pullman's Atheism keeps the dramatisations coming

The atheist author Philip Pullman is, I suspect, more admired and bought than read. When his finger-wagging anti-Christian books are dramatised, on stage or film, they flop. Yet people still keep trying to stage them. Why? My diligent colleague James Heale has obtained for me the viewing figures for the BBC’s recent costly TV version of ‘His Dark Materials’. They started at 7.2 million in Episode 1. Then they fell almost continuously, with one hiccup at Episode 5, to a poor 4.1 million at the end. But how many of them were awake? It was quite boring. A friend who stuck it out to the end confesses that he fell asleep during the final bout.

Yet the BBC is even now airing a radio version of his latest book and , as far as I know, plans to go ahead with another heavy-handed slice of Pullman on TV. This must surely be the triumph of ideology over common sense or commercial reality.