I was almost forty years old when I first visited Israel. I reflected on this the other day when I thought about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party and how it made me feel.

Even in my late thirties it wasn’t a pilgrimage. I accompanied William Hague to meetings with Israeli politicians such as Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres.

We also went to Ramallah and met Yasser Arafat, who presented the Tory leader with a huge mother of pearl Bethlehem crib, one of the ugliest gifts I’d ever seen. William told me it was the second one Arafat had given him. Apparently the PLO had bought a job lot in order to cope with the number of international visitors and was still struggling to get