Ronson cigarette lighters, oeufs en cocotte, Taittinger champagne and a battle-ship grey 4.5 litre Bentley with a snorting Amherst Villiers supercharger: these are just some of the accoutrements of the fictional intelligence officer James Bond.

They give us a flavour of the era in which Ian Fleming’s mid-20th century spy novels were written — bashed out in Jamaica on a typewriter whose rat-tat-tat, I like to think, must have sounded like a Morse code transmission.

With his feline gait, Bond enters a casino on the Picardy coastline, somewhere near the France-Belgium border, to play sleek hands of Chemin de fer and to win the girl. There is always a girl, is there not?

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Licence to thrill: Daniel Craig's 007 and Bond girl Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale

Bond drinks strongly, relaying to the barman in strict terms how his cocktail should be made. Bond is sure. Bond is deadly. Bond is a man of his time.

Actor Daniel Craig, who has just started doing publicity for his fourth Bond film as 007, seems to forget this.

Craggy-jawed Mr Craig, in real life a flimsy Leftie, has given an expletive-ridden interview to Esquire magazine in which he agonises about Bond’s political incorrectness.

He expresses satisfaction that his portrayal of Bond is ‘not as sexist and misogynistic’ as those of some of the other actors who have played him over the years. ‘The world has changed,’ asserts Mr Craig.

Regarding Bond’s womanising, Mr Craig finds it necessary to add: ‘I am certainly not that person.’

Wriggling over the blatant phwoarr factor in modern Bond films, he assures us the producers do their best to ensure they make the roles as dramatically satisfying as possible for the actresses who play Bond’s girlfriends.

There they sit at their exotic film locations, attired in the most fabulously skimpy bikinis, yet we are invited to imagine the director fretting about their artistic motivation! Stanislavski: Spectre assassin or a luvvie’s acting method?

It may be unfair to judge any actor on an interview, even one as long and as thorough as that in Esquire, but how prim and foolish and, oh dear, hypocritical Daniel Craig sounds.

I have always thought him rather marvellous and, indeed, manly as Bond. He is certainly a far better 007 than the silly renditions we had from Roger Moore and the later-stage Sean Connery.

Now, alas, I am inclined to think Mr Craig a bit of a twerp. Film publicists insist on exposing their stars to interviews, but we fans might be happier living in ignorance of the actors and their opinions.

‘I am certainly not that person,’ is Mr Craig’s line, remember. Yet this is the same Daniel Craig who’s had a distinctly mottled record in his romantic dealings with women — even while parading his multi- millionaire, Left-wing conscience by supporting, among other trendy causes, International Women’s Day!

The Chester-born star, whose first marriage ended in divorce, notoriously had a 2005 affair with fellow thesp Sienna Miller when she was allegedly devoted to Mr Craig’s one-time friend Jude Law. Oops!

Mr Law was far from delighted by the news. Furthermore, when Mr Craig married actress Rachel Weisz in 2011, it came as a blow to his former fiancee Satsuki Mitchell, whose father told reporters that his daughter had forbidden family members from even uttering Mr Craig’s name.

Miss Mitchell had been with Mr Craig for six years. They had just bought a home. Then she was dumped like a bag of potatoes and within a trice — abracadabra! — our action hero was spliced to Miss Weisz.

No one particularly expects actors to behave like chaste saints. Normally, I couldn’t give a fig about celebrities’ love lives.

Daniel Craig pictured with his actress wife Rachel Weisz

But when Mr Craig attacks James Bond for being sexist and then draws his mouth into a little roundel of snootiness and says ‘I am certainly not that person,’ are we not permitted to allow ourselves at least a discreet cough of scepticism?

From supermodel Kate Moss to a German actress called Heike Makatsch to a topless model called Marina Pepper — who, marvellously, went on to become a Liberal Democrat mayor and G20 protester, and spoke publicly about what a talent her teenage sweetheart Daniel had been between the sheets — Mr Craig has been an accomplished swordsman.

You could almost say he was as keen on his rumpy-pumpy as a certain Commander Bond. Yet he deplores 007’s chauvinism and says, with almost audible piety: ‘I am certainly not that person.’ Pull the other one, Meester Bond.

The world has, indeed, changed since Ian Fleming started writing his books. The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, thrillingly staccato in its prose, appeared in 1953, when Britain still had rationing from World War II. Convicted murderer Derek Bentley had just been hanged. Elizabeth II was crowned and George V’s widow, Queen Mary, died. Len Hutton’s England cricket team won The Ashes, Johnny Dankworth set up his big band and the House of Lords approved the idea of a commercial TV channel.

This is the context in which we should judge Fleming’s creation — a servant of the Crown who has a licence to kill the Queen’s enemies.

When we read of Bond’s wolfish tastes, his dinners, his drinking, we must bear in mind that to the readership of Fifties Britain all of this would have been unbelievably exotic.

Bond drinks vodka from Riga. He smokes Balkan and Turkish tobacco wrapped by Morland of Grosvenor Street, London, the cigarettes decorated with three gold bands. He eats grilled sole and cold beef.

And he nibbles on the earlobes of gorgeous women who are caught up in his world of espionage and national security. If he fails to emote, if he fails to reach out to his inner new man (not that they had such things in the Fifties) and come over all touchy-feely, there may be two reasons.

The first is that Fleming’s prose style was too urgent for such delays, and paper supplies made novels much shorter in those days, too.

The second is that Bond is a military killer. The character of Bond is thought to be a composite of several wartime commandos Fleming knew when he served with Royal Naval intelligence. With such men it really was a matter of kill or be killed.

We are not told much about Bond’s background or even his looks, though we do learn that he was educated briefly at Eton, was orphaned young and that he looked like the dashing bandleader Hoagy Carmichael. He has a scar on his cheek and a lick of hair hanging from his fringe like a black comma.

Daniel Craig as womaniser James Bond in the 2012 movie Skyfall. The actor claims he is nothing like the spy

Bond is dashing and debonair and extravagant because the drab, exhausted Britain of 1953 was voracious for that sort of figure.

Fleming, in his Jamaican villa, could see that. Bond’s patriotism is not much referred to, but it can surely be seen in his no-nonsense acceptance of orders.

A major problem with the modern 007 films, much as I enjoy them as entertainment, is that they have to place Bond in a modern context because the gizmos and swanky locations have become so big a part of the product.

The character of Bond would be more interesting, more artistically truthful, if the stories were shot in the era in which they were written.

In the novel Goldfinger, Fleming writes that ‘regret was unprofessional — worse, it was a death watch beetle in the soul’. What a phrase.

There is a similarly brilliant passage in From Russia With Love, when Fleming describes Bond on a plane that seems in danger of crashing. He overcomes his fear by retreating to a ‘hurricane room’ in his mind.

This is named after the hurricane shelters Fleming would have known in some Jamaican houses, where, during a bad storm, people could take shelter in a strongly built, central alcove in their homes.

Thanks to this necessarily selfish ‘hurricane room’, Bond is able to control emotions that might otherwise destroy him. An intelligence officer who dribbles all over the place about his emotions would not last long.

What would Bond have made of Daniel Craig, who has made millions out of him, yet still feebly judges him by 21st-century standards of political correctness of which he himself is far from a master?