I would have thought your penultimate paragraph is key here. I am a private individual, not a newspaper editor. Strictly speaking, I don’t have the faintest idea of the terms of any super-injunction taken out by anyone. Nothing has been intimated to me, or served on me. Is my only safe course to refrain from speculating in any way about any celebrity, in case I inadvertently breach an injunction?

Great shame. I hope you'll keep your Twitter feed going.

A thoughtful piece, Tom. I think it's the matters you raise in your third paragraph for which history will judge her most harshly: she accelerated Britain's industrial/manufacturing decline, and in so doing created a whole generation of people who grew up without a wage-earner in the house. Modern Conservatives are only entitled to complain about the "dependency culture" and the "underclass" if they first disavow her economic legacy.

Compared to that the poll tax is less significant, yet it was ultimately the issue which brought her down. (And it was introduced, as history often forgets, because of the anticipated reaction to property revaluation in Scotland, not because of some desire to treat Scotland as a testing ground.)

Would your Twitter account go the same way?

Your argument that alcohol doesn't harm others is a species of the American right-to-bear-firearms maxim that "guns don't kill people, people kill people", and it's just as slippery a way of trying to evade the link between alcohol and public harm. The British love a drink, of course, and would sooner not hear about that link, but it's there all right. Ask any casualty doctor, or police officer, or battered wife, or anyone who (as Greg and Shuggy point out) wants to go out in a city centre of a weekend. The counter-argument - that alcohol can't be all bad because some people like it - really doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

It's precisely because the culture of excessive consumption of alcohol is so embedded in British society that some sort of coercive method needs to be found to turn that culture around. I would start with minimum pricing myself.

Possibly, and as I'm qualified in a neighbouring jurisdiction I won't pretend familiarity with English statute law. But that's a slightly different argument. Legal incapacity to commit a crime or consent to an act isn't quite the same thing as not appreciating how serious the crime or act is.

EDIT: Does Mr Fagan's last reported comment illustrate what I'm getting at? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-wes...

Without getting into the rights and wrongs of the decision to prosecute, you suggest that if the boys "did not realise how serious what (they) were doing was" it follows that they lacked the mental state necessary for the crime of rape. This seems to me to be dubious as a legal proposition. Were that the case, every sniggering idiot who (say) hoax-calls a fire engine and then throws stones at it could plead lack of mens rea, as, I imagine, could many drink-drivers. To name but a couple of obvious examples.

If I'm carrying a knife and don't stab anyone, why should that be a problem?