The poet knew he was archaising, of course. Leaders, except for a few thoroughly bad CEOs, just aren’t like that. Indeed. I‘d set against Hope’s image of the heroic past a great New Yorker cartoon. In this drawing, a savage Goth or Vandal chieftain, armed to the teeth and homed helmet, is getting ready to leave his marquee, while his angry wife is yelling at him: ‘Sack Rome! Sack Rome! That’s your answer to everything.’

‘I want to say something about converse thinking, about looking at the underside of the fish. Every proposition, however important, has its converse. Leaders who don’t think of the converse are apt to roll foolishly with their clichés and exhausted hooray-words. For example, in exactly what ways is the Free World free, and free for whom? You can easily think of minorities for whom the word is a nasty joke. Again, does that four-letter word have the same meaning when applied to that modem superstition, Free Trade? Here it may well mean free for large corporations to override democratically elected governments.

Another slant: What archaic traces lead us to call our far north-west, the Middle East? And there are many other historical clichés we live by, either through being lazy guzzlers of the media or through serious historical ignorance.

 A harder question now for our historical imaginations: wasn’t Islam the heart of the civilised world for a good deal longer than Christendom has been? If so, an educated Moslem, peaceful, civilised, might be looking today at the converse of our own mental map of the world, even if he/she had no tolerance of terrorism – which is another sliding term, since I first beard it used about the Stem Gang, in Jerusalem.

Yet again, the obverse may be invisible: you may have to seek it out. Recently, I was at a public meeting on political dissent. It focused on the things one might expect: Iraq, the Palestinians, George W. Bush. At the end, a friend turned to me and said: ‘there are many kinds of quashed dissent, not just those on one side. For some years journalists on most newspapers were instructed to kill stories about Pauline Hanson and her party.·

A nastier question: are ‘weapons of mass destruction’ sites in the USA inspected by the United Nations? Or in Pakistan? Or in China? We are not told the answer.

Let us press further into home territory. Humans are at least doubled upon themselves, poor complicated psyches, so it was no wonder that Thomas Hardy tried to imagine a paradisal time’ Before the birth of consciousness, / When all went well’. Impossible task, of course, to get back before the apple-offering serpent, that clever vegetarian. We are stuck with knowledge, so let us always look for more. We might even remember that the unlovely Pauline Hanson was fiercely hostile to globalisation. What did the left think about that?

Like those practising Christians who are also rich executives, we rock between one internalised value system and another. There is a wonderful poem about this by the Australian poet Mary Gilmore. It has always haunted me.

have grown past hate and bitterness, I see the world as one;
But though I can no longer hate, My son is still my son.
All men at God’s round table sit, And all men must be fed;
But this loaf in my hand,
This loaf is my son’s bread.

It’s a wise poem. And perhaps a terrible one. Politics keeps on beginning at home, try as we can to reach those instructive obverse truths. As Russell Hoban once wrote: ‘Everybody has a part in many overlapping stories and it isn’t always clear which one is particularly your own story.’ If anyone is.

What do we want from a leader in any field? We want her to be thinking of the human cost of the project, imagining all its complexities of impact. An exciting initiative should always take into account its effect on the person who stands or sits on the very lowest rung of the whole operation.

Let me end with a shocking, perhaps religious, remark made by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel: ‘This ethos of non-acquisitive industriousness does not exist in modem liberal democracies.’ Non-acquisitive industriousness! A bitter pill to swallow, isn’t it? And just brood on this, thinking what it does to comfortable terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’. I assure you that none of us will escape whipping. But that, I hope, is what keeps you all on your toes.