I don’t know who handles the PR for these Canadian seal-clubbers, but it must be a hell of a job. Can there be any group, on the entire planet, that so excites the hatred of the British public? Not the Korean dog-eaters, nor the Italian butterfly-shooters, nor the Spanish goat-headyankers – no, not even the French, who, as we all know, eat our children’s ponies – no one can match the Canadian fisherman for provoking the Briton to tears of rage; and one can see why.

Here is a fellow who rises and puts on his great big waterproof boots and his great big waterproof hat. Then he picks up a horrible knobkerrie, studded with nails, gives his wife a loving kiss, and strides on to ice floes where he sets about him with a terrible Hutu-style slaughter. Bonk-bash-bonk he goes, like some demented axeman, and nothing will stop him. The telephoto lenses of the RSPCA cameras whirr and click.

Above him hover the helicopters chartered by the BBC, while live pictures of the horror are beamed into every living-room in this country. Does he care?

Does he hell. And it is not just any old beast that he brains, but a mammal, a creature like us that suckles its young; and it is a large, defenceless mammal, with both eyes in the front of its head, in that cute anthropomorphic way. It is a furry mammal, with a bark as winsome as any leal and faithful labrador.

One after another, biff-thunk-clunk, the Canadians are now beating these trusting little critters to death, thousands of them a day, until the snow runs red in that awful way we saw on the front of yesterday’s Independent newspaper.

Is there anyone who could possibly attempt to justify this kind of barbarity? Will anyone stand up for the seal cull? Well, ahem, at the risk of terminally alienating and offending animal-lovers across the country, it is the duty of this column – which ever puts logic above popularity – to have a go.

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…”Hello,” says a voice you do not know. It is the voice of someone with a pen poised over your name on a list, ready to strike it off. It is the detached voice of the cold-call insurance salesperson, the double-glazing hawker, and the voice wants to know whether it is you speaking. Yes, you say, anxiety beginning to frost your heart, and you confirm that you are you. And then the voice wants to know whether you have an appointment for an operation on the coming Tuesday.

Yes, you say, and the chill of apprehension deepens. “I am sorry to inform you that your operation has been cancelled,” says the voice. “Please ring after 10am tomorrow.” And you slump back, exhausted and bewildered, facing another wait of unguessable duration, and the pain and the fear continue. That is how the NHS is treating patients every day across the country; and the doctors themselves believe it is a cruel and wanton waste of resources.

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It is a terrible warning for any leading Arab terrorist. You think you’ve got away with it. You haven’t been associated with the deaths of any westerners for at least 10 years. You’ve been in a perpetual state of paranoia, in case a US Navy Seal should pop out of your plumbing and peg you where it hurts.

You’ve been looking under your car, you’ve been twitching the curtains of your tent in case a Tomahawk cruise missile should be on its way; and just when you think the West has forgotten all about your crimes, they send you nemesis. No, they don’t send Bond. They don’t send an assassin. They send Tony Blair to meet you, and what does he do? He kisses you on both cheeks!

Yes, my friends, that is apparently to be the fate, somewhere in Tripoli, of the Libyan leader, the man Ronald Reagan called a “mad dog”. This is the man whose barbaric regime was unquestionably involved in the murder of hundreds of people, British and Americans, in the sky and on the ground at Lockerbie.

This same Libyan regime was responsible for the shooting in cold blood of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in St James’s Square, and for the shipping of heaven knows how much weaponry to the IRA. And how do we choose to requite him for his crimes? According to last night’s evening paper, Tony Blair is going to hail his “courage” and the pair are then going to smooch faster than you can say Mwah-mwah al-Gaddafi.

What an amazing way to run a war on terror. The Libyans have a leader who genuinely has a record as long as your arm in sponsoring terror; and he gets the kiss from Blair, because Libya has signalled that it is willing to do business with the West.

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… And when we come to the building of houses other than our own, we attain, as a nation, our most dizzying pitch of intellectual dishonesty. With one breath we grieve for the shortage of “affordable housing”. We bewail the lack of nurses, or young police officers, or bus drivers, or even bartenders, who find it so difficult to afford accommodation in London and the South-East.

But as soon as we are told that there is a solution at hand, and that “affordable houses” are to be plonked in the vicinity of our own, we become quite incoherent with anger; not just because of the loss of amenity, the uprooting of those ancient elms, or the threat to the mating habits of the great crested grebes which – or so we assert until we are blue in the face – depend entirely on that open field next door if they are to achieve the slightest romantic feelings toward one another.

No, we object also because we fear that the new arrivals could have an adverse effect on the value of our property…

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All my nostalgia for Venice has been evoked by an article in this week’s Spectator, in which Stephen Glover describes the sybaritic pleasures of his weekend. Like us, he stayed at some terrifically posh hotel, called the Pritti or the Gritti.

Like us, he roamed in the evening mist, and rejoiced in the cosy yellow light of the bars and the enigmatic chuckling from the corners. And like us, his joy was accentuated by the knowledge that he wasn’t paying a penny, neither for his travel, nor for his accommodation.

Because Glover, like us, was attending what is known to the politico-journalistic class as a junket, jolly, freebie or boondoggle; and which is classified, for the benefit of irritable taxpayers, as a conference.

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When I was six, I had a wheeze. I had noticed that gumboots were impermeable to water from the outside, and deduced that they must also be impermeable from the inside. So my younger sister and I decided to fill up all the gumboots in the hall with water, and then watch some adult putting his or her foot in it.

The scheme was a triumph, and we were pursued around the garden by an adult armed with a stick – I am not exaggerating – as thick as your arm. We knew it would hurt; we knew we were for it in a big way. But our very terror reduced us to helpless and invertebrate laughter.

We both laughed so much that we couldn’t run, and we sank to the grass at the bottom of the garden and were soundly and deservedly thrashed.

I mention this because my mind has been much occupied with themes of terror and laughter, ever since a group of us went to see the first showing of The Passion of the Christ. I am afraid to say that I was late, and, as I entered the foyer of the Odeon West End, a man with an earring broke off from his mobile phone call and said: “It’s all right, Mr Johnson, you’re in time for the Crucifixion.”

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It was round about 3pm yesterday and all I had eaten for lunch was some kind of measly chicken sandwich, and as I sat at my desk I could feel my resolve weakening like spaghetti on the boil.

It was there, waiting for me in Rudi’s chill cabinet, not 100 yards down the road. It was an extra large Kit Kat. It was a huge chomping chunk, chocker with choccie. Compared to the misery of a chicken sandwich, it was a taste explosion of sugars and fats and scrummy cocoa solids and buttermilk. It would be so gooood, I thought to myself; but no, no, I reflected. It was bad. It was naughty.

No sooner had I decided finally and irretrievably not to go down to the shop than wham, by some teleporting process beyond my comprehension I found myself in Rudi’s, handing over the change, ripping off the wrapper and scoffing that Kit Kat like a psychopathic Bunter.

And across the country, every moment of the day, shopkeepers are witnessing similar disgusting scenes of weakness of will. We know we shouldn’t do it, but we just can’t seem to stop. As our collars swell, and our chairs groan, and our very cars turn into giant inflatable condom-style people carriers, the Labour government has decided that we must be restrained.

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No doubt there will be many readers who will say that this is milquetoast stuff, and will happily supply reminiscences of “Thrasher” so-and-so, who used to lay about him with a golf-club, jokari bat, crow-bar etc; and no doubt there will be some who say that six of the best never did anyone any harm, made them what they are, etc etc.

My point is not to take issue with them, but simply to show what a yawning gulf has opened between the world then and the world now. There was one truly marmalade-dropping story in yesterday’s paper, and it concerned the poor special needs teacher in Cardiff.

We see her depicted in the defeated pose that newspapers reserve for anyone who is supposed to have been caught out doing something truly inexcusable. She is head down, clutching her handbag and her shopping, keys out, and clearly ambushed by the photographers camped on her doorstep. Her crime? She briefly applied masking tape to the mouth of an 11-year-old special needs child, Ben Deacy, who was talking so much that he was disrupting the class. The mother has complained, the school headmaster has denounced her, and the incident is being “investigated” by the education authorities.

Does anybody agree with me that the reaction to this affair is utterly hysterical? As the cowardly headmaster himself testified: “The tape wasn’t put the long way over his mouth. It was a small piece, going from the top to the bottom lip, and it wasn’t blocking his breathing.” It sounds to me like a joke; indeed, the matter only came to the mother’s attention because Annie Sturrock mentioned it in her report on the kid. “Excellent work – once I taped his mouth up!” she said.

Shouldn’t the headmaster, and the education authority, have defended their teacher, and made clear to the mother the spirit in which the action was intended?

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UPDATE – Teacher who taped boy’s mouth avoids prosecution: Following an eight-week police investigation, the CPS has decided that there was insufficient evidence and that it would not be in the public interest to proceed against Annie Sturrock.