VINNIE Jones advertises them on television, the director of Public Health England thinks they are mostly for the good, while the Welsh government wants to ban them at work. And someone reading this is probably toking on one of the damn things right now.

Whatever you think of them, you just can’t escape e-cigarettes.

This thought arose yesterday on the Number 1 bus. Usually I would have been cycling, but I’d walked to meet the daughter who was in town for a few hours. On the way back the bus was full of young people returning from school. They all crowded at the front of the single-decker bus, perhaps because there was no upper deck where they could hide or misbehave. At a guess they were 14 or 15 and smart in their uniforms.

One of the lads, the class clown by the looks of it, was doing something furtive with a cigarette, a quick drag here, hand cupped to hide his action, smoke exhaled in a whoosh, then passing the cigarette on to the next boy. That cigarette did the rounds, going from hand to hand, before disappearing from view.

I knew it couldn’t be a cigarette, an old-fashioned, tobacco-filled paper tube. The smell alone would have alerted the driver. But the actions were exactly the same as if they’d been circulating a roll-up behind the bicycle sheds. This was always the time-honoured location for illicit smoking and other actions too, or so tradition and cliché have it. To be honest I can’t ever remember going behind the bicycle sheds at my boys-only grammar school.

In the sixth form the loos were a favoured place for a sneaky drag – a tote on a cigarette, that is, not a quick change into unusually extravagant clothing. Smoking a fag in the cubicles wasn’t for me, oh no. This is for a rather ludicrous reason.

Teenagers often do things in the name of being different or attempting to stand out. That’s where the pipe came in, a curly item in the Sherlock Holmes mould. Smoking a pipe was briefly my thing. And once I took part in a group visit to the loos or the ‘bogs’ as we probably called them. I lit the pipe, had a puff while others sparked up their cigarettes. Then a teacher alert went out and I dropped the pipe into my blazer, where it smouldered and threatened to start a pocket fire. And me a prefect too.

At least that’s how this incident takes shape in my mind now. Sometimes it’s hard to know for sure what happened at the time and what you have embroidered in the telling over the years. But it’s there in the past in some form or other.

The pipe period didn’t last and that Hendrix-haired boy moved onto cigars for a year or two, and then quickly moved on to smoking nothing at all.

How splendid I must have looked with that pipe, all hair and smoke and hardly any room for a face. But I like the memory and can still smell the tobacco. Mostly I went for the aromatic ones, Clan or Holland House. You don’t see pipes much nowadays.

The kids on the bus made me wonder if sneaky vaping was the modern equivalent of sneaky smoking. The arguments still rumble about these supposedly safer cigarettes with their clouds of pretend smoke.

Vinnie Jones lends his tough-guy frown to promoting a certain brand of steam-powered cigarettes, although he’s not seen ‘vaping’ or inhaling the vapour with its nicotine droplets or whatever they are.

Will more teenagers take up these e-cigarettes thanks to Jones and his adverts? Maybe they will, but I guess that in the past they would have been smoking more harmful real cigarettes.

Public Health England reckons that “on the best estimates so far”, e-cigarettes are 95 per cent less harmful than tobacco cigarettes, although not without risk.

As for smoking a pipe when you are a teenager, that is not without the risk of making yourself appear a complete tit.

While on a cigarette theme, there was a lovely phrase from a lad on the TV programme Educating Cardiff last night. Young Corey is tiny, super-smart and loves rugby, even though he’s not much taller than the ball.

He is proud of his stature, saying that he takes after his dad – who is “five foot and a fag butt”.

BASHING unions is natural territory for this government, as easy as chasing a fox or poisoning a badger. The funny thing is that what we are witnessing is the fighting of old battles for a new purpose.

Back in the 1970s, the heyday of union militancy, nearly 13 million days a year were lost on average due to strike action. In the year to last April, the figure was reported as 704,000 days. Memories of something which was once a very big problem are being revived to excuse the trade union bill. Why should this be? Oh, naked opportunism and wanting to look tough in the political playground, at a guess.

Among those who have objected to the proposals is the Tory MP David Davis, who says that sections of the bill were reminiscent of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. Davis supports most of what is in the bill, but believes that requiring picketers to give their names to police is draconian.

“What is this?” he said on Sky News on Sunday. “This isn’t Franco’s Britain, this is Queen Elizabeth II’s Britain.” Davis described such proposals as ‘OTT’, joining other critics numbering Liberty, Amnesty International, the British Institute of Human Rights and former MP Vince Cable.

According to Cable – like Mr Davis, born in York – the measures are “vindictive, counterproductive and ideologically driven”.

Now that he has stopped supping with the devil, Cable feels free to reveal that under the coalition the Tories were always pressing for more aggressive trade union legislation. “They see the trade unions and the Labour party as the enemy. The question then is how do you weaken them? That is their starting point.”

Well, thank you, Vince – and look where all that long-spoon supping got you and the rest of us.

In the 1970s unions were powerful and sometimes out of control. Now they are nothing of the sort. My own union days are both behind me and still present. Behind because I no longer work on the newspaper, but present in the sense that I still pay the dues. I am not fully sure why, although habit and bruised loyalty may have something to do with it.

And there isn’t a union specifically for people who used to be journalists (perhaps there should be, there are a lot of us around) or for people who are journalists only when they sell a feature. I do have another one coming up, so that will leave me feeling like a journalist again for a day or two.

There are a couple of dusty ironies blowing around my ankles here. Since leaving the newspaper three months ago, I have written far more words than ever before. More than 50,000 to date in this daily blog, and far more than that again on a thriller/crime novel. So a union for churning out words could represent me still.

And the other irony? Well, sometimes I felt conflicted about the union. My union was and is the National Union of Journalists. I sat through the meetings and stood on a picket line or two.

Here, without betraying any confidences, is a typical chapel meeting. A group of people sit in the pub at lunchtime discussing the latest union concerns. Some are the usual firebrands who want to strike about everything and anything. Others talk moderately enough in the office, but turn radical once the meeting starts, as if dripped on from an unseen barrel of militancy. Others stay quiet and look worried.

And the balding man with glasses says, as he usually does, that going on strike should always be the last resort, etc.

My reluctance to strike was well known. I suspected this made me a fairly useless union member, or someone who perhaps shouldn’t be in the union. Did being in the union hold me back (possibly) or keep me going (possibly too)? There is companionship in a union.

My fellow members were kind enough to say in a farewell meeting that they respected me for speaking up against industrial action but joining in when the day came. I found this genuinely touching, especially as I’d always wondered if cowardice had had something to do with it. Cowardice and bills to pay with not much in the bank.

As someone who no longer has to attend union meetings, I don’t miss the fretfulness and the sinking feeling when a strike was looming, but I do miss the comradeship.

If new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn would like some advice, perhaps he should strive to show unions in a positive light, as bodies prepared to collaborate rather than obstruct. This, after all, is how unions have operated in Germany for many years, and successfully too.

Incidentally, the saying played with above is thought to come from the 14^th century and has it that “he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon”. The meaning is clear enough, isn’t it, Vince: be cautious when dealing with dangerous people.

THE “no vacancies” sign has come down and we have Airbnb guests again. My wife is away for the night and I am grilling a piece of pork. This is not a difficult culinary task: three lots of five minutes equalling 15 minutes under the heat. A good quick bit of meat for a man married to a vegetarian.

A young German woman from London stayed overnight. I ran her into York after a long breakfast chat about town versus country, Britain versus Germany, followed by a walk round the garden.

Our new guest is here all week for the antiquarian book fair. His journey from London has been disrupted and he has phoned a couple of times to keep me up to date. The pork steak has had one turn and is half-way through cooking when the doorbell rings. Our guest has arrived and I welcome him in and start on my host spiel. We are standing by the kitchen door. A sense of having forgotten something passes through my mind like a fish lurking at the bottom of a pool.

And then it happens.

All the smoke alarms go off. I have to interrupt my introductory talk and dash around the house with a chair. The alarms are very loud. I stand on the chair, push the buttons and the alarms fall silent, although my ears carry on ringing for a while longer. That’s one way to test the smoke alarms.

Back downstairs, I apologise to our guest. He says it was all very dramatic and suggests it was his fault for distracting me. I suspect the blame lies more squarely with the person who left a piece of grilling meat to its own devices. You could build a charred wall with the pieces of toast which have gone that way down the years. Then there are the forgotten pans. The other day I was heating oil for potatoes to go in a Spanish-style omelette when I switched on the TV news and picked up my guitar for a strum. That oil was very hot by the time I remembered.

We have had many visitors now from all over the world. As well as the British guests, we have had people from Australia, France, Germany, China, Japan, Israel via Crewe, the Crimea (via Norway) and America (via London). And an English couple who live in Luxembourg. I hope that isn’t to forget anyone.

Opening the house to strangers has been mostly a comfortable experience. All of the guests have been pleasant, some have been a little more demanding than others, but we now specify no cooked breakfasts, which removes the need for last-minute scrambling of eggs and so on.

The question some people ask us is whether it is strange to let people into our house. It would be if you didn’t like the idea or were suspicious of strangers. But it’s been fine so far, enjoyable even, and I like the changing rota of guests, someone to get to know a little before they leave and their replacement arrives.

Each new person has a different story and they offer company after a day of laptop labour. My wife finds this harder as she is out at work, talking to people. And the washing of sheets falls to her, so there is that too.

The lack of company is the strangest part of being at home alone rather than in the office. That and not feeling part of the outside world. The other day, when I wrote about the Tory MP and his refugee barber, I realised that sometimes I miss being in dear old Walmgate. No nipping over the road for a head-shave at the busy barbers – although I have found somewhere else to park my balding head. And no weekly cappuccino from the lovely Polish café. Just a stovetop coffee from the ancient espresso pot, a good drink but sadly served without office gossip, unless I start talking to myself, which isn’t a good sign.

Our guest has just left for his booksellers’ conference. And I am upstairs on the laptop again. There will be no smoke alerts as my licence to grill had been revoked. Curry from the freezer today, and you have to try hard to make a drama out of that.

WHAT possible connection could there be between a man sticking up for badgers and foxes, and a young woman affronted by a compliment?  On one level nothing more than both appearing on the same page in the newspaper I was reading. But there is more to it than that.

The link lies in the sweaty incubator of news. Pop something in there for a few moments and it will soon spawn into a many-celled monster.

The TV presenter Chris Packham has been faced with calls for him to be sacked by the BBC following an article he wrote for BBC Wildlife magazine in which he argued that conservation groups were sitting on the fence over foxhunting and badger culling.

Packham has been under pressure to resign from the Countryside Alliance, even though all he did was state something that would seem fairly uncontroversial to many people. He may be single-minded and rather nerdish. What he’s not is some sort of activist hell-bent on pushing animal rights propaganda on the BBC, which is how he has been portrayed by the alliance and its chief executive, Tim Bonner. No, he’s a little odd perhaps, but totally dedicated to wildlife.

Barrister Charlotte Proudman was given the greater part of the page in yesterday’s Guardian, with Packham squashed at the bottom. Her photograph filled four of that newspaper’s fat columns – which isn’t life-sized or anything, but is pretty big. Packham was pictured on a much smaller scale while a badger appeared to whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

There was an irony here. A large picture was used of a woman who complained when a man complimented her LinkedIn picture. Before going any further, it is worth pointing out that this must be the first time that website has been linked with anything as lively as a controversy.

The man whose compliment annoyed Charlotte Proudman was leading solicitor Alexander Carter-Silk (he was never going to be a bricklayer with that name, was he). He saw her profile picture and sent her the following message: “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture. You definitely win the prize for the best LinkedIn picture I have ever seen.”

Now that was what you might call an unsolicited comment, and it was certainly not the best idea Carter-Silk had had since that distant day when his two surnames snuggled up together.

Proudman complained about his sexism and said that she wasn’t on LinkedIn to be “objectified by sexist men”. His defence was that he had only been commenting on the quality of the picture. This was a little odd. What sort of a person goes around assessing the picture quality on LinkedIn? Perhaps there was no proper soliciting to be done that day.

A sexism storm blew up after that, or so it says here. Much of the hostile attention was directed at Proudman for being a humourless member of the “feminazi” – not a term I’ve encountered before – who couldn’t take a compliment.

Man On Ledge feels little sympathy for either of these people.

If Carter-Silk had paused before sending his message, he might have concluded that telling a young woman she looked good was not a smart move. And if Proudman hadn’t gone and put the exchange in the Twitter airing-cupboard, then the story would not have risen quite so dramatically.

In short it’s all down to our old friend ‘what if’. What if Carter-Silk had been a little more cautious in his compliments; and what if Proudman hadn’t been so trigger-happy in taking offence? This should have been a storm in a cappuccino cup, but turned into a social media tempest.

You may well ask what Charlotte Proudman looks like in her picture. But I’m not falling for that one.

JEREMY Corbyn’s resounding victory quite knocked away my intention to address the more parochial matter of David Cameron being rude about Yorkshire.

It had seemed for a while that the veteran left-winger would win the leadership of his party. And to cries of “Jez we can” – or that’s what it sounded like on the car radio driving back from the supermarket – Corbyn stole the poll this morning, securing 59.5 per cent of the vote. A victory thanks in part to the reported 88,499 supporters who voted for Corbyn after paying £3 to join the Labour Party.

Some of those who visit me on this ledge will be pleased by this result, as suggested by comments submitted to the blog or separate messages on Facebook.

I’m still not so sure. Is there any chance that the veteran protestor and complainer about much that his party believes in can do two things at once? Men are often teased about their inability to multi-task in this way. What Corbyn now has to do is unite a battered party whose members will not all be pleased about having him for a leader – while at the same time convincing enough Labour-sceptic voters that his brand of socialism could work for them.

I don’t belong to Labour or any other party, but I am a ragged old leftie by instinct, a long-time small ‘l’ liberal. To me what has happened today is one of those head-and-heart occasions.

My head says: hang on, do you really think having an old leftie for a leader is a good idea on any scale of common sense away from the whirlpool of wish-fulfilment? Can an anti-establishment leftie with no ministerial experience take on a resurgent Tory party? Well, I hope so because there is nothing more depressing than seeing Cameron and Osborne on a right-wing rampage. But once the febrile moment has gone, the danger is that Labour will wake up with a bad headache and even less chance of winning than before.

Now let the heart take over.

At least Corbyn seems to believe in what he says, rather than being one of those identikit pick-your-party talking heads we see so much nowadays. And it’s a long time since anyone stirred up quite so much excitement on the left. So give the man his chance (fingers crossed, wooden objects touched smooth and so on). And at least Corbyn dares to be anti-austerity, dares to speak up about what is happening under this government. And, well, you just never know.

That is probably quite enough from my hungry old heart (and everyone has one of those, according to the book of Springsteen). In all honesty I don’t know if this is a good day for Labour, or the beginning of a long march towards oblivion.

What happens now should in part be down to those three-pound Labour members whose undeniable enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn has seen their man lifted high. They need to stick around and stay loyal, to take an interest in the hero they created. Because if they wander off once the excitement is over, then Labour will left with a leader elected by temporary members who’ve passed on to the next craze.

But let’s hand back to the heart. This could be the start of something for those of us who grumble about the Tories. Perhaps Jez really can… that groaning you can hear off-stage is head complaining about a gathering migraine.

AS FOR Cameron’s unguarded moment, was this such a big deal? The prime minister was caught by a microphone while discussing rival devolution bids in Yorkshire, saying: “We just thought people in Yorkshire hated everyone else, we didn’t really they hated each other so much.”

As a Bristol-born, Manchester-raised former Londoner and long-time resident of Yorkshire, I can see where he was coming from. Pride in Yorkshire as a whole, and as an almost mythical identity, is something immovable in this county. And fair enough, there is much cause for such pride.

Step beyond that and the rivalries open up: between York and Leeds, Leeds and Bradford, everywhere else and Hull.

It’s a twin-track affair: people love Yorkshire unfailingly, while thinking their particular patch is without doubt the best.

And I think the prime minister was joking. I was ejected from the David Cameron fan club a long time ago, but I thought this was quite amusing.

NOW I do love the story about the Tory MP and his haircut. Not everything connected with refugees is sombre and humbling. Sometimes it’s just about an MP making a tit of himself.

Adam Holloway, the MP for Gravesham, wanted a handy personal tale to illustrate the problem with asylum seekers. So he told the Commons about the difficulties he was having with his barber.

‘I couldn’t get my haircut the other day,’ he said. This is the sort of thing MPs say when they are intent on showing us how in touch they are. You know, ordinary human beings whose hair needs cutting or who can guess the price of milk.

It was a good story. Holloway’s trim had to be put on hold because his hairdresser, a refugee from Iraq, had gone on holiday to the country he had fled.

This set Holloway off on an inadvisable anecdotal ramble. He began with one of those phrases people use when they wish to show their grasp of common disdain. In Holloway’s case those words were: ‘We have people in this country…’ You know the sort of thing. Makes the heart sink an inch. Brings to mind barstools in country pubs or relatives with unfortunate opinions.

The full sentence was: ‘We have people in this country who have come here, claimed asylum and then they go back on holiday in places where they’ve claimed asylum from.’

That’s why Holloway couldn’t get his hair cut. Only it wasn’t. His barber, Shivan Saeed, later came forward to reveal that he hadn’t gone back to Iraq. He had spent a week with his wife and young son in a caravan in Great Yarmouth.

The barber, who is 23, told the Daily Mail: ‘It’s dangerous to go back to Iraq – if I wanted to go back there why would I have come here? Next time I see him, I will tell him. I am not annoyed – I am all right with it. He just got it wrong.’

The MP made a mistake and that happens. The trouble came when he sewed his error into a silly great blanket of a speech about immigration and the difference between economic migrants and asylum seekers. And when it turned out that his illustrative yarn was comically wrong, he was left dripping with the baptismal waters of twerp-dom.

Holloway told The Guardian yesterday that important parts of his speech had been overlooked, and he said this as someone who once stayed in the Sangatte camp in Calais.

The former solider and TV reporter spent a week living as a ‘refugee’ at the now-closed camp. Those of us who have never even visited such a place shouldn’t criticise. But where’s the fun in that? Living among refugees for a week doesn’t make you a refugee; it makes you someone labouring a point.

It’s the same with those MPs who occasionally pretend to survive perfectly well on benefits. Living on benefits and beans for a week, no problem, does not make an MP jobless or homeless. It makes them a socially offensive poseur who wants kudos for hanging around the ‘wrong’ side of town.

Two years ago, the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, said he could live on £53 a week in benefits. So could many people if they lived in a country house belonging to their father-in-law the baron.

As for Adam Holloway, he made a fool of himself and we’ve all done that. But his story does confirm long-held prejudices. These migrants, they come over here and undermine our traditional values by taking their wives off to Great Yarmouth for a week. I do love this story. Even the holiday destination could not be more pleasantly mundane.

Thankfully, Shivan Saeed seems to be a forgiving man. Otherwise next time he might have given Holloway a really bad haircut. Incidentally, I wonder what Republican hopeful Donald Trump ever did to offend his barber.

“Hi Julian Cole…” Suddenly I am on very friendly terms with the government. Please don’t hold this against me. All I did was sign a petition saying that Britain should accept more refugees.

I don’t usually put my name to things. But I did sign that petition on the UK Government and Parliament Petitions website, along with more than 400,000 others. The way these petitions work is that if there are more than 100,000 signatures the government then has to agree to a debate, or at least agree to consider having a debate.

Signing that petition triggered two emails. The first one said the Petitions Committee had decided there was no need for a debate as the matter had already been discussed in the House of Commons on several occasions, including last Monday, so “the time was not right for another debate on the same issue”. Monday’s debate, you will recall, was mostly dominated by David Cameron telling us he had sent in the drones to kill two Britons said to have been fighting for Isis.

The brief statement felt like a pat on the head: don’t you worry your little head about that petition, the government has everything in hand, so why don’t you just go back to watching the Great British Bake Off.

Then this morning another email arrived. This one was far more detailed. It began: “The UK has a proud history of providing refuge to those in genuine need of protection. We will continue to play our full part at the forefront of the international response to the crisis…”

There was more, very much more, of the same. It was like being delivered your very own bit of political ducking-and-diving – like finding David Cameron smarming around in the inbox, swaddled in statistics.

The signature read: “Home Office.” Very brusque. Never mind all that “Hi Julian Cole” stuff now.

This left me a little confused. Number one email patronised me; number two email went into great detail to illustrate that I was wrong. Part of the reason, I guess, is that such petitions are monitored by a committee that stands between the government and the petitioners.

Sometimes the committee responds to you; sometimes it passes on the government response. The first email came directly from the committee; the second conveyed the government reaction to the petition. But does this process represent genuine democracy or is it more of a sop?

Here are two further thoughts on the topic of the moment.

ONE: Does the very widespread public concern about refugees mean that the sort of anti-immigrant feelings stirred by some politicians, in particular Ukip and Nigel Farage, are now on the wane? Or once the dreadful images and stories of suffering eventually retreat from our screens and our newspaper pages, will people forget and allow fear of the other to sneak back in? Farage was on the evening news again last night, saying the EU ‘must be mad’ for accepting so many refugees. He also added that those on the move were economic migrants and not refugees, and said that the EU should use patrol boats to send people back to where they’d come from. So not much compassion there, Nigel. Might I suggest a poll with the following wording: “Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip, should in future be known simply as Mr Must Be Mad.”

TWO: Did you see the Riddell’s View cartoon in The Observer last Sunday? Unlike Steve Bell, his brilliant and sometimes extravagantly insulting colleague on The Guardian, Chris Riddell prefers a simple approach. Mostly this cartoon is filled with blue sea, apart from a corner of beach. Where the sea meets the land there lies the body of a small boy, face down in the water. The text reads: “SWARM” D CAMERON

Simple, but devastating.

SO how’s this for the sort of idea that insults justice, politics and fusty old Aunty Common Sense? Impose new fines on people when they appear in court that make it cheaper to plead guilty than maintain their innocence.

This idea was dreamt up by the former justice secretary Chris Grayling. He you may remember also caused an unnecessary row by banning books from prisons. He maintained at the time that the book ban would keep drugs out of prisons, although the Howard League for Penal Reform said this had not been originally cited as a reason. As far as anyone could tell, the reason was simply that the idea occurred to Grayling, perhaps while he was in the shower one morning, dreaming amid the steam of ways to flex his ministerial muscle.

It was such a great idea that Grayling managed to unite many of the leading writers in this country in opposition to his policy, which was relaxed earlier this year after a High Court ruling that the restriction was unlawful.

Grayling seems to have decided to go undimmed in the night of post-ministerial life by planting another ridiculous idea in the justice system. It’s almost as if he shuffled off muttering that if those pesky judges wouldn’t let him ban books, then he would mess something else up instead.

His new policy was introduced in April and now magistrates have begun to resign in protest at court charges of up to £1,200 that they claim can never be collected and encourage the innocent to plead guilty. The new charge was supposed to ensure that convicted adult offenders pay towards the cost of running the criminal justice system. As Grayling said at the time, no doubt freshly douched from the shower of stupid ideas, “Blah-blah and because I want to…”

Well, not quite. What he said was: “We’re on the side of people who work hard and want to get on, and that is why these reforms will make sure that those who commit crime pay their way and contribute towards the cost of their court cases.”

And let’s just rewind a little here… magistrates are resigning because of having to impose fines that encourage the innocent to plead guilty. That’s not justice, is it?

The charges in magistrates’ court range from £150 for anyone who pleads guilty to a summary offence up to £1,000 for those convicted of a serious offence. In the crown court, the charges are higher and can reach £1,200.

The sinister part of this policy is that because it costs less to plead guilty rather than face conviction after a contested trial, some people believe the innocent are pleading guilty as a cheaper way out.

This sort of thing can be called a perverse incentive. Here is an example of the unintended results such ideas can have, gleaned from a Google dip. Under French colonial rule, a plan to exterminate rats in Hanoi was based on paying a bounty for each rat tail handed in. Instead of wiping out rats, this is said to have led to the farming of rats for their now valuable tails.

Richard Monkhouse, chairman of the Magistrates Association, is quoted today as saying that his members had expressed concerns about the new charge from the outset and “it shows the strength of feeling when experienced magistrates resign from the bench because of it”.

Examples given by one departing magistrate in a letter to a newspaper include an unemployed man who put excessive toilet paper down a police-cell lavatory and ended up with costs of £410.

Sometimes it seems that government ministers are not happy unless they are proving their strength/testing the bounds of their idiocy by taking on so-called vested interests. Usually, as with the departing magistrates, these turn out to be the people who know what’s what.

‘They’re not and have never been British and the fact this murderous little thug won’t be setting foot in Cardiff again, well done RAF, well done, now waste the rest of them…’

This was the first of the readers’ comments below a report this morning on The Guardian’s website about the use of an RAF drone to kill two Britons fighting alongside Islamic State in Syria.

I guess this shows that not everyone who reads that newspaper/website comes from the expected liberal mould.

The attack followed the US model of drone strikes, an aspect of modern warfare that leaves some people feeling morally queasy (and which, incidentally, features in the BBC2 thriller Odyssey).

David Cameron announced in the Commons yesterday on its first day back after the summer break that he had authorised the unprecedented aerial attack. The prime minister justified the killing of Reyaad Khan, who was 21, on the grounds that he had presented a “clear and present danger” to British citizens. Khan, who appeared in an Isis recruiting video last year, was said to have been planning terrorist attacks around two events: the VE Day commemorations attended by the Queen in May, and a ceremony to mark the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich in June.

In his statement, Cameron said: “In an act of self-defence and after meticulous planning Reyaad Khan was killed in a precision airstrike carried out on 21 August by an RAF remotely piloted aircraft while he was travelling in a vehicle in the area of Raqqah in Syria.”

Another Briton travelling with him, Ruhul Amin, was also killed in the attack. Cameron said both men were involved in actively recruiting Isis sympathisers and were “seeking to orchestrate specific and barbaric attacks against the west”. “We should be under no illusion. Their intention was the murder of British citizens.”

This may well be true – but does not avoid the heavy irony that what the state has done is murder British citizens. Whether this was a right or legal act can be argued about until the horizon ties itself in a knot, and Cameron certainly believes he had the law behind him.

The average person watching the news has no idea, they are clueless drones responding to whatever they are being told. And I count myself among those without a clue.

This state of not knowing anything is because the legal advice to attack was based on secret intelligence which was not made public – because it was secret – or discussed in Parliament.

In practical terms, you couldn’t have a debate about such attacks, as decisions have to be made quickly and in secret. But the last vote in Parliament on whether or not there should be a military strike on Syria was lost by the government – which went ahead with this attack anyway.

So all we can do is believe what we wish to believe – and that’s all that leaders such as David Cameron do anyway. And Tony Blair before him. Blair is probably deeply envious that there weren’t RAF Reaper drones so readily to hand in his day.

This isn’t a party-political thing; it’s a leader thing, the burden/thrill of heavy responsibility. This is the point where politics tips beyond the everyday grind of argument, posturing and pretending to give a toss. This is the big important stuff that is so big and important it can happen without encumbrances such as debate or telling people anything beforehand.

Maybe this attack was legally justified, maybe it wasn’t: we don’t know because the intelligence used to justify the attack stays hidden. Everything rides on that intelligence: get that wrong and you’ll be sending in anonymous drones to kill innocent people, or people innocent of what you think they’ve done or were planning to do.

It’s not unusual for people to assume that politicians are lying to them or presenting versions of the truth more bent and full of holes than a Curly-Wurly bar. So was David Cameron telling it to us straight and uncurled? Well, you have to trust that he was because you don’t have any other option. And whether you feel like trusting Cameron on this matter depends on how you feel about him on other matters. And so the spiral deepens.

AS I type these words, I have no idea of what is going to happen. This, you see, is a real-time cliff-hanger.

The old car is heading for another MOT today. It’s a regular teenager now at 16 years old. Over the years it has picked up a few fashion statements, scratches for tattoos and a fancier adornment, a freehand whorl in the paintwork, where I reversed into our gatepost at night.

There are nearly 140,000 miles on the clock but the valiant estate still drives well. The electric windows don’t slide so willingly nowadays and the CD player gave up the ghost years ago. But the radio works, as does the tape cassette (see, I told you it was an old car), and a connector through the tape deck allows me to listen to music from my iPod. The speakers are good, although the one at the front on the driver’s side sometimes has to be encouraged with a thump.

Another fault with the speakers is that they seem to transmit an awful lot of Richard Thompson, but it is arguable that is not the fault of the car. Quite a bit of Van Morrison seems to be stuck in those speakers too.

The seat-warmers in the front still work so that bottoms can be warmed on a cold day. Perhaps Swedes have a thing about hot bots. Nowadays the air-conditioning is not so hot, but I can live with that.

The car is our second Volvo after the big silver one with leather seats seemingly borrowed from a gentleman’s club. That one went in the end because it only ran on leaded petrol. This one is a V70 and you see plenty of them around, some older than ours. So fingers crossed.

It’s seen some action has that old estate. Family holidays and all those trips to and from universities in three different cities, with the car crammed to the roof, every spare inch taken up with student detritus.

Trips to the tip, endless trips to the tip. This weekend one journey saw the car filled with rotting greenery from the garden. That all went into the green skip and the cabbage smell didn’t linger for too long. Yesterday we introduced another garden aroma, claiming our reward for all that deposited green stuff with a load of free compost. Just take some bags and a spade, stand before a crumbling hill of corporation compost and start digging. It’s not often you get anything for free from the council.

On one occasion the car rescued our eldest son after his scooter broke down on a country lane. With the back seats down, we managed to squeeze his heavy transport on board. The smell of petrol lingered for weeks.

For a while, when our middle boy was in a band with his schoolmates, I had a part-time job as roadie. Once the car returned from a rehearsal with the entire band and their instruments. Speed-bumps were approached cautiously that night, as the car was only a couple of inches off the road, and I didn’t want the exhaust to do a drum solo. Other times I parked at the back of Fibbers in York, waiting in the concrete shadows for a gig to end and the band to emerge.

On less of a heavy metal note, the Ercol dining table where I sit with my laptop travelled here in the back of that car too, along with the four matching chairs.

In a couple of hours, I shall lay my bicycle down in the versatile car and drive to the little one-man garage where the car has its annual check-up and service. I have noticed a few mechanical aches and pains, and a distant clank or two. From experience I fear that the exhaust pipe may be a little disconnected: the car’s that is, and not mine.

Old cars are worth nothing and they are worth a lot. I’d be lucky to get a grand for the old Volvo, but the car is worth more than that to me. So hopefully it won’t have to join me on this here ledge.

Those Swedes knew what they were doing back then, knew how to build a proper car. With regards to that cliff-hanger, the oily denouement will have to wait until later today. Here’s hoping…