I have a friend in London who is irredeemably posh and takes great delight in mocking football fans, who he deems to be classless oiks — including me, and we’re supposed to be friends.

There is much angst among the Western liberal cognoscenti over the “peace agreement” with Russia currently being foisted on the Ukrainian people by the Trump administration in Washington, chiefly on the ground that it is less a peace agreement and more a capitulation.

Greater economic minds than mine (it’s not a high bar, to be honest) have generated a tsunami of words in the past week on the subject of what Donald Trump called “Liberation Day,” so it need not detain us for long today.

To my astonishment, I discovered last week that Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced in The Beatles by a lookalike Scottish orphan called Billy Shears, who has been masquerading as the legendary musician ever since.

The madness, because that is what it is, began in earnest in 1998 with the publication in the respected British medical journal The Lancet of a study purporting to establish a link between autism and MMR — the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella.

The 20th-century British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic.

For anyone foolish enough to obtain their news from the unregulated wild west of social media, or from websites populated by the increasingly bizarre output of artificial intelligence, this has not been a good week.

It was in October 1980, while debating against the incumbent Jimmy Carter during the US presidential election campaign, that Republican challenger Ronald Reagan posed what was simultaneously the simplest but also the most profound question ever asked of voters by a candidate.