My claim to fame this year: I stopped a lot of people from squirting each other with milk

Every columnist, broadcaster or writer should, as each year closes, review his or her net contribution to the sum total of national good. It isn’t vain — or, if vain, it’s the vanity demanded by self-respect — that we should ask what we’ve done to change the world for the better.

One hundred and ten years ago this New Year’s eve, Emile Zola will have reflected with pride on the total exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, whose cruel traduction by the French authorities the brave writer did so much to expose. Charles Dickens deserved to spend his Christmases proudly contemplating how his stories, serialised in the daily newspapers, had awakened the Victorian conscience to the sufferings of the poor. The great American broadcaster Ed Murrow could have taken quiet year-end satisfaction from his fearless unmasking of Senator Joe McCarthy and his lies. And, closer to home, my distinguished predecessor on the Times, Bernard Levin, will surely have reviewed with a sense of honest annual achievement the innocent black South Africans, the wicked Gas Board officials and the philistine opera directors whose stories his journalism had brought to public attention.

How I admire Simon Jenkins and his campaigns to civilise the national appreciation of our built and natural environment; the late Hugo Young and his tireless defence of our common European inheritance; and Simon Heffer and Christopher Booker for their tireless attacks on it. Carved on Robin Cook’s gravestone in Grange cemetery, Edinburgh, is his own piece of personal stocktaking: ‘I may not have succeeded in halting the war but I did secure the right of parliament to decide on war.’

Hear, hear, to all that. And so it is, that as the ninth year of our new century draws to a close, I too must ask myself what I’ve done for humanity this year.