It is, by now, clear that Kim Jong-un is madder than his father. He’s blasted off North Korea’s third nuclear test and plans to restart its nuclear reactor, as his people continue to starve. Last weekend his government declared that the ‘time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle’ with South Korea. He has instructed his troops to ‘break the waists of the crazy enemies’ and also ‘cut their windpipes’. For good measure he described Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female president, as a ‘venomous swish of skirt’ and has severed all military hotlines with Seoul, like a petulant teenager refusing to answer the phone.

When David Cameron proposed toughening the rules that govern foreign nationals being treated for free by the National Health Service, he faced — as one might expect — a barrage of criticism. The Prime Minister was accused of tilting at windmills. The threat exists only in the minds of xenophobes, said his critics. The actual levels of abuse are minimal, so why is he scaremongering? A few weeks earlier, I had written a piece for The Spectator from a different perspective; that of an cancer specialist who has spent his career in the NHS.

I thought the Haute Route was going to be easier than the Engadin, the cross-country ski marathon I recently completed in St Moritz. I was very wrong. It was sold to me as an 180km ski-touring trek from Chamonix to Zermatt. I imagined lovely powder skiing in bubbly snow, floating down unmarked tracks under blissful blue skies, with the odd sighting of chamois. The reality was a five-day, mostly uphill trek through patchy cloud with a heavy rucksack on my back.