When Andrew Neil asked for a ‘yes/no’ answer to the question whether Sir Fred Goodwin should have lost his knighthood, Michael Portillo got a bit uppity that I used neither word in reply, and said simply ‘irrelevant.’

But as I said here the other day, the idea that the loss of a silly bauble for one individual can somehow represent closure on this is a nonsense, and makes us look like a really silly country.

Gillian pointed out that following the American savings and loans crisis, which happened under Reagan, so vigorous were the subsequent inquiries that the number of financiers eventually jailed ran into four figures.

I don’t know if extensive criminality was involved in the banking collapse, but what I do know is that a lot of people in a lot of organisations screwed up big time, and caused havoc in the financial systems and in the lives of millions of people. As Andrew Neil pointed out, the consequences have been greater, and for more people, than the phonehacking scandal which has rightly led to an inquiry into the practices of the modern media. I was among many calling for such an inquiry long before David Cameron agreed to set it up. I expect that one day he will have to set up a banking inquiry too.

Gillian and I seemed to agree that the problem for politicians, bankers and regulators is that there has been no sense of closure on what happened. And there won’t be until there has been a proper reckoning. That means that all of the key players have to sit down in front of a powerful committee of inquiry, and be held to account.

It might mean such an inquiry would recommend the stripping of a knighthood or two; measures to deal with the out of control bonus culture; and ideas for new ways of running financial services. But more importantly, it could look at the whole picture – the role of politicians, regulators, credit ratings agencies, bankers, the lot.

Unless it happens, and unless it leads to change. the public anger will not subside, the politicians will continue to respond to it in a piecemeal way, and we’ll end up learning next to nothing.

So now that Gillian is behind the idea, I hope to see the FT leader pages fill up with calls for such truth, reconciliation and forward plan to be examined in detail and in public.

Banking largely got us into the mess. But it has a big role in getting us out of it. And it won’t be able to do so until that reckoning has happened.

We will doubtless be chatting banks and bankers, Dave and Ed, and all the stuff you’d expect of a political programme looking at some of the week’s big issues.

But on the back of my publishing The Happy Depressive, the programme asked me to make a little film to set up a discussion with Michael and my fellow depressive and Time to Change campaigner Ruby Wax on the subject of mental illness and public life.

It is not a new subject for me and my argument will be familiar to regular visitors here – that there is stigma and taboo surrounding mental illness, that public figures speaking out about it helps break it down, but that public figures tend not to because of the stigma and taboo … and so the vicious circle keeps on turning.

When I tweeted about it this morning, a Candadian follower called Mike Gibbs reminded me of his country’s liberal leader Bob Rae, the ex-Premier of Ontario, who has been open about his own battles with depression, and has led other Canadian politicians to similar openness. Canada’s PM Stephen Harper also made a powerful speech on the subject following the suicide of one of his MPs, Dave Batters.

So as doubtless some of you may be fed up of hearing about me on the subject, today’s blog is given over henceforth to Susan Delacourt, a Canadian journalist, writing last November about Bob Rae.I make the point tonight that whilst I understand MPs fearing being open about having mental health problems, I have found nothing but understanding from both public and media. It looks to me like Bob Rae has a similar experience.

With thanks to her and Mike Gibbs, and above all perhaps to Bob Rae, here is her piece, and a powerful speech by Mr Rae. And here is another piece Susan has kindly sent me, more broadly on the subject of depression and politics in Canada.

He was clearly up to all sorts that he shouldn’t have been and RBS became a disaster area under his tenure, for which we are all still paying a price. But it wasn’t the only disaster area. And he wasn’t alone in helping create it.

So there are still plenty of bankers, not to mention regulators, who are wandering around the world from board to board, knighthoods and peerages and enormous pay packages largely intact. And before anyone shouts ‘what about the politicians?’ they are at least accountable at the ballot box. Gordon Brown was PM, he is no more. The banking crisis was not the only reason, but it was one of them.

So are we really to say that because some faceless group called the forfeiture committee decides Fred is to lose his K now we can all carry on as before? Is that it?

By wanting more, I don’t mean more humiliation for more banking knights and peers of the realm. I mean a proper investigation and explanation of all that happened.

In my new and varied life I do quite a lot of speaking to business organisations, including banks. And yes, in the spirit of openness, I am often handsomely paid for the wit, wisdom and insight I impart.

One point I have been making is that the banks have not engaged in a process of reckoning and explanation about what happened. Perhaps it is too painful. Perhaps they just feel they have to put the past behind them and get on with the job of sorting out the mess.  But it won’t work. The disaster was too big and it was too costly. There has to be, surely, a proper reckoning of what went wrong. And that requires more than a bit more humiliation for the man who, in becoming a symbol of what went wrong, also became a scapegoat.

The fact that he is now Mr Goodwin and not Sir Fred ultimately affects hardly anyone but him. I find the whole honours system so ludicrous anyway – in my mind it is more of a punishment to have all the silly letters than to lose them, but on this I realise I am in a minority.

The serious point is that the humiliation does not put right what went wrong. It doesn’t help explain why the disaster occurred and nor in truth have any of the reports and inquiries so far.

We have had Chilcot for Iraq. Leveson for phonehacking. Surely there has to be a similar investigation into what went wrong in the banking disaster. Mr Goodwin would not be the only witness who would find such an inquiry testing indeed.

In being the scapegoat he has unwittingly done his former colleagues a huge favour. But if the stripping of his honour is the only moment of reckoning for what went wrong, then I think intelligent outsiders are entitled to look in on our country and say ‘what an odd little place it is.’

Ps. Ed v Dave so far this week. Played 2 won 2.

As it happens it is a conference on language and politics so no harm in mixing the three. And meanwhile I wake up to headlines suggesting Angela Merkel intends to campaign for Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential elections.

The reaction among my German friends last night – the ones who said Brits drink more than any EU country btw, so pretty well-informed – was that she has enough political problems of her own without adding Sarko’s load to her shoulders. The Merkozy brand is not quite what it was.

It is always a risk getting involved in another country’s election. When TB was riding high, we were under enormous pressure from social democrats around Europe to get him to campaign for them, and we said no more than yes. But when we did say yes – to Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, Wim Kok in Holland, Viktor Kilima in Austria and Goran Persson in Sweden for example, not to mention Putin when we thought he was a good guy – we spent the election nights worrying about whether we were about to have a major diplomatic repair job on our hands.

So with the French polls as they are, favouring Francois Hollande, Merkel will be following the French elections even more closely than usually she might. She stayed out of the British general election, perhaps because Gordon Brown was the incumbent and David Cameron the challenger.

I would love to have been privy to the chats as Sarko gently persuaded her to stick her neck out for him. But I am far from sure it is the vote winner either of them think it is. The people of Europe are not quite as emotionally bound up with the Franco-German motor as they are. One of the ‘democratoc deficit’ issues exploited by the sceptics is that many people feel they do not have their own national destiny in their hands. The sight of the German Chancellor riding to the rescue of a struggling French president might add to that feeling for French citizens, and be a factor tipping them in the direction of change.

This morning’s Observer leads on the raising of jobs and the young to the top of the agenda for the upcoming EU summit. I repeat – endlich, enfin, at bloody last.

I’m off to Germany this afternoon for a conference on the importance of language to leadership, strategy and crisis management. It might seem obvious that words matter in any political situation. Clear strategy requires the words that explain it clearly. And when it comes to the eurozone crisis the lack of clarity has exposed the lack of strategy.

One of the points I will be making tomorrow is that if you say the words ‘eurozone crisis’, any number of words or images come to mind – Greece, bailout, austerity, unemployment, cuts, US anger, blah and blah and blah … but there is little sense in the public mind of a way out; and that is because none is being properly articulated.

It is not helped by the fact that David Cameron and George Osborne see the crisis as much as an opportunity to score points at the expense of our European partners as to play their full role in addressing the reality of mounting unemployment risking the writing off of a generation.

In their response we are witnessing one of the differences between left and right. Compare and contrast their inaction on unemployment with the zeal with which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pursued the New Deal in our first term. At the time Tories said the State could make no difference with such ‘grandiose schemes’. The said grandiose scheme worked and the Tory argument, like the one that said the minimum wage would cost a million jobs, melted away.

But under Cameron, for all his talk of a new approach, the Tories are reverting to type. What single concrete proposal have he and Osborne put forward to deal with youth unemployment? On the contrary as part of the cuts programme to deal with the deficit in a single Parliament (the Plan A that isn’t working) one of the first cuts was to axe the Future Jobs Fund. We could do with it now. Like we could do with a bit of the zeal that TB and GB used to bring to European Summits. They may have upset people from time to time. So does Cameron, as with his veto. But unlike Cameron, TB and GB tended to get things done that helped get people into work.

The same said football-naysayers must have a vague sense of a row between Manchester United’s Patrice Evra and Liverpool’s Luis Suarez which resulted in the latter getting a hefty ban for racist abuse.

As a result, Evra will have to endure most forms of verbal abuse known to man when he steps out for today’s Cup tie at Anfield. (That’s where Liverpool play, for those who don’t follow football but are still with me).

As he was heading to the team hotel yesterday, possibly musing on the subject of racism, so was I, having been asked to write a foreword to the autobiography of a player called Roger Eli.

Now I know Roger won’t take it amiss if I say even serious football fans may struggle to recall the name. He played mainly in the lower leagues and had a career beset (that’s the word that always goes with injuries in the sports pages) by injuries but who found his best days playing for my beloved (the word always used to describe Burnley when the papers mention my support of them) Burnley.

The reason he is relevant to Evra and Suarez is that part of Roger’s story was the abuse he and other black players had to take as part of the job of being a non-white pro footballer in the late 80s and early 90s.

Changing culture takes time. And it takes activism. And it takes people prepared to put their heads above the parapet and say what is right and what is wrong. There is less racism in football than there used to be. The active campaigns on that front have helped bring that about. There is less racism in society than there used to be. But it still lurks and lingers and the campaign for a truly non racist Britain has not been won. Indeed Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager Stephen, makes that point in The Guardian today, and questions the current government’s understanding of the issue, and its commitment properly to tackle it.

When Evra hears the insults raining down on his head today, he may or may not be able to block them from his mind. But afterwards, when not just the match but in later years when his career is over, he ought to take pride in having stood up for himself and in so doing stood up for others without a voice or the platform that football gives him. He was under a lot of pressure – not least from the absurd Sepp Blatter, laughably the senior official in the game – to ‘let it go,’ ‘shake on it,’ ‘put it down to the heat of the moment and the passion of the game.’ He didn’t, and even though he ‘won’ his battle, he has paid a price, which is another reason he deserves applause not abuse for what he did.

There must surely be a day when racism is studied in schools for what it says about what we were not what we are. We’re not there yet. But if and when we do get there, Manchester United’s left back will be able to say he played his part in the journey.

I don’t know if Patrice Evra has read, or heard of, Edmund Burke. But in acting as he did, he certainly seemed conscious of one of the greatest political and cultural sayings of all time, Burke’s ‘All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’

Now if United’s legendarily creative songsmith Pete Boyle could turn that into a chant, I’d be impressed. In the meantime stand by for plenty of ‘you’ll never walk alone,’ and abuse of Evra from the home fans, chants against Suarez from the away fans, but hopefully once the noise is gone, a small step further down the road to a non-racist Britain.

Yes, it’s one of those ‘restores your faith in human nature’ times.

The person in question is a bus driver who was last night working the C11 route in North London, which Fiona’s mother, who had been here to celebrate her birthday, uses to get home.

On getting off the bus she realised she didn’t have her handbag. So no purse, no keys, no credit cards, all now off for for the rest of the C11 ride. Not a very happy birthday.

She cancelled the cards, came back to our house to get keys, and wrote off the rest. Meanwhile Fiona started to fill in the TfL lost property forms online. Then they decided – hope springing eternal – to drive the route, find where the bus ended its journey, and see if they could find the actual bus she had left the bag on. Slim chance … but then …

Audrey got a phone call, from a friend, saying that someone had just called her and if she was at the Archway bus stop at 10pm, she would have her handbag delivered to her.

That call was from the bus driver. He had seen the bag in a break between journeys, taken possession of it, and once he got to the end of the route, called the first number he could find inside her little address book. So instead of spending the end of her birthday feeling stressed and angry at herself for losing her bag, and facing a day sorting out all the consequences, thanks to the bus driver, all ended well.

On Wednesday, The Independent had a poll saying that people trusted and believed each other less than ever. In The Happy Depressive, I have quoted surveys confirming that people’s happiness has been matched by a decline in the belief that when we leave our own homes to venture outside, people will be nice to us.

So like I say … faith in human nature can be quickly restored. As for TfL, Fiona said she thought the driver was of Eastern European background, seemed embarrassed by their gratitude and was just a thoroughly nice man.

So last night, when I was talking about diaries with fellow diarist and media sceptic Chris Mullin at an event organised by The Institute for Government, I sensed both of us felt more comfortable with these big slabs of book – seven volumes and several novels between us so far – sitting there on tables in the bar area.

Yet I was the one arguing for politicians to embrace the social media of the digital age – whilst staying alive to its downsides – as a way to let politicians and public shape a better debate than the one promoted by the mainstream media. A man from Twitter told me afterwards I ought to be on their payroll for the promotion I gave them — go on then!

And, as I sit here bashing this out before heading to Gatwick for a flight to Budapest, I am looking at the three books I’m planning to take with me, (the Steve Jobs biography, The Help and David Malouf’s ‘The Happy Life‘), and I’m thinking ‘that’s a lot of space, and a fair bit of weight for a man who never does hold luggage.’ So I find myself going online elsewhere, and getting them for my ipad kindle, if that is the correct terminology And while there I see other books I suddenly fancy, and I add them too. I started with 3 taking up a third of one compartment in my wheelie bag, and ended with 6 taking up a sliver of an ipad. I’ll only read one max two and finish neither, as I’m back tomorrow night.

Part of me is screaming ‘I like BOOKS, I like paper, I like the feel, I like typography, I like the coffee cup stains, I like to know how far through I am, I like Daunt Books bookmarks … I like to see what everyone else is reading on the train, the plane, in the airport lounges.’

But the more rational part is doing what my equally technophobic literary agent Ed Victor told me he did recently before a holiday – got the books he wanted to take, packed them, unpacked them, and then nervously downloaded the lot of them to his kindle.

In the States there were more than four million kindles sold as Christmas presents. Standing against this tide reminds me of the silent movie actor in The Artist who couldn’t adapt to the arrival of talkies. We gotta go with the flow.

So I am, I am, which is why I have barely mentioned last week’s paperback publication of volume 3 of my diaries, (annoying one part of Random House) whilst – as you may have noticed – banging on all over the online place about The Happy Depressive (to the delight of Digital Dan the man trying to get ebooks to take over the world).

The Guardian is the only paper to run a big chunk. The Times did an excellent editorial. The FT have run a piece and a couple of letters on what it says about mental health in the workplace. I’ve done a couple of radio and telly things. But all the promotion has been online, and the best promotion has been from people who have read it, tweeted they liked it or reviewed it on Amazon, or both, sufficient already for agent and publisher to be asking if I don’t have another mental health book in me.

So I confess to mild feeling of chuffed-ness on being told by Digital Dan that I was yesterday just one slot behind the Steve Jobs biography in the itunes biography and memoirs charts (of whose existence I was unaware until that moment). But there we were, Jobs’ stern face at Number 5, mine just below at Number 6, both a little way behind Confessions of a GP in top slot, and by this morning I was back at 9.

But it got me thinking, as writing the ebook did, about death and legacy. The chart itself is part of Jobs’ legacy. So was my looking at the chart, its instantaneousness, its responsiveness to real time change, its absorption of the views and behaviour of people all around the world.

I’ve only skimread Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography – it’s one of the reasons I was planning to put it in my bag for the flight to Budapest – but I have been fascinated by the coverage of the book, and of Jobs’ death more generally.

When he died weeping supporters created shrines to their demigod outside their temples, Apple Stores, all over the world. Many of the obituaries, overwhelmed by the twin words ‘grief’ and ‘genius’ on the rolling news channels, tended to avoid the less savoury or less successful chapters in his life story. Not so the Isaacson book which is far from an unqualified hagiography. A lot of the media comment sprung from his past experiments with LSD, his status as a hippy billionaire, contrasted with the often harsh treatment of his employees.

The products Apple create are sleek, must-have desirable, have helped define the modern era, and changed the way we live forever, but Jobs himself was very much a (flawed) human being. Apparently he was driven to the point of monomania and exerted an influence on his employees that sought them to explain their decisions through the prism of his own feelings and objectives: it seems good ideas were good because they conformed to his expectations, but bad ideas were often dismissed as ‘shit’ and the onus was on the originator of that idea to bring Steve around to the point that he believed he had come up with it.

He also made many mistakes along the way, survived many setbacks, shed many tears and yet he really did change the world we live in.

So I am left wondering – was Steve Jobs happy? Would he have summed up his own life as a happy one? Was he content with his achievements when he died? I’ve written here and in The Happy Depressive about my friend and colleague Philip Gould reaching a near blissful state of fulfillment when he reached ‘the death zone’ stage of his fight with cancer. As I hope The Guardian extract showed, he faced death with a force and a serenity that was for his friends a thing of solace and even beauty, however much we cried when finally he went. In Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement address from 2005 he confided with the audience about his then recent recovery from the cancer that would return and kill him, stating that he hoped to live for a few more decades more and that ‘No-one wants to die’,  but –tellingly− he added, ‘Death is the destination we all share, and that’s how it should be, because death is likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent: it clears out the old to make way for the new.’ I think Philip would have agreed wholeheartedly with this. New Labour New Britain and all that. He rewrote his brilliant book, The Unfinished Revolution, as a ‘letter to the next generation,’ and his own account of his battle with cancer and eventual death will be told in the posthumous An Unfinished Life.’

If the pursuit of happiness is life’s journey, then death is its ultimate destination and, in many ways, its ultimate fulfilment. I can’t claim to have any great or privileged insight into the life of Steve Jobs, but what he helped create in his work at Apple and at Pixar has at least contributed to the happiness of millions, and that must have meant a lot to him when he passed away, as did perhaps even more so the knowledge that his work would impact on generations to come.

I’m guessing, but if Philip reached 8 on the death zone happiness meter (and that is as high as it can get in my worldview) I reckon Jobs would be a 6.5. I’m currently around 4 but as I say in the ebook, we don’t really know until we near the end, and we do our own reckoning about whether by our own criteria – mine are family, relationships which endure, fulfilment through achievement, and experiences which matter to us and to others and from which we learn – whether we have lived a happy life.

Forgive me for guessing about Jobs, but people guess about each other all the time. Like when I was having lunch with  Ed Victor yesterday, in walks Ralph Fiennes – Ed knows him, I don’t – and I start the lunch saying I thought he was a great actor but he didn’t seem my kind of guy, and after meeting him an hour later thought he was nothing like I expected and totally charming.

Maybe Steve Jobs would have had the same effect. I only met him once and it was as part of a frenetic and over-crowded meeting with lots of big egos and big ideas and I couldn’t really form an impression. So all I have to go on is other people’s words and memories, and a powerful legacy shaped by the words, memories and actions of millions and millions of people, many yet unborn.

Enough … At this rate I’ll miss the plane. Ta-ta. Memo to WHS — have any stock of the diaries ready, I’ll sign on the way through North Terminal. I’m not embracing this brave new world to the exclusion of the old one you know. Not yet.

And so they might. But the members of those ‘most families’ eagerly found by TV reporters to agree with the government’s proposition of a benefit cap at £26000 on a single family were not necessarily informed that this was based on the cap plus tax, but minus child benefit which would be absorbed as part of the overall £26k, regardless of the size of the family.

It is just one factor that has distorted a debate in a way which has delighted David Cameron, Iain Duncan-Smith and most of the media.

I would be hesitant in asking Lord Justice Leveson to add even futher to his reading load, but if he is looking for a good example of how a biased and distorting media helps pave the way for distorted debate about issues which impact for the worse on real people, then he could do worse than ask for a few years worth of coverage on benefits.

In several of the papers, echoed by the broadcasters, the debate is skewed to portray benefits as all bad, claimants as all scroungers.

There are abuses. There are scroungers. There are families who take take take without regard to any responsibility to the community that is giving. People are right to be angry about them. Governments and local authorities are right to seek to deal with the abuse.

But there are families that have been hit by unemployment, illness and misfortune who need and deserve support, and do not deserve to be thrown in with the rest.

As a direct result of the government’s determination to overturn the amednment on which they were defeated in the Lords yesterday, more families will be tipped from just above the poverty line to well below it … Which in turn and in time will ultimately lead to greater cost on the State, in terms of dealing with them when made homeless, picking up the costs of increased ill health, family dysfunctionality, descent into the criminal justice system.

Amid the ‘most families would be happy with 35k’ talk, ministers and media were also trotting out the line that three quarters of people polled support the cap.

Presented as it has been, as a simple way to deal with armies of cheats and scroungers at a time everyone (apart from bankers and editors) is feeling the squeze, what’s not to support? Had the debate probed a little beyond the one-dimensional, things might look a little different.

Not for the first time, the Tories have put brutal and effective politics ahead of actually improving the country. It’ll catch them in the end, when people realise – as with their failure on the deficit – that the policies for which they shout so loud have not had the effect they claimed they would.

Remember Plan A? Public sector cuts to get the deficit down, private sector to fill the gap, lots of jobs for the people losing theirs from the cuts and the benefit changes.

The plan is not for working.

I know Nicky – no relation – Campbell inspires mixed views, but I think he holds the ring in live, and lively debates, really well. And with issues as varied as the right to protest, the role of happiness in politics, and sex education all on the agenda, there was certainly some lively debate. Nicky even managed to squeeze in that he had read – and enjoyed – The Happy Depressive. (Memo from Beeb bosses – one Campbell plugging a book is probably enough).

What I really enjoyed about today was all the weird agreements breaking out.

Last night, in between coughing and watching J Edgar (Leonardo di Caprio is brilliant by the way) I was doing an email interview with an Armenian magazine who inter alia asked me what qualities I valued in a person. Among them I said ‘strong and enduring values but matched by a mind open to new ideas and arguments.’

There was certainly a lot of that going on in the Harris Academy in Peckham today. Even before the programme started I found myself deep in conversation with George, a leading light in the Occupy London movement, and more often than not – even if we expressed ourselves differently – we were in deep agreement too. He talked about the failure of neoliberalism and the need to hasten the collapse of a falied capitalist system. I talked about the need to recognise that if we are serious about the extension of happiness and well being to the majority, then the prime focus has to be closing the inequality gap between top and bottom, with our energies focused on the bottom. We agreed David Cameron was right to add happiness to the list of factors government policy makers should address when devising policy. And we agreed he was talking the talk without walking the walk. In fact I would go so far as to say that if you distilled the very different words we were using, we had something close to a seven and a half out of ten agreement across the piece. He clearly sees Parliament as something of a failure. I don’t.

But then – weirder and weirder – when it came to the programme’s discussion on the right to protest, I said I agreed with a lot of their arguments and they were having an impact – for example all three party leaders were last week making speeches about responsible capitalism, and they might be able to take some credit for that. But I felt they were making a mistake in going on about the way they felt they were being harrassed by the authorities, because in comparison say to the miners under Thatcher, or the civil rights protest movement in the US (I quoted the J Edgar film on the subject) they were getting a prettty good press and fairly soft policing.

I then found Mark Littlewood, a right wing free marketeer from the Institute of Economic Affairs, who pre-programme was extolling the benefits of abortion clinic ads on telly, saying ‘I never thought I’d say this but I agree with everything Alastair Campbell said.’

Meanwhile Nicky said I was ‘with the government’ on the happiness agenda (which I am up to the point of the somewhat important question of policy proposals) and after a pretty lively debate on that – this time with the free market fundamentalists arguing that wealth creation was the route to happiness, me arguing that it was not the be all and end all – we moved on to sex education. And I found myself agreeing with Nadine Dorries rather more than I had expected. She is the Tory MP who has carved out a niche in Parliament speaking out about issues like abortion, sex education, the sexualisation of youth. We have never met before so, given the image I had of her as an anti-sex puritan right-winger, I was a bit taken aback that she kissed me on being introduced. Only a light mwah mwah on each cheek, but you know, enough to challenge my preconeceptions.

Once she persuaded me that she was not saying her call to talk of the benefits of abstinence in schools applied only to girls not boys, but the girls were the ones who had to live longest and hardest with the consequences of unwanted pregnancies, and once I realised she was not saying abstinence should be taught at the expense of teaching about relationships, love and sex, then I found myself nodding more than shaking my head as she spoke. Again, about seven out of ten.

Afterwards, I had three members of the audience come up to me and say they had expected to disagree with everything I said (because they opposed the war in Iraq) and ended up agreeing with almost all of it, and asking where they can get the book. (I must say this digital only thing is a bit of a problem but Digital Dan from Random House says I must persevere because ‘it’s the future’.)

So why did I enjoy the programme more than most that I do? Well, so much of media debate does not really have the time and space for real debate. News for example tends to have a headline, a proposition, a point in favour, a point against, then a glib conclusion rfrom a reporter. Most chat shows skate over surfaces.

In an hour it is impossible to cover three big debates in huge detail. But I thought Nicky and his Big Questions team did a pretty good job.

I usually come away from telly feeling there had not been enough time, there was more heat than light and people just had a fixed position and stuck to it whatever subject came up. I sensed people in today’s programme – myself included – feeling their own conventional wisdoms and paradigms shift a little.

A programme which has Occupy protesters tweeting afterwards that I talked sense, me saying so did they, Mark Littlewood agreeing with me more than he expected to, me agreeing more with Nadine Dorries than I expected to may sound like dull telly – but when the agreements are all unexpected, it is actually quite refreshing. And interesting.

And before I was home, I find QPR’s Joey Barton and I engaging in a twitter conversation about God, Nietzsche, Proust and football. This because I had tweeted while en route to the programme that the biggest questions of all were ‘To be or not to be?; is there a God; and has Joey Barton read Proust. (He told me he hasn’t, and he hasn’t read Nietzsche’s books but he knows enough to quote him) … Funny old day.

Now I’m home to rest up before I toddle down to The Emirates to see my mate Fergie put one over on Arsene (who, Gooners may be interested to know, is quoted in a key section of The Happy Depressive.) By then, I am also hoping my mate ‘Arry – we’ve played golf together don’t you know? – has put one over on Roberto.

The morning has been full of surprises. So might be the afternoon. As Nietzsche said ‘it’s a day of two halves Joey’.