Mr. Iannucci, we salute you.

Am I going mad? I heard that Tony Blair thinks so. Not just me; everyone. You too. He thinks we’re all mad. Someone close to his circle told me recently that the reason Blair seems so resolute, so calm in the face of criticism, is that he thinks the media are just mad. And he confronts unpopularity with the knowledge that we, the public, are turning mad as well. The more we say: ‘He’s going mad’, the more it proves to him that we must be mad. Is that the logic of a madman?

I only mention this because I was struck by the madness of a remark Blair made last week. It was just as the High Court ruled that the government’s recent consultation with the public over what our future energy policy should be wasn’t consultative enough, and that he and his ministers would have to consult us on the policy again.

Asked if this would put on hold his plans to build more nuclear power stations, he said: ‘No. This won’t affect the policy at all. It’ll affect the process of consultation, but not the policy.’

Take a good hard look at that quote again. It’s mad. It’s based either on a belief in the possession of psychic powers so discriminating they can predict the outcome of a consultation before it happens (which is mad) or they’re based on the belief that words have no meaning other than the meaning one chooses to give them and that this meaning can change at any particular moment (which is at least three times as mad as the first example of madness).

A sane person would assume that a consultation about a decision would be part of the process of forming that decision. If you go into a shop and ask: ‘What cakes have you got?’ and the shopkeeper says: ‘Cream cakes, eclairs and a fruit flan’, then your decision about which cake to buy is affected by that process of consultation. You won’t ask for a Swiss roll, for example, because the baker’s told you he hasn’t got one.

A madman, however, would believe that ‘consultation’ need not actually mean ‘discussion’ if he doesn’t want it to be. An equally valid meaning could be ‘spice’ or ‘kindergarten’ if he so chooses. So a madman (let’s call him Blair) goes into a baker’s shop and says: ‘What sort of cakes have you got, but I’m going to buy some nails.’

The baker says: ‘But we haven’t got any nails. We sell cakes.’ To which Blair replies: ‘Doesn’t matter. I’d like some nails please.’ ‘I’ve just told you,’ replies the baker, ‘I haven’t got any nails, you brain-dead knob mouth, so runt off.’

To which Blair replies: ‘Well, I’d like some snails then, please. With quails. And be sure to teach them tricks; I’m no Roger Bannister.’

And, in his head, this would all make perfect sense. Who is mad? And does it matter?