I don’t specially want Sir Keir Starmer to be prime minister, but if that is the eventual price of Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, so be it. Although Ms Sturgeon’s political skills deserve respect, her rule in Scotland has been rigidly ideological and thus – by an apparent paradox – corrupt. If you believe you are the political version of Calvin’s elect, you can do no wrong. You therefore create a one-party state, police force, civil service etc staffed by your own supporters, and crush any dissenters. As a result, your country becomes divided and badly governed. Eventually, your righteousness traps you in extremist insanity – in this case, maintaining that a dangerous male rapist is a safe woman. You thought you were an angel, so you fall like Lucifer. Of course, it remains possible that an SNP government run by a more moderate person (Kate Forbes?) might stay on top, but it seems likelier that the spell has been broken. Polls, including Lord Ashcroft’s latest study, suggest that voters have gradually come to realise that the SNP was really only interested in an independence referendum and its associated anti-English racism, rather than improving the lot of Scotland. Staying in the Union, perhaps under a Labour government beholden to Scottish votes, feels safer.

Keeping abreast as best I can – information leaks out in small drips – of coronation plans, I find anxiety. It is not really about the main elements. The King will be properly crowned after all, in a traditional service which is specifically, deeply religious rather than merely nominally so. The military elements are also in order. The anxiety is of the ‘What’s going on?’, ‘Who’s in charge?’ variety. The head man for state occasions is the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, whose grandfather did it so brilliantly for the coronation of Elizabeth II, but the present Duke seems downbeat. It was he who squashed the tradition of publicly proclaiming the coronation and sought to push aside the Court of Claims, which confirms the right to perform certain roles at the coronation. Instead, the claims system has been reduced to applications by email. These had to be in by 8 February. Claimants have not yet heard the results. Some have picked up rumours that no robes will be worn (and therefore no pages required), which would be miserable if true. The official tailors have still not had their instructions. The heralds, the only people in the royal set-up learned in the Law of Arms and the customs and rules involved, have been marginalised. How will peers, who have a specific, lifelong duty of allegiance, which MPs do not, be represented? And so on. The Earl Marshal, I gather, does not answer inquiries. There seem to be no controlling minds, in government or palace, so the work is carried on by quite junior officials. It feels as if the organisers are dominated more by fear of causing offence than the need to put on a great state occasion with its necessary precision, historical accuracy and restrained magnificence. I expect it will be all right on the night, but just now it feels uneasy.

Brianna Ghey, aged 16, was recently stabbed to death in a park in Culcheth, near Warrington. Brianna had been transgender, born male, but the police said, as if to reassure, that there is ‘no evidence to suggest that the circumstances surrounding Brianna’s death are hate-related’. Perhaps because of protests, they then backtracked, allowing hate crime as a possibility to be investigated. In modern police parlance, a ‘hate crime’ is defined as one motivated by animosity to a ‘protected characteristic’, such as sex, sexuality, race or religion. Such crimes most certainly involve hate, but there is something wrong in confining hate to this category. Surely all serious violent crime, committed by anyone against anyone, is ‘hate-related’. To restrict its application is to deny its pervasive power.

Many years ago, editing the Sunday Telegraph, I received a letter from a famous playwright calling our then theatre critic, John Gross, a ‘subliterate dickhead’. The description was magnificently inappropriate. John, author of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, was possibly the most literate, well-read person I have ever known. But the accusation brought home to me the extent to which creative persons can loathe critics. This has recently been expressed even more violently by Marco Goecke, a German ballet director. Angered by a review of one of his shows by Wiebke Hüster, the respected ballet critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine (and former wife of that paper’s editor), he accosted her in the foyer of the Hanover state opera house during a premiere on Saturday. After abusing her verbally, Mr Goecke produced something he had prepared earlier – a bag filled with the excrement of his pet dachshund, smearing it on Ms Hüster’s face. She understandably wants him charged. Though tantrums of the creative temperament can be found in all performing arts, I think it is strongest in those, like Mr Goecke’s, which attract public subsidy. The cult of the artist at the taxpayer’s expense tends to make the former feel godlike. When someone dares say his work is no good, he thinks he has been blasphemed against. In this case, I also feel sorry for the dachshund, an innocent and unwitting collaborator.

My wife and I went to see Puss in Boots – The Last Wish on Monday. It is half-term week and we were pretty much the only unaccompanied adults in the cinema. I reflected how, if I had seen the film as a child, I would have been utterly terrified by the hooded, red-eyed wolf who is, explicitly, Death. His appalling, eerie whistle heralds his approach and, unlike the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he is bound to win in the end. The devil-may-care Puss is on the last of his nine lives… Reflecting further, however, I decided I was more deeply frightened, aged 66, than I would have been aged six. The wolf, after all, is six decades nearer my door.