As I have noted before, there is always another circle. I thought that last week’s scandal (originally entitled ‘Suellagate’ or ‘speedgate’ by the papers) could not be surpassed for its sheer vacuousness and pointlessness. But then I did not foresee that the next week would be one in which every newspaper and news bulletin would lead with a story about a morning television presenter. Yet here we are, after more than a week of national debate about Phillip Schofield.

I first became aware of Schofield when he was presenting children’s television from the BBC’s ‘broom cupboard’ with Gordon the Gopher. I have not followed the career of either character very closely since. Nor, I think, have many other people.

In case you think that claim an exaggeration, I just checked the viewing ratings for ITV’s This Morning, which Schofield until recently presented with Holly Willoughby. For their last Christmas special, they had more than a million viewers, but in recent times they had been bumping along with a bit over 500,000 viewers a day. And I am sorry if this sounds cruel, but that means that only about 1 per cent of the population cared even slightly about Phillip Schofield. So how has this minority interest become a majority one?

There seems to be some desire to prove that the presenter’s relationship with a young male employee at ITV started before the boy was of legal age. Schofield denies this, but the insinuations of the press suggest a different direction of travel. Still the blanket coverage confounds me. Perhaps the nation is gearing up for another ‘paedophiles in public life’ stampede. It is around ten years since our last one, so we’re probably due. Doubtless Tom Watson and James O’Brien are sharpening their pitchforks as I type and will soon be making unfounded allegations against a fresh group of innocent men.

It is a singularly British obsession. The people at ITV who ‘protected’ Schofield seem to be next in the line of fire. And again I cannot help thinking this is not a healthy use of our nation’s time and energies.

Or to put it another way, let us imagine that the story continues to ‘develop’, and that everybody in charge of morning entertainment at ITV is soon outed as being complicit. Hell, imagine that everybody with any connection to Phillip Schofield is chased from their place of work. What exactly will have been achieved? And why should this have become such an obsession? I am afraid that to me the most likely explanation would appear to be that it is something to do.

As I tried to point out in relation to ‘speedgate’, there is an extraordinary tendency in this country to chase down fundamentally insignificant stories. And I cannot help thinking that it is simply displacement activity. After all, we don’t seem to be especially effective at addressing any of the things that we could be addressing.

There is mild notice given when it turns out that we might just avoid going into recession. Inflation is eating away at everyone’s pay packets. If you work in the private sector you just have to suck it up. If you work in the public sector or have a particularly bolshy union, then you can strike and insist on an above-inflation pay rise. Immigration has actually gone up – in fact more than doubled – under the current government. There aren’t enough houses being built to accommodate the people who are already here, let alone the millions coming into the country.

We recently saw a prime minister attempt to reverse the narrative of managed decline, but she lasted about a fortnight, so managed decline seems back on the agenda. We have a Labour party government-in-waiting which looks set to reopen the Brexit wars, leaving this country in a permanent psychodrama relating to the EU. And in the meantime the police can’t even protect the public, but instead encourage strange, parasitic end-time cultists to stop the members of the public who still bother to go to work from actually getting there.

In this situation, it is perhaps understandable that public interest might like to be focused on tearing up ITV HQ and learning what precisely Holly Willoughby knew and when. But such expense of energies does not seem optimal to me.

I have been reading an excellent new book by the physicist Lawrence Krauss called The Edge of Knowledge in the US and The Known Unknowns in its UK edition. The book comes as something of a bath, because instead of telling the reader what to think, or showing the reader how much the author knows, the book is about the things that we do not know. Specifically, Krauss looks at the major cosmological questions which scientists have not yet solved and may never solve.

‘We don’t know’ is a statement that good scientists – almost alone in our culture – do not mind making. Of course some deists make them nervous by saying: ‘Aha – therefore God.’ But that’s a separate argument. The point is that there are things that science cannot explain, but about which we should be not just humble but curious. They include the questions of how the universe began, how big it might be, whether time travel is possible and what is at the centre of a black hole. How did life on Earth begin, and are we alone? What is consciousness and does it exist outside of ourselves?

These are very good questions, and good matters to apply our brains to. But as I survey the subjects we are being encouraged to apply ourselves to, and the energy being expended on them, I notice something is seriously amiss. A cynic might say that when looking at the big problems in our country, we are being misdirected. Or as they say when watching a magician, keep an eye on the hand you’re not meant to focus on. But when I think about what we could be doing and discovering if we actually put our collective minds to it, I cannot help thinking that we are not doing the things that we ought to do. Or, to put it another way, the decimation of ITV’s morning schedule should not be the peak of our present ambitions.