Hadiza Atunse, a 25-year-old PA, smashed her Toyota Auris into a Mini Cooper, spun out of control and flipped into a hedgerow in Wilmslow, near Manchester. When the coppers turned up, she declined to partake in a breathalyser and the police, mysteriously, did not give her a tongue swab to determine drug use. I say ‘mysteriously’ because the young lady was also found with a large bag of coke in her car.

Later it was discovered that she was driving without insurance. Yet Ms Atunse copped only a £730 fine because the judge seems to have accepted the defence’s argument that she had been suffering from ‘excited delirium syndrome’, which, coincidentally, is what afflicts me in the moments before Bargain Hunt comes on the TV. I run backwards and forwards between the kitchen and the lounge, preparing my Bargain Hunt snack of a mug of tea and two Petit-Beurre biscuits and, wrapped in a pre-show exhilaration, wonder to myself, will one of the experts be the lovely Izzie Balmer, or will it be Danny Sebastian with his grating histrionics? Will the contestants win a Golden Gavel?

It had never occurred to me that my excited delirium might be dignified by the suffix of ‘syndrome’ or that in the future I might be able to use it to mitigate – or perhaps entirely excuse – some appalling crime I might commit. This condition, medically, involves hyperthermia, excessive sweating, superhuman physical strength, violence and incoherent shouting – all of which I go through before Bargain Hunt begins. It is also closely linked to cocaine, although in my case I blame the Petit-Beurre, as I’ve snorted Charlie only once 40 years ago and it made me sneeze. (I’ve only done ecstasy once, as well – and that experiment had me laid out flat on a lawn at midnight, clench-jawed, with people holding my hand and saying: ‘Rod, Rod, we all love you.’ Never, ever again.)

Our judicial system lives in a fairy tale, where every malefaction is the consequence of a medical condition

But the magical invention of these ‘syndromes’ to describe what is simply anti-social or criminal behaviour – beginning with ADHD, by the way – is one of the great growth industries of our age, along with vape shops, Kurdish heroin cartels cutting people’s hair ineptly and the magnificent, grandiose con of psychotherapy, a handmaiden to narcissism. If only such imagination had been abroad when Hermann Goering was in the dock at Nuremberg: ‘My client suffers from acute body dysmorphia, depression and excited delirium syndrome. This explains the carpet bombing of London, the looting of valuable artefacts, the stuff with the Jews – everything, really, your honour.’ And Hermann walks away with a 750 mark fine and a lifetime of being interviewed by a sharp-eyed and suspicious Gitta Sereny.

Do you ever get the feeling there is something wrong with our criminal justice system? That we have somehow lost a grip on the reins? That the balance has tilted so far away from the victim and in favour of the perp that we may as well embrace the proposal put forward by the imbecilic, buck-toothed Scottish Green munchkin Kate Nevens and abolish prison and essentially criminal justice altogether? Our judicial system still lives in a land of fairy tales, where every human malefaction is the consequence not of wickedness or selfishness, but of a medical condition which absolves them of guilt, even if that condition is simply ‘intense stupidity’.

This denial of responsibility on the part of the individual is the only way that the liberal left can support its sociopathic hypothesis that the only real crimes in society are success and hard work and discipline and the accumulation of wealth. Everything else is the consequence of unfortunate genetics.

You will remember the larks – what larks! – occasioned when hundreds of mainly black youths went on the rampage in Clapham, shoplifting, terrorising locals, vandalising, a week or so back. The coppers advised stores to close for an hour or so – thanks for your help, the Met – and in the end arrested only six teenage girls. Why did they not go in equipped with riot shields and truncheons and drag the rioters into paddy wagons? No such luck – that’s from a previous, fascistic era. In this era the store owners who pay not only their taxes and extortionate business rates foot the bill, and the feral scumbags, the skanks, who contribute nothing to our economy, are allowed their fun with no redress.

Shortly after this happened the newspapers wrung their hands and wondered why young people were occasioned to behave in such a manner. Of course it wasn’t all young people. Nor, in truth was the description ‘black’ precise enough. It seems to have been British Caribbean young people – not, as Kemi Badenoch pointed out, African kids. ‘You do not see scenes like this in Lagos or Nairobi,’ she said.

Anyway, here’s how Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility (how can you have a professor of social mobility? It’s not a subject or a discipline. It’s a state of wishful thinking), explained it in – natch – the Grauniad: ‘There’s nothing new about young people organising mass meet-ups. What’s changed is the context. We’ve dismantled the physical spaces where young people used to gather safely: youth clubs, community centres, even affordable public venues. Digital platforms have taken their place, organising gatherings at speed and scale. We often frame these moments as problems of behaviour. But they are also symptoms of a deeper shift: a generation with fewer structured opportunities, fewer shared spaces, and more uncertainty about where they fit.’

They are problems, you absolute plank, of atrocious socialisation, rotten parenting and wickedness. These people did not riot because of a lack of opportunity to play a game of ping-pong in a youth club. It is not about a lack of ‘structured opportunities’, whatever the hell they are, but a lack of decency and probably a mistaken sense of victimhood inculcated by faux academics such as yourself, Lee.