Long ago, one cold February evening in Oxford, I made the short journey to St Aldate’s Church to hear a panel, including the then Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, discuss the impending invasion of Iraq. The bishop, a patrician liberal Anglican of the old school, was firmly opposed. In those days I was a zealous neocon, keen for the English-speaking nations and their allies to export freedom and democracy at the barrel of a gun, so I went along spoiling for an argument. I even managed to ask a question (rather a clever one, I thought at the time) about why we should set any store by the moral authority of the UN Security Council.