On the BBC’s Dateline London programme recently, two foreign correspondents took issue with the idea that the British did not like children. The problem, said Franck Guillory of Le Journal du Dimanche, was that they liked them too much, treating them like grown-ups when what they needed was discipline.

Tererai Karimakwenda, a London-based presenter on SW Radio Africa, an independent Zimbabwean station, said he was “mortified at what you let children get away with”, adding that “a little slap is not a bad thing” – for which he was howled down by his British fellow-panellists.