It is always easier to look backwards not forwards because, as they say in Japanese politics, an inch ahead is darkness and full of nails which must be hammered down. This explains why just about everybody got last year’s predictions wrong and the forecasts of the few that didn’t will, on the law of averages, not be worth the papyrus they are written on.

So here is what I will and will not miss about the Bush administration. I do so not in the spirit of being mean, though there is plenty to be mean about, but more as an antidote to the interminable articles now being written about the Bush legacy. Hobbes (the philosopher not the opening batsman) said it all – it was nasty, brutish and, unfortunately, not short.