President Numeiri of Sudan is said to have remarked of Gadaffi that he was 'a man with a split personality - both of them evil'.

If the Europeans truly wish to improve their NATO contribution they can show it simply enough. They can establish professional armed forces, like those of the UK. And they can acquire more advanced technology. Indeed, unless that happens soon the gulf between the European and US capabilities will yawn so wide that it will not be possible to share the same battlefield. Alas, I do not think that sharing battlefields with our American friends - but rather disputing global primacy with them - is what European defence plans are truly about.

Ideally, when Christians meet, as Christians do, to take counsel together, their purpose is not ( or should not be) to ascertain what is the mind of the majority but what is the mind of the Holy Spirit - something which may be quite different.

All corporatism - even when practised in societies where hard work, enterprise and cooperation are as highly valued as in Korea - encourages inflexibility, discourages individual accountability, and risks magnifying errors by concealing them.

To me consensus seems to be - the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects.

We must not fall into the trap of projecting our own morality onto the Soviet leaders. They do not share our aspirations, they are not constrained by our ethics, they always consider themselves exempt from the rules that bind other states.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.