That means that at any given time we know we are examining crackpot theories."Then why examine them?"Because what is crackpot one day may turn out to be sane the next. If you had suggested to an 18th-century scientist that time was relative, he would have called it crackpot, but Einstein made the idea commonplace. In the case of the Tory government, it is exactly the opposite."Meaning what?"That people who seemed at first sane turned out to be crackpot."How did scientists first notice that the British government was, in fact, going mad?"Well, it came about because scientists started getting stranger and stranger requests from the Government. We were asked to evaluate stranger and stranger topics, to give judgement on stranger things, and even, in the case of BSE, asked to sit in seminar all weekend and come up with a solution to the Government's quandary overnight just like that.Now, this is not uncommon with governments, none of which ever seem to have any idea how science works, but eventually it dawned on us all that the way the Government was acting was not just uninformed, it was deranged.

For example, Michael Howard goes around shouting "Prison works!", when quite clearly it doesn't. They do irrational things like suddenly change the danger level of alcohol, or suddenly admit that there was after all a connection between crime and unemployment. Quite irrational.Therefore we realised that the difficulty of our work was caused not by its innate intractability but by the deranged nature of the people supplying us with the agenda, ie, the Government."Is there any evidence for this derangement? Apart from the mad staring eyes of Howard, Portillo, etc?"Well, the way they have demonised Tony Blair shows a troubled mind at work, and I don't mean Tony Blair's mind. Putting on Mawhinney and Heseltine as a comic double act suggests advanced derangement.