The boat was heading vaguely north-west towards the English coast, crossing one of the busiest and most treacherous seaways in the world. The sea was calm; the weather fine but very cold.

French coast-guards believe that this strange craft — like a child’s trike on a motorway — was either run down or overwhelmed by the wake of a freighter about one hour after leaving a beach near Dunkirk. There were 27 bodies recovered from the sea, including 17 men, seven women and three teenagers. One of the drowned women was pregnant. Two men were rescued. At least another 20 people may have drowned.

Even the provisional death toll makes this the greatest single calamity since the so-called “Calais migrants” started to climb aboard small boats to try to reach England in 2018. Yet the story of the Calais migrants goes back not three years, but almost three decades. I have been writing about them for 24 of those years.

When the Calais saga began, in the early Nineties, the migrants were mostly Bosnian refugees from the Yugoslav civil war. They were followed by Iraqis, Kurds, Pakistanis, Afghans, Eritreans, Syrians, Somalis — the human flotsam of successive crises or wars in Europe, Asia and Africa, washing up against the English Channel.

It is a complex story which is habitually simplified by British politicians and some in the British media. France’s record is not unblemished, but that has nothing to do with the cunning Gallic cynicism of British media myth. I made up my mind years ago about who was responsible for the never-ending Calais crisis. We all are. No one is. Everyone is partly right; everyone is partly wrong.

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The migrants, or asylum seekers, have good reason to go in search of new lives, whether they are genuine refugees or (as the British government and press insist) merely illegal, economic migrants. Britain, of course, has good reason to want to maintain control over its own borders. It is absurd to suggest, as some volunteer groups do, that all who arrive should be admitted. But the French — notably the people of the Pas de Calais — also have good reason to believe that they have been troubled for three decades by what is, ultimately, a British problem.

The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, presents the events in a simpler way. The fact that 27 people drowned is a tragedy but it is mostly the fault of the French, he said. The British popular media is even more convinced where the guilt lies. “This is on you, Macron,” was the splash headline on MailOnline yesterday. If the website wants to increase, rather than reduce, the trickle of migrants now reaching Britain from France (and it is a trickle not a flood), the best way of doing so would be to carry on insulting and angering the French.

The Calais crisis can only be managed. It cannot be solved. And like it or not, it can only be managed with the help of France. For the past 18 years, Britain has been sheltered from the full force of the successive waves of migration reaching Europe by two barriers. The first was the French government and the French police. The second was the English Channel.

In 2003, President Jacques Chirac signed a treaty with then Prime Minister Tony Blair at Le Touquet, just south of Calais, which in effect moved the south-eastern English border to France. All passport checks were moved to the French side of the Channel. France agreed to accept British cash to toughen its defences against illegal migration to England (mostly stowaways on trucks and freight trains). As a result, migrants wanting to claim asylum in Britain (as is their right under international law) could not do so because they could not reach British soil.

The second barrier — the English Channel — stood more or less unchallenged for years because the migrants were scared of the sea. That terror lasted while large chinks remained in the Franco-British border controls, the Calais port and the Channel tunnel fences. Gradually those chinks have been identified and closed.

This is not mentioned by the British popular media or the Government but the number of migrants reaching Britain — mostly from France — is not increasing. The opposite is true. There were 80,000 in 2002. That fell to 18,000 in 2010. There were 29,000 in 2020, after the boat traffic began.

The Calais migrants started to overcome their fear of the sea in 2018 because they had to. Other ways of reaching England had been closed off, mostly by the diligence of the French. Once the migrants overcame their terror of the sea, yesterday’s tragedy became inevitable. Of course, the people smuggling gangs are partly to blame. They exist because other methods of crossing the 30km of sea between Pas de Calais and Kent have been hammered shut. In sum, blaming France or President Emmanuel Macron for what happened on Wednesday is as foolish as blaming the water in the Channel.

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That isn’t to say that France doesn’t deserve its share of the blame for the muddled policies of the last 30 or so years. But France has, in effect, been protecting Britain from even a small amount of migration, at Britain’s request. If Paris now chose to end that policy — to repudiate the Treaty of Le Touquet as many French politicians are demanding — Britain would face the full force of Europe’s wider migration crisis for the first time.

That would also cause problems for France. But they wouldn’t be nearly as serious as those in Britain: the makeshift camps of migrants would move from Calais to Folkestone and Dover. Presumably neither Boris Johnson nor MailOnline would welcome such an outcome.

I know what the objections to my narrative will be: why should Britain take any illegal migrants? If these people are seeking asylum from persecution or war, why do they not do so in France? Why are the French authorities incapable of stopping something so obvious as a small inflatable boat with 50 people aboard from setting sail from Loon Plage near Dunkirk? Surely this is all about Brexit and France wanting to punish Britain?

I have spoken over the years to dozens of migrants, to senior French officials, to senior British officials, to humanitarian volunteers. I have witnessed the opening of Sangatte refugee camp in 1998; its closure at Britain’s insistence in 2002; the clearing of “the Jungle” , a squalid informal in the dunes and scrubland north of Calais, in 2009; the creation of a semi-official replacement called “Jungle 2”; its bulldozing by the French government in 2014. Most of the questions above have existed from the beginning. This “crisis” began long before Brexit.

The British media in recent days has shown images of French police standing aside while migrants set off in flimsy boats towards England. The French authorities have yet to explain these pictures. I expect some French police are less than zealous when confronted with large groups of migrants. But to suggest that it is official or unofficial French policy to let migrants cross is false. If that were the case, why have all other safer, illegal routes been so successfully closed? If that were the case, why do French police clamp down so brutally on migrant encampments, confiscating tents and even sleeping bags?

In my experience, the policy and practices of successive French governments on the Calais migrant crisis have been muddled and unpredictable. France has alternated between crackdowns (after Britain complains), and compassion (when human rights groups point out excesses). Taken as a whole, however. France has been guarding Britain’s border, with a large degree of success and a growing amount of exasperation.

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It is impossible for the French to police every metre of the 100km of the Pas de Calais and Nord coastline without immense resources. French officials day that 60% of attempted crossings are stopped. Britain offered to give an extra £54m in July, but has so far handed over only £20m. French officials reckon it already costs them €120m a year to “police Britain’s frontier” of which Westminster covers only about 20%.

Meanwhile, serious efforts have been made to secure small boats and to prevent the sale of inflatable craft in shops in the Calais area. But shops in Belgium are only a short drive away. The “boat” which sank on Wednesday is believed to have been bought in Germany.

Yet parts of the British media accuse the French of encouraging asylum-seekers to try their luck in Britain, instead of France. This is nonsense. In 2020, France dealt with 80,000 asylum applications and the EU as a whole 416,000. The UK dealt with 29,000. The great majority of the people who illegally (and invisibly) cross French land borders every day are people who speak a little French and have family or contacts in France. They want to stay in France.

A minority, the Calais migrants, come to France because they want to reach the UK. A very small minority of this minority are people who have had asylum requests turned down in EU countries. When their camps are cleared by French police, they are offered a chance to go to a holding centre many kilometres away and apply for asylum in France. All but a handful refuse.

Why are they so determined to go to Britain? Because they speak a little English; or they have connections in the UK; or they have been persuaded that the UK, without ID cards, is an El Dorado for migrants.

I have spoken to many migrants over the years. One sticks in my mind. Adamkhan was 34. He had been a maths teacher in a primary school in Peshwar in Pakistan. He fled after he was threatened by the Taliban for promoting “western education”.

When I spoke to him at a squalid camp near Calais port in 2014, he was walking with a crutch after injuring his leg fleeing from police while trying to board a lorry. He said: “Most of the immigrants here… want to go to England because they speak a little English and because they think they can work there.”

“I know the UK is a crowded island and no one wants us. I know the French authorities have a very difficult job. Conditions in these camps are inhuman. But what is the solution?”

There is none. European countries can improve their external border protection, but many migrants will still get through. A small percentage of them will always try to go to Britain.

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But there can be better management of the crisis. The French can, perhaps, try harder to block the beaches. Britain could agree to process some asylum requests on the French side of the Channel. But Boris Johnson’s suggested solution — British police on the French beaches — could never be accepted and would not work.

The Calais crisis cannot be solved in Calais because it is not a Calais problem. It is a small part of a European, or global, problem of displacement of peoples by war or famine or misery.

The danger, from a UK viewpoint, is that the problem will grow much worse. There is already a rising drumbeat in France — on show in the speeches of candidates in April’s presidential election and in the well-argued columns of Le Monde — which calls for a repudiation of the Treaty of Le Touquet.

France, the critics say, is complicit in a situation which is legally doubtful under international law: Britain has an international obligation at least to consider asylum requests — and France is preventing asylum-seekers from even reaching Britain to make them.

The more the British government and the British media insults France, the more that drumbeat will grow. Further calamities in the Channel could make the pressure irresistible. Lifting the barriers would not be an easy decision for the French government. It would be portrayed in Britain as an act of war. It might attract even more migrants to the Pas de Calais.

Whatever happens, there is one certainty: the present situation — Britain relying on France while insulting the French — is untenable.

The furthest edge of the European Union has recently become the centre of the continental bloc’s attention; and what happened in Kastanies is reverberating in Brussels, Paris and Berlin, as Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, humiliated by the loss of at least 33 Turkish soldiers in an airstrike in Syria’s Idlib, takes his rage out on Europe.

Since the multi-billion Euro refugee deal with Europe in 2016, Erdogan, like Gaddafi before him, has wielded the prospect of unleashing an unstoppable wave of migrants as a threat against the soft, rich and disunited European powers he incessantly rails against.

Until now, the threat has always worked, both for extracting Danegeld at will from fearful European leaders, especially the perennially pliant Angela Merkel, and for ensuring European acquiescence to his military adventures in Northern Syria. Among them, the January 2018 invasion of the Kurdish region of Afrin, and the October 2019 invasion of the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast each saw hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians flee their homes in the face of war crimes carried out by Turkey’s rebel proxy militias and a systematic Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing and forced demographic change.

But this week, when Erdogan finally pulled the trigger, European leaders did something few expected, least of all the Turkish despot himself: they said no, and pulled together in what became the first display of European diplomatic unity and common purpose since Brexit unsettled the fragile union.

Erdogan had hoped that European leaders would support his faltering war against the Syrian government and its Russian backer in the county’s northwestern Idlib governorate. Here Assad’s forces, backed by brutal and indiscriminate airstrikes against civilians as well as the mixed rebel and al-Qaeda-linked jihadist forces backed by Turkey on the ground, are regaining territory lost in the first years of the almost decade-long war, causing one million civilians to flee their homes in the process.

Erdogan’s propaganda channels, like the state-run broadcaster TRT, linked the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of migrants at Greece’s border with the humanitarian crisis in Idlib, claiming that the huddled masses seeking to gain entrance to Europe were fleeing Russian and Syrian government bombing. Despite this claim being boosted by well-meaning Western commentators, it is entirely untrue. The dispossessed of Idlib remain trapped in Idlib, barred from entering Turkey by the second-largest wall on earth, manned by Turkish border guards ordered to use lethal force to prevent their entry.

Instead, the flow of migrants who appeared at Greece’s border demanding onward passage to the UK, Germany and Sweden were drawn from the migrant underclass of Istanbul and other Western Turkish cities, mostly Afghans from the country’s Hazara Shia minority working in the country’s booming sweatshops as well as Pakistanis, Moroccans and other recent migrants drawn in by visa-free travel to what has become the easiest point of access to the European Union.

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Lied to by the Turkish state, which informed them that Europe’s borders were now open, they were then bussed to the border in free coaches laid on by the Erdogan government for this sole purpose. When they realised that the border was closed, they attempted to gain entry by force, hurling rocks and tear gas grenades at the Greek soldiers and police guarding the border, or rushing weak sections of the border fence as Turkish police fired tear gas at Greek officials to distract them, and used armoured cars to pull down the border fence.

The images of an angry mass of mostly economic migrants attempting to enter Greece by force, urged on and openly supported by Turkish security forces, have awoken a strong feeling of patriotic and indeed nationalist sentiment in Greece, where the new conservative government has directly labelled the events at the border as a form of hybrid warfare, in which Erdogan utilises migrants as weapons and the Turkish and international media as a force multiplier to secure his aims.

Civilian hunters, fishermen and military reservists from border villages have formed semi-official patrol groups along the frontier, capturing and detaining migrants who have broken through and handing them to the Greek army and police for immediate return to Turkey. Convoys of military reinforcements trucked to the frontier have been met by applauding crowds as they trundle through the towns and villages of Greece’s border regions, where many Greeks see the sudden, forced migrant crisis as part of Erdogan’s longstanding campaign to weaken Greek sovereignty over areas of the nation only liberated from long centuries of Ottoman rule in 1913, and which Erdogan repeatedly threatens to take back under Turkish control.

It is unclear why Erdogan attempted to achieve his goals in this precise fashion, using unhappy humans as weapons in a manner directly contradicting claims that this crisis has its roots in Syria. Greek government statistics disseminated to journalists last week asserted that of the 252 migrants who had then been detained after illegally entering Greece over the land border, 69% were from Afghanistan, 19% from Pakistan and only 4% from Syria- fewer than the 5% from Turkey itself.

If Erdogan had wanted to round up a sufficient number of genuine Syrian refugees to hurl at the border, he could easily have done so. But by weaponising a random assortment of migrants of dubious or non-existent refugee status, the Turkish government not only weakened its case to be acting out of a humanitarian desire to assuage Syria’s human misery, but has also weakened the entire concept of asylum in the eyes of European observers and voters.

The Greek government’s response, halting all new asylum claims, whatever their merits, until the end of the border crisis and immediately returning all new arrivals to Turkey, has met with the warm approval of Europe’s political mainstream.  Greece has been termed Europe’s “shield” in a newly warlike turn of phrase, and €700m of support for new border infrastructure has been pledged, as well as hundreds of personnel to repel attempts to enter what is now an officially sanctioned Fortress Europe.

The massive disjunct between the Turkish government’s narrative of events at the border and that witnessed by journalists on the Greek side has also highlighted the sadly now firmly established weaponisation of media in 21^st century conflicts. In attempting to expand the Syrian war to the frontiers of Europe, Erdogan also expanded the online meta-conflict to the sphere of European politics, a trend which will not enhance ordinary consumers’ trust in the news they watch and read.

Accelerated by social media, the Syrian War has blurred the distinction between protagonist, activist, analyst and journalist like no previous conflict. As various factions and proxy militias battle on the ground, this meta-conflict between western commentators rages on social media, as each side, radicalised by the secret DM groups in which they communicate, attempts to sway the public narrative in their chosen direction.

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Consequently, those journalists and commentators keen to promote Western military intervention in Syria on behalf of either the civilians or armed rebel groups of Idlib have uncritically shared Turkish narratives of desperate Syrians pleading to enter the safety of Europe, despite their almost total lack of correspondence with reality.

As Stalin learned nearly a century ago, and other dictators have realised since, Western journalists will quite happily ignore the evidence of their own eyes if doing so allows them to flaunt their humanitarian and progressive values, a situation drastically exacerbated by Twitter.

Yet whatever the merits of Western military intervention in Syria, the dire situation of the country’s civilians will not be improved by allowing Turkish-resident Afghan and Pakistani economic migrants to enter Europe en masse whenever Erdogan deems it useful. Instead, by eroding the already-waning attachment of European voters to the very concept of asylum, Erdogan’s cynical border gambit will do great harm to those genuine victims of conflict, now and in future, who need it most.

What Erdogan did not realise is that the Europe of 2015 no longer exists, shunted into distant, unrecoverable history by the political hangover of that year’s refugee crisis. The wave of right-wing populism that has eviscerated Europe’s once dominant centre-left now threatens the continent’s centre-right, causing mainstream conservatives to shift dramatically rightwards for their own survival. In 2015, right-wing populists in Hungary and Poland were shunned outliers in the European system, written off as aberrations from an only semi-liberalised Mitteleuropa. Five years later, right-wing populists are the rising challengers even in the continent’s western heartlands.

In France, only a few percentage points separate Le Pen from Macron for dominance entering next year’s presidential election. In Italy, the likelihood is that Salvini will assume power within the next year or so, most likely in coalition with the far more radical Brothers of Italy party. In Spain, the outlandishly Francoist VOX party seeks to enter coalition government with mainstream conservatives nationally, as it already has in Madrid.

In Sweden and Finland, the heartlands of the Nordic social democracy so beloved by British and American liberals, right-wing populist parties seeing to halt migration and overturn the liberal consensus are the most popular political forces in each country.

In Germany itself, the entire political system has been paralysed by the rise of the right-wing AfD party in response to Merkel’s handling of the 2015 crisis, with Merkel taking six months to form a government after the 2017 election, and German politics now reducible to a series of experiments in unlikely and unstable coalitions just to keep the populists out of power.

The country has also been shaken by a series of extreme right-wing terror attacks against both ethnic minorities and pro-migration politicians alike, and a rolling drumbeat of alarming incidents of radicalisation within the German security forces, like the 2017 Day X plot in which troopers in the German equivalent of the SAS allegedly conspired to assassinate liberal politicians, including the country’s president, and launch a guerrilla campaign against the state.

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In Austria and Denmark, the onward march of right-wing populism has been halted, but only by centrist governments of right and left adopting the rhetoric and policies of the populist right, including a zero tolerance approach to illegal migration. It is little wonder that Orban himself has declared the European Union’s reponse to this crisis a moral victory: the policies he was shunned for in 2015 are now the stated policy of the European Union as a whole, with Europe’s mainstream conservatives falling over themselves to claim Greece’s hardline border policy as their own.

This is not, as an aside, the Europe that Britain’s FBPE contingent so idealised during our own long-running political crisis, but it is the continent’s political mainstream for the foreseeable future. Given that the majority of Afghan and Pakistani migrants will have aimed for the UK as their ultimate destination, drawn by long-existing communities of fellow kin and a facility with the national language, it is ironic that at the same time Turkish police were firing volleys of tear gas at their Greek counterparts to enable their entry, Dominic Raab was in Ankara declaring his full-throated support for Turkish foreign policy, despite the fact that its success at Europe’s borders would direly threaten his own government.

The European Union — with the exception of Merkel’s Germany, lumbering distractedly and painfully towards geopolitical irrelevance — has finally awoken to the threat posed to the continent by a Turkish autocrat lurching from one self-engineered crisis to another in his desire not to relinquish his hold on power.

Threatened at home by a secular Kemalist section of the electorate dissatisfied at the country’s bloody and so far unsuccessful war in Syria, by the presence of millions of refugees, by slow-motion economic collapse and by the country’s growing slide into authoritarian Islamism, Erdogan survives only by engineering crises which pit the Turkish nation against the world. Switching from the United States to Russia to Europe and back again as the existential foe of the moment, Erdogan’s Turkey is the greatest destabilising factor in our near abroad.

Claiming that Turkey’s borders as settled by the 1923 treaty are too small to contain the might and needs of the Turkish nation, Erdogan has effectively annexed large chunks of northern Syria, expanded its military presence in Iraq and Libya, claiming them to be within the Turkish “borders of the heart,” and threatens constantly to invade and annex Greece’s eastern islands.

It is only by chance that the 2016 coup attempt against him failed and that Turkey avoided a serious civil conflict, and Europe will need to be similarly fortunate to avoid being dragged into a conflict of the autocrat’s choosing in the near future. The chances of a peaceful transition of power away from Erdogan are exceedingly slim, and Europe, including Britain, will need to reassess its relations with its unhappy neighbour sooner rather than later, a process begun, it seems, at a sleepy Balkan border crossing the Turkish strongman last week turned, on a whim, into a battlefield.

Sometimes I try to interrogate my own reasons for it, in that guilty way that parents do with every decision we make, everything that we could have done differently. I wonder if it’s second-child syndrome, that everything she does is old hat to us so we’re relaxed, whereas everything the eldest one does is new ground broken and new fears faced. Or if it’s just differences in personality, that she tends to misbehave with a cheeky grin that makes it harder to be angry. Or, of course, if it’s simple sexism: I forgive the girl-child things I wouldn’t the boy, because gender roles. I don’t know what the truth is.

Another cliché is that fathers of daughters are suddenly supposed to have a wave of newfound feminist feeling. “As a father of daughters, I now realise that, in fact, women should have the vote,” we are meant to say; or, “As a father of daughters, I now realise that perhaps we should pay women nearly as much money as men.” 

It’s such a trope that I know of at least two articles spoofing it. Both of them are good and funny and hit home. “As a man with no daughters, I am completely incapable of feeling any empathy towards any woman whatsoever,” says one. “How merrily I used to drive down country lanes in my old Ford, periodically dodging off-road to mow down female pedestrians (you must remember I had no daughters then),” recalls the other. Other pieces are more straightforwardly angry.

I haven’t greatly noticed such a change in myself, I think probably because I’m already as perfectly egalitarian and pro-women as it’s possible to be; DM me if you want lessons in feminism, ladies! But there’s an implicit accusation in the trope, and I want to defend my fellow fathers-of-daughters from it.

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The accusation, I think, goes something like this. The father-of-daughters didn’t care about women beforehand; he was unable to even process the idea of them as fully human. Now that he has daughters, he wishes to protect them from bad things, and to do that — he belatedly realises — he needs to protect all women. But it shouldn’t take the production of a new woman from your genetic material to realise that women deserve equal pay, a life without fear of assault and all those other things. 

There’s also a suggestion that fathers in these situations still don’t see women as fully human: they wish to protect their daughters because they see themselves as the owners of those daughters, and wish to protect their property; or because their daughters are extensions of themselves, and they wish to protect themselves.

Most especially, I think the argument is: it should be obvious that women deserve all the things that men deserve, and if a man needs to procreate to realise it, then something is wrong with that man.

To argue that that is not necessarily the case, I want to go back to a beach in Turkey in 2015. That autumn, a little boy called Alan Kurdi died with his brother and mother, trying to cross the sea to Europe having escaped the Syrian civil war. You’ll remember the awful photo; it was everywhere, the little boy on the beach. A year or so later, another awful photo went viral, of another young boy, Omran Dagneesh, covered in dust and blood after an air strike.

That second time, I wrote about it. I was a relatively new parent at the time: when Alan died, Billy was about 18 months old, and Ada was as yet unborn. When Omran was caught in the air strike, Billy was two and a half or so, Ada just short of her first birthday.

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The images provoked an extraordinary reaction in me. With the photo of Alan, in particular, I was close to tears; I swore online at a journalist who shared it (“STOP TWEETING IT. STOP TWEETING THAT FUCKING PICTURE. It is a little boy. A dead little boy. Let him have some dignity”). With the photo of Omran, to quote my own words from the time, “I stood staring at my phone for over a minute, with the picture, again, switching between Omran’s face and Billy’s in my mind, like those optical illusions that could be a duck or a rabbit depending on how you look at it.”

I return to that piece every so often, because it still evokes an echo of the same reaction each time I read it: the yawning, panicking horror; seeing myself, as in a dream, simultaneously the parent of the child and the child himself. In my imagination, the child’s inability to comprehend the horrible things that are happening is the worst part; he would not understand why it was happening or why I had been unable to protect him. My chest still tightens when I think about it. 

Three years earlier, I would have had an entirely different response. Of course images of dead and suffering children would have been awful and heartbreaking to look at, but they wouldn’t have evoked the asphyxiating shock that they did when I was a father myself. 

Why was that? After all, it should have been obvious that children being injured or dying in war is awful, that Alan and Omran would have been unimaginably scared, that their families would have been devastated in ways that the word “devastated” cannot do justice to because it is worn away by overuse. I shouldn’t have needed to have kids of my own to realise that. And yet I did. 

And I don’t think I’m alone. A lot of people, both men and women, messaged me to say that since becoming parents, they have become hugely more vulnerable to images or stories of children. Parenthood opened a sort of empathy-valve: suddenly we were all drinking from a firehose of empathy; we couldn’t not put ourselves in the place of the scared child, whether we wanted to or not.

That is, I think, what is going on in the minds of the authors of those fathers-of-daughters pieces. You can be a man, making your way through the world, and being perfectly aware — on an intellectual, conscious level — that the women in your life have concerns which are different from yours. Most, if you asked them, would probably agree that women deserve equal pay for equal work, that medical research should gather as much data from women as from men, that pathways to STEM careers should be as straightforward for women as for men. They might even have said that it was obvious.

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But if the father-of-daughters experience is anything like my experience with the images of children, then perhaps – one day – that empathy-valve was opened. They couldn’t not feel themselves in the place of their daughters walking down a dark alley at night, or being told girls don’t do physics. And suddenly, instead of it being a thing of which they were intellectually aware, it was a great burning heart-squeezing pressure, and they couldn’t stop themselves from taking whatever platform was available to them and shouting from it to anyone who would listen.

Maybe that will happen to me, some day; maybe it happens when one’s daughter reaches her tweens or teens, when society starts to impose more strictures on what she should and shouldn’t do (at the moment she is far more concerned about whether she is Elsa or Anna in her playground games of make-believe). Maybe at the moment I’m in the calm “it is obvious” intellectual stage and it’ll all change for me.

If it does, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll suddenly realise the Right Thing to Do, any more than it meant that Andrea Leadsom would have been a better PM than Theresa May because she was a mother. The empathy firehose gives you insight but costs you detachment, I think, and sometimes detachment is important; empathy won’t tell me the correct maternity leave policies for a given trade-off between economic growth and female participation in the workforce, for instance.

“Parents don’t necessarily make better decisions,” I wrote in 2016. “They just make different mistakes.” There is, for any policy goal, a correct policy decision, and I’m not sure being a father of daughters reveals it to you. But it probably makes you want to shout about the problem a lot more.

I haven’t felt the father-of-daughters impulse, as I say; I’ve just felt myself become wrapped around our daughter’s little finger, even when she shrieks “I HATE DADDY. POO POO DADDY” and refuses to let me put her to bed, which she does fairly often. But I understand the awful rush of empathy behind it.