Having diligently uncovered what they curiously call his ‘birth name’ – Adrian Elms – the Metropolitan Police (perhaps for purely histrionic reasons) insist on calling him Khalid Masood.

But the nomenclature reveals the terrible secret: that the man who wreaked havoc in Westminster was only peripherally connected to the forces of terror and fundamentalist aggression.

More likely he was exorcising his own demons. No more an international terrorist than the little man in the asylum is Napoleon Bonaparte.