Drinking champagne at the Wallace Collection does not constitute the whole of that Western civilisation which Standpoint exists to celebrate and defend, but it feels like a good start, and the first number of the magazine goes some way to indicate other areas of interest. However I want to confine myself to celebrating the magazine and its editor.

I have known Daniel since he was a schoolboy and his father was a socialist. I applauded on the sidelines when he got a place at Oxford from Langley Grammar School, and applauded again when he got a First in History. I read his leaders for the Telegraph, his dispatches from Bonn and Eastern Europe, and later his leaders for the Times. After that his by-line was all over the better journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and more recently he wrote a very good book on chess as the conduct of the Cold War by other means.

Most of us, thankfully, still have relatively little direct experience of violent crime, although everyone but the most sheltered now suffers death by a thousand anti-social cuts, and the implicit threat they carry. A few days after the Standpoint launch party last month, and just yards from its offices in leafy Manchester Square, I was paying for drinks in a local pub when a group of quite obviously under-age teenagers swaggered in. The pub is the sort most regularly used by local office people having an after-work drink, and these kids looked distinctly off the beaten track. After being asked to leave for being too young by the landlady, they started to make a noisy fuss. Then one of them raised an unopened glass Coke bottle he was carrying and challenged her, 'So am I too young to smash this in your face?'