I find it terrifying that so many of the zero-foresight fluffy tendency inhabit the medical profession, because one day I might need one of them to remove something from my brain; and I’d hate to think that while doing so, the surgeon might think ‘Ah, here’s a left cerebral lobe – he won’t be needing that…I’ll take it out while I’m here’.

Ms Pollock wants you to know that rugby scrums are dangerous. She has done research, so she has, and the finding is inescapable: the “commonest phase of play causing injury” is the scrum. What’s more, the most common injuries resulting from scrums are head, face and shoulders. Not livers or toes then?

“Scrums should be banned,” she opined, “the sport is not safe enough for schoolchildren, and not enough is being done to protect the safety of children”.

Allyson is devoid of views about how the game of rugby will be played without scrums, or indeed what might replace them. The kids could engage in tickling contests perhaps, or focus groups to decide which way the ball should exit – and whether hookers should be called something less offensive. Like receivers, for example.

This news broke on the BBCNews website, and there are times when I wonder if some welcome renegade is lying under deep cover inside Auntie, emerging occasionally to release entirely false stuff in order to warn us all of where Harmanism might lead. But having watched Mark Thompson on the Marr Show this morning, I have to conclude that the stubbly intellectual gnome now laughably called Director General of the BBC almost certainly agrees with Allyson Pollock.

There is a subject called social anthropology. There are also things called competitive sport, character-forming experiences, hard knocks, commonsense and the triumph of a sensible majority over a minute percentage of those who have lost their reason.

That a senior medical professor could put forward such bad social science in the light of two major British sporting failures is appalling, but not surprising. As The Slog has said many times before, we should not let any doctors anywhere near decisions of national importance: they may well be surgically and remedially qualified, but most of them are judgementally challenged.