Professor Rosie Woodroffe, a badger expert at the Zoological Society of London said “When you kill badgers two things happen. The first is there are fewer badgers”.

You think I made that up? In the same Telegraph article, Environment Minister Owen Paterson told the BBC that (a) the marksmen brought in to kill 70% of all badgers missed their target because the badgers “moved the goalposts and kept moving around like wild animals” (b) he had thought the Badger population on Dartmoor was 5,000, whereas it’s only 3,800, and (c) even then, the marksmen missed their target of killing 70%.

A failure? Not a bit of it. Mr Paterson said: “Our chief vet thinks that there’s no question the cull in Somerset has been a success.”

Now as we head up the wooden stairs to Beddington tonight, what we need to bear in mind is that the people who made these utterly dumbassed statements have serious public-life jobs. I mean you don’t get to be a ZSL expert by failing all your GCSEs apart from Needlework. And Defra’s finest Owen Paterson (I have it on first-hand authority) enjoys the respect of his senior civil servants.

But a year or two from now now, Rosie Woodroffe could be handling a major global pandemic caused by the leap of deadly frog-flu to human beings. Are we going to be reassured when she tells us that slowly boiling humans means there will be less targets for the frogs to aim at?

And just as worrying, by 2018 Owen Paterson might be in charge of repelling Belgian invaders out to wreak revenge for Britain destroying the EU. Will we think Paters credible when he explains that, although he was surprised that 5.6 million Belgians (rather than 1,250) had stormed Ramsgate, he thought that bagging 113 of the blighters was a pretty good haul?

Lest we forget, Mr Paterson’s Defra was the one which, after the coldest English Spring since 1947, said that the delay in ripening of UK crops was “entirely unforeseen”. As a result of this unforeseen inevitability, Draper Osborne had to add some £3.5bn to his deficit column in food imports.

I have a chum who is writing a book, the working title of which is In Search of Competence. I’d imagine he’s snowed under with evidence to suggest that it’s going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack.