I joke often about how, if I were in power, I’d employ police marksmen to sit on motorway bridges picking off people who drive too slowly. But actually I’ve never thought that the death penalty is a good idea.

When a state calmly and coolly, and in sound mind, decides that it’s going to kill someone, that’s actually premeditated murder. And when they administer the lethal injection in front of an invited audience of priests and officials on a sort of stage: well, that’s just bizarre.

There are two ways a truly civilised and advanced nation can be defined. One, it has a fleet of nuclear submarines, and two, it does not have the death penalty. That leaves you with France and Britain. And that’s about right.

Think about it. When you empower the judiciary to kill someone, you are not even hoping that the person will be rehabilitated. It is pure punishment. But who’s the punishment aimed at? Sure, it can’t be very pleasant sitting in your cell dreaming up some ludicrous last-meal request that will stump the jailhouse chef, but actually, after the poison has done it’s dirty work, you’re dead and that’s sort of that.

The people who actually suffer most are your parents and your children. And they weren’t the ones who did the crime.

I’m not saying we should be soft on vagabonds and thieves. I’d like very much to lock them up in a cell and tell them they can eat only what they can cultivate in their body hair. And I wouldn’t heat the jail either, or provide plumbing. But I absolutely couldn’t support a state that declares murder is wrong and then hammers the point home by publicly and openly murdering people.

That said, a state that waits for people who are a bloody nuisance to order dim sum, then silently pokes them in the buttocks with a nuclear-tipped umbrella seems somehow less revolting.

I can think of many people who could and should be removed from the scene in such a way that no one can really explain what happened. George Monbiot. Ken Livingstone. Various hardline Muslim fanatics. Most human rights lawyers. Anyone with a rally jacket. People in Babyshambles. People with beards. Anyone with a sign on their desk that says “You don’t have to be mad to work here”, anyone in a jungle in Australia, anyone who claps along to the oompah music at the Horse of the Year Show, and everyone at the Ideal Home exhibition.

This Henry II attitude to good governance — “who will rid me of this turbulent priest” — is not premeditated murder. It’s more like a crime of passion, and that’s understandable. You feel sorry for the leader as he sits there thinking: “I’m trying to run a country here and how can I do that if I’ve got this infernal priest nicking all my churches and making everything worse. So can someone go out there and stick a sword in his gizzard.

“And then on the way home can someone please pop into the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show and mess with the Earls Court boilers . . .”

That’s pretty much the same as a husband trying to run a family and finding that every time he comes home from a hard day at the office his wife is in bed with the paper boy. Eventually he’s going to snap and shoot them both. And not even the Americans would electrocute him for that.

Of course, once the state gets a taste for the quiet assassination of troublemakers, there’s always a danger that you end up with Uday Hussein feeding hookers to his pet tigers and making old men dance after they’ve had the soles of their feet beaten to a pulp.

That’s bad, obviously. But what you do to solve this is have him quietly killed as well.

There’s a scene in an Eighties film called Defence of the Realm where a journalist is blindfolded and dragged to a grand-looking room in Whitehall where three old-school-tie types grill him a bit. And then after he refuses to play ball they attach a small bomb to the record player in his flat and blow him to pieces.

He was going to print a story that would have resulted in the American forces leaving Britain in the middle of the cold war. So what do they do? He couldn’t be arrested and tried because he hadn’t committed a crime. And he couldn’t be allowed to run the story. So he had to explode.

I sort of like the idea that this Ludlum stuff is going on, behind our backs. But I fear it doesn’t any more. Thatcher, yes. There’s no doubt in my mind that she might not have lost too much sleep if her security services had taken out the odd person threatening national security in a Geneva railway station. But Blair? Hmmm. I doubt he’d have the balls, because he’d be worried about what he could say if Cherie found out.

Then there’s David Cameron. Did you see those pictures of him in Darfur last week? He was wearing cords and a short-sleeved shirt and I’m sorry but Boden Man is never, in a million years, going to order the quiet assassination of a turbulent cleric.

If he had a full packet in his underpants he might surely be tempted to lose it with his minions and shout at them them to put a dollop of killer lead in Polly Toynbee’s tofu. Instead of which he’s now going to let her shape his party’s stance on social justice.

It won’t work. My Henry II plan will.

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