Campbell's diagnosis (he offers as prime evidence the ways in which the rebarbative Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage shamelessly told deliberate lies to persuade simpletons to vote for Brexit) comes just as the Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne imbroglio blossoms in our public conversation.

When what Bishop and Pyne have done (with unseemly post-parliamentary haste taking those plush jobs, their ministerial careers having made them deliciously employable) it is because the average person in the average pub is aghast at the Bishop and Pyne shamelessness.

Your columnist, like everyone else down at the pub extremely shame-conscious and guilt-sensitive, gave a gobsmacked gasp of shock when news first broke of Pynes and Bishops pouncings on their new jobs.

How could they?! So ingrained and evolved is the average good soul's sense of shame that we are always startled when others do things our own consciences would never let us do.

And it turns out that (for I have been researching this, ashamed to write in ignorance) evolutionary neurobiologists say it is literally true that we have evolved, most of us, to feel shame and to take pains to avoid it.

It was vital to our survival, in primitive times and battling circumstances, that we did nothing that jeopardised our tribes wellbeing, that made us appear wilfully, tribe-jeopardisingly selfish. Shame is the evolved pain we feel (and so live ethical lives that avoid risk of it happening) when we know that others think we are selfish scum. But quite why this shame gnaws most of us (across all cultures, everywhere) but leaves the Trumply shameless not even a little nibbled is not clear.

My point is not to moralise, to say that those of us down at the pub with our senses of shame are better people than these shameless hussies (of both sexes). No, I am expressing dismay (Alastair Campbells voice is full of dismay when he discusses these things) that those of us who have evolved/been brought up to live lives governed by fear of shame are ill-equipped to thrive, even to survive, in these increasingly post-shame times.

What is to become of us? Our possession of a full range of self-conscious emotions makes us fragile and vulnerable. These are times that suit the Trumps, the Johnsons, the Farages, Bishops and Pynes. They are today's real-life Daleks, the mutant monsters of the Doctor Who science-fiction series whose deep, nightmare-stoking horror for us lay in their untouchable, shameproof emotionlessness.

Meanwhile, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing has brought a chorus of the truism that all of us who were alive and thinking on that day (July 20, 1969) remember exactly where we were.

What would make a change and be more stimulating would be for people to reminisce instead about who they were, what they were on that unforgettable day. So for example this 50th anniversary has reminded me that at the time I was tempestuously, tragically, unrequitedly in love. Alerted by Shakespeare to the part the callous, capricious moon plays in these things, on July 20, 1969 I was blaming the moon for my misery and hoping Neil Armstrong would give it a good kick.

In recent days there has been an orgy of gushing about what a grand achievement going to the moon was for our species. Was it so grand? Do contrary-minded curmudgeons know that they have, supporting them, a kind of poet laureate in W.H. Auden? At the time of the moon landing he was thought the greatest living poet of the English-speaking world. He chose, instead of joining in the moon-conquering fever, to write a grumpy poem, Moon Landing, about what an empty, blokey, pointless, non-achievement it was. It begins:

Its natural the Boys should whoop it up for

so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure

it would not have occurred to women

to think worthwhile

Its not one of Auden's best poems but, because this column likes to be contrary, I recommend it (its easily Googled) to any thinking readers who are fed up with all current yay!-we-conquered-the-moon gushings.

When in recent days that poor Christian cabbage, the US vice-president, bragged that the USA plans to send a man and a woman (the first of her sex) to the moon, I had the Audenesque thought that it will be a struggle to find a fine, accomplished woman who can be bothered to do something so frivolous.