The Former Colonial Power is almost everywhere a pest. Consider the French, still being blamed by many in Rwanda for that country’s genocide — so much so that the Rwandans stopped teaching French in their schools and set up a cricket board, surely the unkindest cut of all. The British are schizophrenic about how they view their imperial past in a way difficult for outsiders to fathom; and every now and then it becomes visible in acts of staggering tastelessness.

The British media has always been a pretty rich mine of evidence that attitudes simultaneously arrogant, patronising and insulting continue to exist in parts of that country’s public opinion, particularly among the country’s intellectual elite. The BBC’s editorial judgment — it, alone among electronic media outlets, tries to avoid the use of the word “terrorist” to describe the Mumbai attacks and attackers — is representative of this position. For the complex of interests which the BBC traditionally represents — and continues to represent, however many non-Oxbridge accents they may put on air — India’s turning away from their preferred, Old Labour, orthodoxy cut deep.

Hence the subtle anger that BBC Britain no longer matters like it does, concealed until it’s brought out into the open at times like this — when the well-known flaws in India’s recent history of growth will be produced as universal explanation.

India, formerly the last bastion of the Times crossword, has become a country which cheers too loudly at cricket matches; Mumbai a city where young people have accents more Indo-American than Indo-British. Hence root causes will be hastily unearthed, and The Guardian will be unkind about the brashness of “new India”. But this shouldn’t surprise us: after all, Tony Blair suffered the same fate. India, like Blair, doesn’t despise America quite enough.