There’s none so zealous as the converted. Panorama: Britain’s Hidden Alcoholics (BBC One, Monday 8pm) had retired spin king and former boozehound Alastair Campbell alternately manhandling mangled livers and chortling about the old days with, of all people, Anne Robinson.

Campbell is certainly qualified to talk about the damage excessive drinking can cause - including, it seems, to your short-term memory. Campbell reminded us twice who he was in the show’s opening three minutes.

Being preached at by the man whose dodgy dossier took us into Iraq was like getting lessons on etiquette from Malcolm Tucker. And his partner Fiona Millar was wheeled out to talk about Campbell being “cruel and sometimes aggressive” when in the grip of the dreaded drink. Hard to imagine, isn’t it.

But it’s not just odious public figures who drink too much. Some were intelligent professionals, others worked in the City. These were well-to-do sorts who just can’t say no to a seventh glass of Chablis after the opera. It was heart-rending but often scattergun stuff, with much of the running time spent on Campbell jogging through a gloomy forest as if fleeing his own mortality.

Surely the problem isn’t supermarkets, or the price of drink. The problem, as Campbell finally came close to admitting, is us. We just can’t be trusted.

As for our host, he gave up drinking in 1986, only returning to the occasional tipple more than a decade later. The country is still paying for some of the stuff he did when he was sober.

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