If there’s a political figure more irritating than a tobacco-banning clown from North Dakota, it’s a preachy left-wing windbag who has, it appears, been given delusions of grandeur by his role in a fading soap opera set in the White House.

The London Independent, needless to say, does not agree. In an oleaginous ’profile’ of Martin Sheen, writer Andrew Gumbel notes the supposed irony of the “continuing success” of the West Wing and its fictional President ‘Bartlett’ (one t, actually, but never mind) in a country allegedly in the grip of “war fever and right-wing resurgence”.

Gumbel tells us that Sheen, somebody who has always been predictably orthodox in his choice of liberal causes, is “a rebel, a non-conformist, a man who delights in challenging authority at the highest levels by standing four-square on his unshakeable moral sense.”

Oh, please…