My claim to fame this year: I stopped a lot of people from squirting each other with milk

Every columnist, broadcaster or writer should, as each year closes, review his or her net contribution to the sum total of national good. It isn’t vain — or, if vain, it’s the vanity demanded by self-respect — that we should ask what we’ve done to change the world for the better.

One hundred and ten years ago this New Year’s eve, Emile Zola will have reflected with pride on the total exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, whose cruel traduction by the French authorities the brave writer did so much to expose. Charles Dickens deserved to spend his Christmases proudly contemplating how his stories, serialised in the daily newspapers, had awakened the Victorian conscience to the sufferings of the poor. The great American broadcaster Ed Murrow could have taken quiet year-end satisfaction from his fearless unmasking of Senator Joe McCarthy and his lies. And, closer to home, my distinguished predecessor on the Times, Bernard Levin, will surely have reviewed with a sense of honest annual achievement the innocent black South Africans, the wicked Gas Board officials and the philistine opera directors whose stories his journalism had brought to public attention.