The case for driverless cars

I can’t remember the name of the comedian, but he had a wonderful ambition, one which will sadly now never be realised. He wanted to interview Neil Armstrong for an hour on live television without mentioning the moon landings once.

I wish he’d succeeded. In fact Armstrong might have leapt at the opportunity to pontificate about baseball or gardening, rather than the Apollo missions. It must be maddening when every conversation with a stranger turns to one brief event in your life: rather like being in the Eagles and knowing that, in a two-hour concert, 90 per cent of the crowd is only there for ‘Hotel California’.

Following in this vein, I have a secret retirement project where I interview the world’s leading minds on trivial and tangential topics. I’ve made a start already. The Spectator has 30 minutes of unreleased footage of me quizzing the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek about toilet design; somewhere on YouTube there is ten minutes of me talking to the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman about a speed camera on the M11 near Chigwell.