The only tone I am able to adopt

these days is Victor Meldrew's

MATTHEW PARRIS

Victor Meldrew's, apparently, is the tone the Tories want to avoid. But, even as they move in a more receptive direction, this Tory finds himself increasingly prey to Meldrewitis. The condition may be chronic. I have started railing at electrical appliances.

'Matthew,' my lodger remarked mildly on Monday morning, 'you seem to be turning on the TV for ten minutes every morning to shout at it. Why not leave it off?' He had a point. But BBC Breakfast News had invited on a woman who kept a silk-lined casket containing an uneaten shard of biscuit left by the late Queen Mother.

At first I thought that it was a satirical item — maybe the BBC was straying on to dangerous territory? — but no, the woman was real. The item was not ironic. The camera lingered in close-up on the biscuit. It was supposed to be serious. I mean, you don't have to be a republican to find this sort of rubbish ridiculous, do you? What thoughts occupy the minds of people like this? Should we let them vote? Have the BBC lost their senses?

But stop me. There I go again. Last Friday morning, driving early up to Derbyshire, I caught on the car radio a Today programme interview with an American who believes (said the announcer) that the causes of stammering are chemical and not psychological. The American was asked to explain. He said that when a person stammers there appear to be chemical changes in part of the brain associated with this. Drugs can counteract it.

'Well, of course they might!' I found myself shouting at the dashboard. 'That doesn't mean stammering's a physical ailment.' Everything we do (probably everything we think or feel, too) will be associated with a chemical or electrical change in the brain. These changes, though we are unconscious of them, may be involved in facilitating the activity of which we are conscious. Blocking the former may block the latter. Heck, it's hardly news that drugs might stop a stammer. A pint of vodka can stop all speech.

The question is whether a chemical, or lack of it, is the first cause. Obviously not. Stammerers often have difficulty only with certain words that carry for them an emotional charge. A civil servant friend just couldn't get the words 'civil servant' out when people asked him what he did. Another friend, telling me about his visit to a Zimbabwean game reserve then named Wankie, got horribly stuck on the first syllable, which, reddening, he repeated, like a stuck record-needle, in a crowded restaurant. It isn't a chemical; it's a demon in your head whispering 'Wouldn't it be dreadful if. . . ? '

At the end of the Today interview (which the American, who said that he himself was a stammerer but was cured by the drug, got through without a hitch) his interviewer said goodbye and he (no doubt thinking, Hooray. I made it!) replied, 'Goodbye — and tha-tha-thank-thank.. ', and I heard myself shout. 'Hah! Yes! See!' at the radio. What a horrid person I was becoming.

Last week a report appeared in the papers: US medical researchers have discovered a cure for cocaine addiction. The article explained that a pill has been found which neutralises the 'rush' that cocaineusers experience on sniffing the substance, rendering the whole experience an expensive waste of time.

'Well, they won't take the pill then, will they?' I yelled at the Guardian. This whole research programme had been based on a misunderstanding. Its assumption was that most drug-users really want to stop. But they only say that they do — may even think that they do. If they really, completely did, of course, they could buy a one-way ticket to a place where there were no drugs. Drug addicts don't do this — or, rather, the word 'addict' is used to describe those who don't. Finding, in the form of a pill, another way of offering them a road that they have already demonstrated their unwillingness to travel is hardly going to be the answer. Aren't medical people dim. . • ?

But there I go again. Stop me. Someone should have stopped me when I started yelling at the television the other night because an announcer had reported that an American research programme had 'shown' that TV violence breeds violent children. A long and extensive study of real-life families proved that children who watched a lot of television at home were more likely to become violent as teenagers.

'No, you idiot!' I shouted. 'Children who watch a great deal of television at home have worse parents than children who don't. That's why they turn out bad.' What a waste of time and money, conducting all those case-studies with hundreds of families when the whole thing misses the point. Typical Yanks, But stop me. For here comes a new rage. 'Educational psychiatrists were on hand this morning' as children returned after the Easter break to the school attended by that poor girl, Milly, who is missing. It was feared that her schoolmates would suffer psychological trauma as they reassembled.

A team of educational psychiatrists? An Asian shopkeeper has one eye put out by shoplifting thugs — his hundredth such attack — and we have no police to protect him; yet we afford 'educational psychiatrists' at Milly's school? What is an educational psychiatrist? No such thing. There cannot be a science of psychiatry, because we have no agreed account of the human mind. Present knowledge lacks the spine of a theoretical structure — or, rather, comprises competing accounts. In the history of psychology, our age is the Middle Ages; concepts such as 'schizophrenia' and 'psychosis' serving as 'blood', 'phlegm' and 'choler' served would-be medical science half a millennium ago. So there cannot be educational psychiatrists; just kindly adults with experience of handling childhood upsets. Harrumph!

Cripes. What's that on my TV? Newscaster time-filling on the Queen Mother's funeral: 'They pass the Thames where King George used to fish. It's still there.' Still there'? Of course it ruddy is. Aargh! Offbutton. Stare through window at river outside my East End flat. Huge roar and splash.

Oh no. It's the flipping 'Thames river police again, doing wheelies in their stupid powerboat. They just roar around being macho. Hope they tip over. Never saw them arrest anyone. Nothing to do. What are they for? Cushy number. Privatise them.

Stop me, I say, before it's too late.

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.