Thursday evening’s Question Time took place in the well-to-do London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, so it was perhaps inevitable that a well-to-do chap equated an icon of well-to-do-ness with something well-to-do people generally have little experience of… knife crime. 

During a segment on the current spate of violence hitting London, a man dressed in a lovely pastel blue blazer gave his take on what’s needed to reduce knife crime in the capital.

He said: “Why is it I can walk into my Waitrose here in London, there’s no tags on knives or anything.

“But then, when I go to Bath, and I go to the Waitrose there, I literally can’t take the knife off the thing without going to the counter?

“So it’s the supply. I’m talking about, it would be one step that we could make very easily to reduce this supply.”

His apparent ignorance of the economical realities of gang life in London’s less-affluent boroughs prompted sniggers of derision from the audience – and more than a few derogatory comments on social media. 

On the panel, journalist and former policy advisor to David Cameron, Baroness Camilla Cavendish, said: “I’m not going to address that point if you don’t mind…

“Let’s leave Waitrose out of it.”

Last month it was revealed police forces across the country have recorded sharp increases in knife and gun crime, figures likely to fuel mounting concern over rising levels of violence.