There are times when the affairs of State are so pressing and so complex as to seem almost impossible of fair solution.

George Osborne’s Budget last week was as good as it could possibly be with the national coffers close to empty.

It was a business and enterprise-friendly budget – aimed at seeking to kick-start growth in our economy by helping businesses, especially small and medium sized enterprises and entrepreneurs.

Only profit-making businesses can hope to pull us up by the bootstraps, rather than yet more Government spending in the hope of buying ourselves out of trouble. The state must be smaller and spend less, society and the people bigger and more self-reliant.

But how hard that can be.

I strongly support the right to protest, and feel for the very many decent people who turned out on Saturday to express their view (albeit a different one to mine) that the cuts will make the economy contract even further.

Their perfectly honourable law-abiding protest was ruined by a handful of anarchists and thugs.

Not only did they wreck any PR advantage which a peaceful protest might have had, such as that enjoyed by the Countryside Come to Town a few years back who left not a speck of litter nor left a gate open as 500,000 marched through London; but also the violence risks turning the people and the authorities against what should be a perfectly legitimate way of expressing an opinion.

In a similar vein, there are many people like me who are increasingly concerned by events in the Middle East, and in particular at the way in which a relatively justifiable UN Resolution to protect innocent civilians from massacre seems to be being used increasingly as cover for removal of Gaddafi, for which in my view there is scant international legal justification.

Yet any kind of anti-war protest would be hi-jacked by communists, anarchists, thugs and bad-hats alike. The scruffy herberts who have been encamped in Parliament Square for several years and risk wrecking the royal wedding bring legitimate protest into disrepute.

The Malmesbury School sixthformers who bent my ear on Friday, left-wing singer Julie Felix at the Royal British Legion concert in Wootton Bassett on Saturday; and other weekend events are the truly effective way of influencing national events via the MP.

I always find constituency events therapeutic for that reason, and the only safe sounding-board for events in Westminster.