In case you want even more on this business about Cameron/India/Pakistan (or even if you do not), read this businesslike piece by Hasan Suroor in The Hindu.

It reminds us helpfully of one footling British diplomatic error after another:

This is not the first time that a British leader has gone to the subcontinent and returned with a bloodied nose. Indeed, there is a history of British politicians blundering into controversy on their visits to the region, leaving Whitehall to pick up the pieces.

Remember January 2009, when David Miliband, the then Foreign Secretary, found himself thrust into the centre of an ill-tempered row over his tactless remarks on Kashmir and the Mumbai terror attacks?

Or 1997 when Robin Cook, the newly-appointed Foreign Secretary, nearly ended up wrecking the Queen’s visit to India by infuriating Delhi with an offer to mediate on Kashmir prompting I.K. Gujral, India’s Prime Minister at the time, to tell him to mind his own business dismissing Britain as “a third-rate power”?

More recently, Gordon Brown was involved in a very public spat with Islamabad when on a visit to Afghanistan in the dying days of his premiership he said that two-thirds of all terror plots foiled by British intelligence agencies were hatched in Pakistan…

What is it, then, about the subcontinent that causes the famous British stiff upper lip go all a-quiver?

It is striking that while the more gung-ho Americans seldom put a wrong foot, the British despite their supposedly better understanding of the region and particularly Indian-Pak sensitivities never seem to get it right.

Mr. Cameron is simply the latest casualty of a tendency that, one suspects, has something to do with a mindset which refuses to recognise that the era of Britain lecturing its former colonial subjects while they listened quietly is over.

Yup.

Only tip-top speechwriters need apply for a job involving British oratory in that part of the world.