I’ve always known that I wasn’t a good person, but I didn’t quite realise the extent of my badness until I saw the latest Bond movie. Spoiler Alert: the film features a baddie intent on World domination. I know – who’d have thought it, so different from the rest of the franchise…

This particularly baddie doesn’t appear to be a cat-cuddler like the last one, but he does have a blue face – a bit like someone who’s come racing to Kelso in December without their coat. And he’s devised a way to quickly and (as far as I can tell) fairly painlessly inflict death on billions of people by means of genetically modified nano-bots.

First the baddie wipes out all the other known baddies, then he sets about mixing a large pool of poisonous nano-potion. His targets are spread pretty evenly across the globe, although there appears to be a bias towards the populations of more highly developed, wealthy, nations – so, looking on the bright side, the positive impact of his plan could be that it helps to address the effects of global over-consumption, climate change and environmental degradation.

It isn’t clear what his motivation is for wiping out huge swathes of humanity, but by winding the clock back 100 years on the World’s population, from something like 7.8 billion to 2 billion people, our baddie would achieve all the government’s net-zero targets in one fell swoop, ensuring the future of countless other species on the planet including penguins, pandas and polar bears.

While the lack of obvious suffering portrayed in the film is a seductive proposition, I can’t tell a lie: I’m finding the genocidal side of the plan a trifle troubling. I mean, I have friends in America, Australia and continental Europe, quite a few in Britain too, or I did have – until they read this blog and discovered that I’m leaning towards becoming a dastardly unstable eco-conscious megalomaniac.

And I’ve got nothing against all the other people around the globe who’d be affected either. In fact, let’s make this absolutely clear – acting God and making life or death decisions based on a person’s ethnicity, age, sex or appearance is wrong! Only a horrible baddie would behave like that.

But a nice baddie? Well a nice baddie might express a bias whereby surviving the nano-pox would depend on something fun like, say, maybe… enjoying horseracing? Imagine: all the upsides of a more spacious planet, a greater variety of wildlife, no climate crisis and everyone loving racehorses too!

So I’m organising a high stakes game of poker in the Stewards Tower after racing on 23rd October. I might be weeping tears of blood while clasping my golden gun beneath the table, but once I’ve captured all the chips I’m going to put them all on Ben Asker at Sedgefield on Sunday – the selection for this weekend.

And after that, you needn’t worry, because I’m totally NOT going to use the proceeds to purchase an island, somewhere in the Mediterranean, where I’m going to live with a bevy of beauties, with names like Domino, Solitaire and Darts, while I hatch an evil plan of World domination.

Mwa-Ha-Ha-Ha, Mwa-Ha-Ha-Ha!