delusional disorder and it affected many aspects of his thinking.” 178. Dr Reveley went on to express similar views in relation to letters written by Bane to David Mellor MP and to Mr Trower, and summarised her views in the following terms: “A normal person who has a mistaken belief is different to someone who has a delusional disorder. And once someone has a psychotic problem, their brain cannot be taken to behave in normal ways, and they can’t be taken to think in normal ways, and you can’t pick out this bit and say, well, that bit’s OK, and pick out that bit, that bit’s OK. Their decision-making in so far as it impacts on their delusions is unsafe.” 179. I approach the passage from Dr Reveley’s evidence that I have just quoted with some caution, because Professor Howard said that it differed from the approach that he would take, and also probably differed from the approach outlined in BMA guidelines. He said, and I would agree, that it is dangerous to assume that just because someone has a diagnosis of Delusional Disorder, it must somehow affect all their thinking. Professor Howard explained that there is a huge amount of research literature dealing with the thinking processes of people who suffer from persecutory delusions, and the general conclusion of that literature is that the thinking of such people is exactly like the thinking of healthy people except specifically in relation to the areas where they have delusions. Here again, Dr Reveley may in my view have been a little too ready to adopt a broad brush, impressionistic approach. Nevertheless, that criticism does not necessarily invalidate her basic point that the terms in which Bane wrote to the Prime Minister, Mr Mellor and Mr Trower, among others, show that his support for the Conservative Party and the leadership of Mrs Thatcher had become inextricably entangled with his deluded beliefs about an international conspiracy. Indeed, as will appear later that is in my judgment the right conclusion to reach, and from late 1984 onwards, if not earlier, it is impossible to keep Bane’s support for the Conservatives and his delusional belief systems in separate water-tight compartments. Bane’s identification with Ajax 180. Before leaving Dr Reveley’s evidence, I should say a little about one minor, but intriguing, question, namely the extent to which Bane identified himself with Ajax, or regarded himself as having conversations with Ajax. In paragraph 67 of her first report Dr Reveley referred to some of the material in which Ajax features, including the Bernard Levin article and Bane’s letter of 19 December 1988 to Mr Trower in which he referred to Ajax having dictated over 50 pages to him. Dr Reveley’s comment was that the content of this letter, and the suggestion that Bane had been hearing the voice of Ajax, and having a conversation with him, made a diagnosis of some form of psychosis almost inevitable. In cross-examination it was put to her that there are several documents where Bane clearly seems to have identified himself with Ajax, and that it was against the weight of the evidence to suppose that Bane ever saw Ajax as a separate person with whom he was having a conversation. It was suggested that it would be over-literal to interpret his references to conversations with Ajax in such terms, and that they were no more than a metaphor for a man debating ideas with