The man I keep not wanting to write about has had a milkshake thrown over him. I am not in favour of people throwing milkshakes over this man, even though it is horribly tempting.

If anyone deserves a sticky soaking, he does. As that banana and salted caramel concoction dribbled down, it was hard not to indulge in what might be called milkshake-schadenfreude.

Throwing things at politicians has a long and ignoble tradition. Eggs usually, flour sometimes (half-way to a pancake there) and punches occasionally, and now milkshakes are the flavour of the moment. Assorted right-wing nuisances and liabilities have received this sticky blessing, the latest anointment occurring yesterday in Newcastle.

I am not naming the man because I am tired of typing his bloody name.

It’s not a good idea to throw milkshakes over this man, as it only encourages him to play the victim and come over even more toxically pompous than normal.

The milkshake man is splashed over many of the newspapers today. The Daily Express (or the Daily Brexit as it should perhaps now be known) declares the milkshake-chucking incident to be an “affront to democracy”. That is part of a widely flogged quote from the milk-shaken one, a man who declared, as you may recall, that the Yes vote in the referendum represented a revolution without a single shot having been fired. That was days after the murder of Jo Cox MP.

In the order of offences to democracy, being murdered by a right-wing loon counts a few notches higher than having a milkshake upended over your pinstriped suit.

The man whose name I don’t wish to type has also said that he would “pick up a rifle if Brexit wasn’t delivered”. I am not convinced he would know what to do with a rifle if he did pick one up (me neither), but his threat does carry alarming undertones: deliver Brexit or there’ll be blood.

As it happens, Jo Cox’s husband, Brendan, is against the airborne delivery of milkshakes. He said: “I don’t think throwing stuff at politicians you disagree with is a good idea. It normalises violence and intimidation.”

Yeah, well, that’s probably true (sigh). But I can’t have been the only one whose spirits rose when watching that footage on the news. Those milkshake splashes went all over social media too. My favourite one was a play on words about why we should lactose the intolerant.

But throwing milkshakes at that man only draws even more attention to him, and that’s the last thing we all need.