A CHOICE between Theresa May or Andrea Leadsom is devil and the deep blue sea time. So who’s the devil in this scenario?

Oh, take your pick. Both swim in deep blue waters, but at least we know that May is a cold fish in the Tory sea. Leadsom is more of a rogue catch, a right-wing snapper fish who wants to reduce the rights of workers employed by small firms, among other things.

According to reports, the largely unknown Leadsom disapproves of the gay marriage legislation introduced by David Cameron and wants to repeal the fox-hunting act so that ‘vermin’ can be hunted down. Oh, and she is a devout Christian who is said to believe that sometimes God talks to her.

When the God whispering in her ear theory was raised on Channel 4 News, Leadsom was not amused, saying: “That question is not one that is for laughing at and poking fun at.”

Oh, I don’t know about that.

Now I don’t wish to disparage religion here because plenty of good people have faith. But politicians who believe that God talks to them, now that is worrying. Did God tell Andrea that He didn’t approve of those gay marriages; and while He was about it, could she do something about hunting foxes as they were a right pest and He did so like those pretty pink coats worn by the men on horses? Now I can’t confess to knowing much about God, but it seems unlikely.

What we do know is that God or someone has decreed that the next prime minister will be a woman. This morning’s headlines are full of Maggie references, with the Sun offering rather tortuously, THE IRON MAYDEN, with the sub-head: “New Mrs T must be Tezza not Leadsom.”

I don’t greatly care who leads the Tory party, but that sounds about right, not least because Leadsom is a little odd. She gave a rather simpering interview to the BBC yesterday. She smiled sweetly whenever anything critical was raised, such as allegations that she had embellished her CV somewhat.

Watching her was like seeing a poor Margaret Thatcher tribute act running through her routine. But the thing about Leadsom is that she’s untried, untested and a bit of a raging right-winger. Theresa May is, they say, a safe pair of hands. And a canny operator who supported the Remain camp by doing nothing much other than once mumbling that staying in Europe might be a good idea, then kept her head down and let the Tory boys tear each other apart.

Post referendum, once the letting of blue blood had been done, once Michael Gove had skewered Boris, only to die himself by cuts from the brotherly blades; only then did Theresa May step forward, smile that chilly smile, and remind us that she was the only sensible one left standing.

Anyway it’s nothing to do with me. Or with you unless you’re a renegade Tory who reads leftie columnists. No, it is down to 150,000 Tory party members to vote, with the two candidates campaigning over the summer. The winner will be announced in September, in time for David Cameron to leave at a time of his choosing – rather than, as some of us might wish, receiving a boot up his Eton undies and being told to go now.

It’s always odd when a prime minister jumps ship midstream. Millions of voters have no say in who will lead the country; instead it is down, in this case, to what amounts to a handful of Tory party members, the faithful crusty few.

Will either of these women be a success? Well, Gordon Brown snatched the crown midway through a Labour Party matinee, and we all remember how well that worked out.

The Mirror goes with the Thatcher angle, carrying a picture of Leadsom next to Mrs Hacksaw (ah, haven’t used that label in ages). The strapline reads: “Be afraid… be very afraid!” Below that it says: “MAGGIE II” with the numeral decked out horror movie style. Time to shudder…

NUMBER of words: 2.5 million. Number of words that will stick: six.

One sentence jumps out from the coverage this morning of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s part in the Iraq War. This is former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal reassurance to President W Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.”

History often picks out a phrase and sets it in stone. And those are the words that will now be chiselled out for Tony Blair. Fairly or not, they suggest that Britain’s decision to join in the US war against Saddam Hussein was taken for reasons of friendship between our prime minister and their president, rather than on solid military or humanitarian grounds.

In the heat after 9/11, calm reflection was not what Bush wanted: he wanted regime change in Iraq and he wanted it now. Blair was hesitant, urging a degree of caution, but then he went along with what his buddy required of him.

There always was something uncomfortable in all that footage at the time, showing Bush and Blair together, like the world’s most alarming buddy movie: Tony and George’s Big Iraq Adventure.

There were geo-political, military and humanitarian reasons for attacking Iraq; but there were also reasons for not doing so. The awfulness of Saddam’s regime was never in question, and the war ‘solved’ that problem by removing him. Yet it has always seemed as if the flaw in this was that there was no plan beyond going in and hitting Saddam; no thought to the longer-term repercussions: merely a Hollywood-style act of getting even. The US wanted revenge for 9/11, which was understandable but not necessarily well focused.

The war cost the lives of British troops, and the relatives of those who died will never forgive Blair, although death from conflict is, it has to be said, one danger of a military life.

Many more deaths occurred in Iraq, with the figure put as high as 600,000 – alongside the millions displaced from their homes. And last weekend’s deadly blast in Iraq only further heightens the sense that the war solved nothing and almost certainly made life worse for the country we had intended to rescue.

Those six fateful words were written in a letter to Mr Bush in July 2002. Blair reportedly wanted that phrase kept out of the Chilcot Inquiry, but there they are. Reports such as this are dense and difficult and very few will ever read all those 2.5 million words. But anyone who watched the news or even just glanced at the headlines will recall that phrase – suggesting, as it now does, that Tony Blair tied himself and his country to the American war without proper procedure or consideration for the feelings of the British people, and spurred on by dodgy intelligence.

All those millions of words, and one word you won’t hear from Tony Blair. And that is “sorry”. His lack of repentance is unsurprising in a sense as he has to stick by his belief that what he did was right. And he might not say sorry as such, but he is sorrowful, a man crucified on a cross he made for himself; a man fleetingly so popular and now forever to be remembered for hitching himself to an American war; a man forever tainted by pulling Britain into a tragic misadventure.

Of course history happens on the hot hoof and is then written in the long shadows afterwards. But even that caution cannot disguise the still unfolding tragedy of Iraq and our part in that tragedy. And it can’t wash away the notion that somehow Blair joined Bush in a star-struck crusade built on revenge and no proper plan.

HARD to believe now, but this place once had its ne’er-do-wells. Nowadays the Cotswolds is firmly the province of “do-wells”.

I can’t recall ever visiting a prettier or most prosperous seeming place. Every house is a picture-box exercise in perfect Englishness, the honey-coloured bricks often as not tumbling with roses.

Ten miles were walked yesterday, and another ten will be done today if all goes to pretty plan. The countryside is soft and wooded, and rolling too, as suggested by the ‘wolds’ at the back end of the name. The hills are plentiful but friendly for the most part. And you are more likely to meet someone reversing their shiny new Range Rover or BMW into your path than you are a good for nothing. Although if you venture to Chipping Norton, you might well bump into David Cameron.

And here’s the thing, the only political thing today, when all this chaos is over, David Cameron will have a nice and easy life. No money worries and the Cotswolds to roll around, when he’s not earning more money on the top peoples’ lecture circuit, expounding on his own marvelousness.

We are in Bourton-on-the-Water, in the north Cotswolds, a place almost comically scenic, lovely with its river and bridges. And thronging with tourists, too. The Chinese have arrived with their cameras.

Where we are staying there was a talk last night, and that’s how those good for nothings came into the picture. There was once a brotherly gang of thieves and robbers, the Dudsdon boys by name. This trio were highwaymen and common thieves too, willing to steal anything from anyone.

In the pub one night they planned to rob a grand house, where the front door had an opening through which a hand could reach to undo the bolt. The brothers were overheard in their plotting and a trap was set. When one of the brothers put his hand through, it was tied to the bolt. One of his siblings used a sword to cut off the lower arm and the three fled empty-handed in more ways than one. The injured brother is said to have bled to death in the woods nearby.

The remaining brothers continued their thieving and thuggish ways, until they were done for murder. The judge at their trial said they were “desperate fellows who had long been a terror to the country where they lived” (and should you wish to apply that to a different class of Cotswolds fellow who haunts us today, feel free).

The brothers were hanged from a gibbet in the woods, lovely woods almost certainly.

The reason for this tale is that round here they say it is the roots for a common saying. You might not know the brothers’ surname but you do know them, for they were called Tom, Dick and Harry. I Googled that and found it to be true, in the sense that a book of Cotswold history carried the story. Other theories on the roots of this saying are available, some going back to Shakespeare.

So think on that when you mumble and grumble about modern good for nothings. Any David, Boris or Nigel will do…

TWO hundred miles, that’s all it was, two hundred miles. By the time we arrived, Nigel Farage had quit as UKIP leader and Chris Evans had announced he was leaving Top Gear. I think I should go on more long journeys.

Isn’t it odd that Farage should quit as UKIP leader now? His reasoning  was as follows: “During the referendum I said I wanted my country back… now I want my life back.”

Thanks for that, Nigel. All those endless years of banging on about how much you hate Europe, while also being paid handsomely to sit in the European Parliament moaning and annoying everyone, and now that you’ve got your way you want to quit after engineering that piece of vandalism known as the referendum.

So run that by me again. You’ve landed us in the shit so you’re walking away to get your pub back. Sorry, life. Or maybe life and pub are the same thing, you know, equivalent entities in Planet Farage (a place few of us wanted to visit, so the planet came to us).

But what will you do with yourself now that your ambition has been exhausted in victory? Sit on a barstool somewhere and bore on endlessly until everyone within hearing distance find that their brains have rolled out of their ears. So just the same as always, but with a pub crowd instead of a national audience.

Of course, Nigel, you resigned your sorry ass on us before, and then came back with unseemly haste. Are you really going for good this time? I do worry that without what Margaret Thatcher once called the oxygen of publicity, you might well shrivel up and just disappear, never again to trouble the country you just got back.

Incidentally, Nigel, now that you’ve got your country back, can I have mine back, too? You know, the decent, tolerant, accepting country you’ve done so much to pollute with your Europe-hating, racist-inclined views and generally dislikeable behaviour? Only I am worried that the decent Britain many of us believed in has been poisoned by your behaviour, and the way your unpleasant antics convinced David Cameron that he had to hold that ruinous referendum just to shut you up. You and the endlessly duplicitous Boris Johnson are more or less responsible for this unholy mess.

And now you’re walking away. While I won’t be sorry to see you go, and please stay away this time, isn’t this all a little hasty? It’s often said that if you want something bad enough, when it finally happens you will be disappointed. Is that the problem? Well, plenty of us are mightily disappointed that your view prevailed –  especially by the sort of margin you said wouldn’t be enough to win the referendum if the scores had been the other way round.

Incidentally, I cannot believe that Nigel Farage is only 52. How did that happen? I am seven years older than that and still think Farage belongs to an older, crustier generation. Weird or what…

As for Chris Evans, his Top Gear wasn’t that bad, no worse than the original on a poor day, of which they were many. Matt Le Blanc was good fun. I’m not that keen on Evans, but he was okay. And sometimes you need a nonsense show like Top Gear to escape the world.

There is a very deep pit reserved in Hell for such as he… Tweet from a Boris-supporting Tory MP about Michael Gove

AND SO there is…

THE two men sit with their backs against the Eton wall, for even in hell there is a hierarchy. Boris Johnson is wearing baggy Y-fronts that burst into flames every hour or so. The pants remain unharmed but Boris is clearly unhappy – “Bloody asbestos pants.”

He grimaces as the pain dies down, knowing that it will return.

“Does one ever get used to that?”

A barbed chain bound to his chubby ankle attaches him to his companion in this corner of hell. Boris musses up his blond mop and leans forward, as if facing a television camera. He emits a series of elongated ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’ and then looks down at the crowds he imagines to be below. He waves and puts on his best buffoonish face, the one he spent so many hours practising in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Are you on that zip-wire again?”

“Ah, yes. Proudest moment, don’t you know?”

“Only Boris…”

“Only Boris what?”

“Only you could do something so stupid and end up looking good. You’ve led a charmed life – you know that?”

David Cameron, who is wearing faded Union Jack boxer shorts, leans forward and glances sideways. His eyes burn red and as he looks at Boris, blisters break out on his pale skin.

“Oi, Dave – stop doing that. It’s bad enough with the flaming pants already.”

“You deserve every burn. You’re the reason we’re cooped up down here in Hell. And I’ll never let you forget that.”

“Hang on a minute, Dave. You’re the one who held that referendum to prove a point and then bored the arse off everyone trying to pretend that you supported Europe. You thought you’d win and when you lost, the whole edifice came tumbling down. You were so sure about everything – just like you used to be at school. Mr Bloody Entitlement. You just thought everything would go your way again, didn’t you, Mr Jammy Pants?”

“And why did I lose, Boris? Because you grabbed the opportunity to advance yourself at my bloody expense and then allowed everyone to starting banging on about immigration.”

“Ah, you’ve forgotten…”

“Forgotten what?”

“Every time you say banging on…”

“Ah, damn!”

A skeleton with a remarkable head of hair, a Tarzan sweep of hair, uses a hammer to hit Dave on the head.

“Stop that Heseltine!”

“It’s your own fault, Dave – and as for you, Boris, you ripped your party apart, you ripped your country apart and…”

“Yada yada yada. How many times to I have to hear you say that, Hezza?”

“How about for ever as that’s rather the point down here.”

Hezza points a shaky finger at the Boris pants, which burst into flames again.

“Hey, that’s only just happened. I wasn’t due a hot pants moment again!”

“Think of it as a two-for-one offer.”

Hezza takes his rattling bones off elsewhere.

Boris, glancing at his smouldering underwear, speaks again. “If we going to have to sit here for ever, perhaps we could have a go at someone else instead.”

“What, the Gove monster?”

Boris is suddenly animated. He puts on a prissy Scottish accent. “I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or built the team for the task ahead.”

“How long are you going to keep saying that?”

“How does eternity sound? I mean to say, Gove the Geek who pretended to be my friend and supporter, and then knifed me in the back at the last bloody minute. Man’s a scoundrel.”

“Oh do shut up, Boris. Anyway, talking of knives…”

A slight bearded man is passing through this privileged corner of hell with a pinched look on his face. Despite his obvious disapproval, he seems oddly untroubled by the heat down here. “You see I have the support of all my willing party minions. So I am not going anywhere.”

As usual, Comrade Corbyn is followed by little badges on legs, each bearing the slogan: “I’m for Jeremy.”

Dave has a faraway look on his face, remembering all those encounters at the dispatch box. “Even in Hell you don’t know how to do up a tie properly. And you might have the worshipful support of your believers, but have you looked at your back lately?”

The comrade refuses to rise to the remark – “I follow a new sort of politics” – and walks off, with the contents of the sharper objects from the cutlery drawer rattling in his ribs.

“And an old sort of politics did for you in the end, didn’t it?”

Dave turns to Boris. “Do you think he ever gets used to all those knives his MPs put there?”

Boris stands and shuffles round as far as the chain allows.

“I doubt it. That one Geeky Gove put in my back hurts like…”

“Like Hell?”

“Yes, that’s the bloody thing of it…”

And if there is a special place in hell where Dave and Boris are shackled for eternity, well, all this chaos, uncertainty and bitterness won’t have gone entirely to waste, will it?

LATE last night I did something shocking. It was like a quaint throwback in a way. A chatty Californian had just gone up to her room and I sat up and read the newspaper for half-an-hour. No music, no television. Just the crisply landscaped pages of the Observer.

Post-Brexit, I have found this to be a comfort of sorts. Last Sunday’s edition was full of reports and opinions about our crazy decision to leave Europe. And I have read just about every word, with one exception.

The best piece by far was part of a yes/no argument about what happens now, with the novelist Howard Jacobson in the fearful camp, and the Tory MP Theresa Villiers in the hopeful camp.

Unlike some newspapers, the Observer will give a platform to both sides of an argument, instead of twisting every fibre of an issue to fit its beliefs (yes, Daily Mail, we are talking about you; and you needn’t look smug, Daily Express, either).

Jacobson’s piece was superb, sorrowful and angry, funny and wise. Do seek it out. As for Villiers, I stumbled at the first paragraph and fell by the second. It wasn’t that I disagreed with her. Learning what the “other side” thinks is a good thing. No, it was just such a dull piece of writing, whereas Jacobson shone. One nil to the novelist.

Sometimes I struggle with my chosen Sunday newspaper, especially if there is not much happening and the reports seem dull. But last Sunday’s edition was first-rate. And it reminded me of the pleasure to be had in good old newsprint, and set me off thinking about the new electronic world versus the old paper one, and also about the time I fritter on Facebook and Twitter.

My feelings on this are complicated and a little hypocritical, I guess. For while I love a good newspaper, I only buy two a week and spend too long on my phone, checking the news, chuckling or frowning at Facebook or skimming across the surface of the Twitter lake (a bottomless place if you are not careful).

As I do not have an office to go into, I find Facebook both a comfort and an annoyance. On the good side, it’s like having colleagues and friends at a remove; on the bad side, you don’t half waste time on there. Or I do. Only snatches of time, but it adds up.

After I put down the newspaper last night, I hopped back into the electronic world and saw that a friend had posted that she was now staying away from Facebook, partly for reasons of using time better; and partly because of the conflicts that can arise between having real friends and social media friends.

This friend has said such things before, then slipped back into the Facebook bubble bath of inconsequentialities. So we shall see.

I like Facebook but sometimes it deflects me from the path of firmer purpose. It also raises a smile often. Points me at different sorts of news. Tells me about friends. So it’s mostly for the good. And it’s how most readers locate my little ledge.

As for print versus the electronic world, both have their virtues. But reading a proper newspaper done well, and not glancing at it while watching television, cannot be beaten, I’d say. And some newspaper websites are awful – not so much for what they contain, but for the endless adverts that drag everything down so much that the site becomes unusable.

I often look at my old newspaper’s website and end up leaving, frustrated not by what it contains, but the impossibility of reading anything.

When it comes to writing, I sometimes wonder if I’d be better going back. All you need is a room with a desk, a chair and a typewriter. Sadly, I got rid of my beloved old Hermes typewriter years ago. That old beast offered no distractions, just a mechanical means of bashing out words.

IN the past few days, various pieces of nastiness have floated to the surface of British life. I don’t mean Nigel Farage giving inflammatory speeches. He’s always doing that and we expect nothing less.

Not long after the vote to quit Europe was announced, examples of the ugly side to British life began to bubble up through the post-vote sludge. First Polish families in Cambridgeshire were said to have had cards pushed through their doors telling them to go home (with the text helpfully printed in English and Polish).

Yesterday further examples of such disgraceful behaviour were shared on Facebook. These snapshots suggest that unless we are careful the post-Brexit mood is going to turn nasty. And may well have done so already.

One of the posts was from Channel 4 News and it showed commuters on a tram in Manchester – big, decent-hearted Manchester, a city of many people. The tram is crowded and a tall man with a ponytail has attracted the attention of a runty yob. The youth shouts, “I’ll waste you, bro”. The man says: “How old are you?” The yob says: “Don’t even talk to me – you’re an immigrant…” Only his version contains more bleeped-out f-words. “You’re a dirty little immigrant. Get back to Africa.”

The man, who sounds American, says: “You are very ignorant – you’re not very intelligent, do you know that?”

The dim lump of Mancunian humanity starts chanting: “Get of the tram – get off the tram.” Then the genetic-throwback and a similarly dumb pal push down the tram and start flicking beer from bottles at the man. A woman passenger says: “There’s a baby there. There’s no need for that. There’s absolutely no need for that.”

The victim, angry but squaring up, says: “Seven years in the military…” Others around him say it’s not worth it.

The yobs leave or are pushed off, amid cries of “Disgrace.” One woman says something poetic in its anger: “To England you are a disgrace.”

The woman who filmed the clip told Channel 4 News how scared she was; and who could blame her, but well done for capturing a sorry incident that illustrates how careful we have to be right now.

Another post was from the excellent James O’Brien on LBC and shows him taking a call from a German woman who has lived in Britain for 43 years and relates, heartbreakingly, how she has been receiving abuse since the vote.

Amnesty UK reports a 57 per cent rise in reports of racist incidents, with director Kate Allen saying: “Some people now feel licensed to express racist views in a way we haven’t seen for decades. The referendum campaign was marked by divisive, xenophobic rhetoric as well as a failure from political leaders to condemn it. We are now reaping the referendum rhetoric whirlwind.”

Yesterday that whirlwind blew into Leeds, with reports suggesting a Polish shopkeeper had been attacked and “told to go back to his country”. Further examples lobbed into the national dartboard of xenophobia include a Muslim schoolgirl reported to have been cornered by a rabble who said: “Get out, we voted leave” and the Eastern Europeans allegedly stopped from using the Underground with shouts of, “Go back to your own country.”

Another example includes right-wing protestors in Newcastle carrying placards urging the country to “start repatriation”.

Such examples should depress the hell out of us. They have not been caused by the vote to leave, as such attitudes already existed below the skin like incipient boils or something. But in the post-Brexit heat, too many people feel free to scratch away at the hate.

As a proud but disillusioned member of the 48 per cent, I deplore the snapshot of our country these incidents give. Of course most of those who voted to leave also deplore such views. But some of them perhaps do not. And that should worry us. It should make us angry.

But we should we react with the authority of that man on the tram in Manchester. And we should all chant that phrase spoken on that tram, words that deserve to become a slogan for a worried age: “To England you are a disgrace.”

TODAY I shall tell you about the man who wasn’t there. This week we are surrounded by men one might wish were not there, or men who no longer are there (Boris Johnson in the first category, England manager Roy Hodgson in the other).

The man who wasn’t there has no connection to the would-be prime minister or the man with his head in his hands. He is not a conniving old Etonian who has just helped to do over another conniving old Etonian; and he is not the manager who resigned after overseeing the most woeful England game in memory – losing 1-2 to tournament minnows Iceland.

I watched the game and then remembered why often I don’t. Iceland were brave, skilful and dazzling, and England were none of those things. It was a Boy’s Own win, a sparkler of a story and would have been uplifting if our own side hadn’t been the desperate losers. Maybe it even was uplifting in a self-hurting way, as surely you only deserve to win if you deserve to win.

But let me tell you about the man who wasn’t there. This house of ours has seen many guests in the past year and this one was a perfect mystery.

Last week was unusually hectic in the word-worrying business, allied to a spot of daughter-ferrying, Volvo stuttering and temporary white van man antics. Amid the personal busyness, I was asked at the last-minute to stand in on a feature, so had another day’s work.

As I was juggling returning the van early, picking up the resuscitated old Swede and checking the train times to Wakefield, a guest got in touch. He wondered if he could have a key ahead of his stay on the next night as he might be going for a pint after his event. He was staying one night at the Bar Convent, and one with us. In a flurry of white van dashing and bicycle pedalling, I returned the van and left a key at reception.

All arranged and sorted, although I did have to phone the hire place from the petrol pumps to ask how you removed the fuel cap on the white van. Then I had to ask a proper horny-handed van driver how you returned the fuel cap after filling. And after all that I was generous in my diesel estimation and gave the rather expensive hire company too much fuel in return. “You won’t get anything back from this lot,” said the man who checked the van over.

The next day was busy and enjoyable, and when the day was done I sat up late watching television, half-reading the newspapers and engaging in phone fiddling, a modern addiction to which I have become addicted.

By 11.30pm our late-arriving guest had not arrived, so I went to bed, leaving a few lights on. A couple of post-it notes went on two doors – “This is your room” and “This is the bathroom.”

In the morning the lights were still on, the notes were still in place. And there was no sign of our guest. My first thought was to panic. Had this poor man been unable to open the door or had I given him the wrong key? Was he at this moment sitting shivering on the doorstep? Was he about to sue our useless Airbnb arses?

Puzzled, I checked the house phone. And there was a message from our missing man. Two messages and I’d not heard either of them. He’d been booked into the Bar Convent for two nights instead of one, so wouldn’t need to stay with us after all, but was happy to pay.

“I’ll be the quietest guest you’ve ever had,” he said.

And it’s true because he was.

JEREMY Corbyn is like a boy playing hide and seek. He has his eyes closed and is counting away. Then he opens them and starts to look around, nothing too energetic mind you, only to discover that most of his friends have gone home and no longer wish to play with him.

At a time when the government is in crisis, when the country faces stormy waters without a chart, the Labour opposition has started falling apart too.

Boris Johnson may well be standing on his Telegraph soapbox this morning proclaiming the need to build bridges following the vote to leave Europe, while talking of “feelings of dismay, and of loss, and of confusion” – a state of affairs which he helped to create in the hope of becoming prime minister.

Johnson proclaims that “the negative consequences are being wildly overdone”. Well maybe but negative consequences are all we have at the moment; and negative consequences seem ready to sink Jeremy Corbyn’s shaky raft.

At the time of writing, and counting, 12 members of the shadow cabinet have resigned, including shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, whose department removed the first brick from the wall.

With the government rudderless, following David Cameron’s time-lapsed resignation, and with Britain’s former 27 partners in Europe withdrawing to discuss what should happen to us now, the country could do with a strong opposition. Instead it has a ragbag squabble of an opposition falling out among themselves over their leader’s role in the referendum.

At present Corbyn is insisting he will stay and will put himself into any new leadership contest. He always has been in an odd position as leader, voted in on the back of a tidal wave of mostly new supporters, and yet not much admired by many of the MPs he commands. And all of this matched to a public perception that he could never be prime minister. An uneasy combination; and that’s why his leadership appears to be coming apart.

There are more important matters to worry about, so it says something that all attention should be on the seemingly disintegrating opposition this morning.

Can Corbyn survive this storm? Perhaps by a display of political derring-do he will cling on. If so, he will need to appeal to a wider congregation than those new party members whose support landed him the job – a job few if any had pictured him doing.

There always has been a conflict between Corbyn’s vociferous supporters and the sulking bulk of his parliamentary party. Now that volatility has broken out into open warfare.

And this at a time when we need a good opposition to point out the difficulties we face; and to point out the Leave lies peeling away from the wall like slapdash posters.

We had hardly heard the news of the vote on Friday morning before Nigel Farage admitted it had been a mistake for Vote Leave to pledge an extra £350m a week for the NHS. By the end of the day, arch quitter Daniel Hannan MEP scotched another promise, saying that free movement of labour might continue, and with it immigration from Europe.

Two rotten promises in one day. Two discarded pledges. So what if you were sitting there thinking you’d voted to leave for one or perhaps both of those reasons? It all begins to look shabby.

As for Labour, Mr Corbyn has only had a brief time in the role, and the attempted putsch against him could be seen as opportunistic – a lethal lunge from those who’ve never really believed in him.

But then politics is in internecine business. And a practical one too. If Jeremy Corbyn clings on, he will have a diminished pool of talent. His life won’t be easy, but then nothing is for anyone at the moment.