Donald Trump famously wrote a book called The Art of The Deal; equally famously, he didn’t write it at all, but hired Tony Schwartz to bash his bullshit into shape.

If you ask Google how many copies were sold, the answer is muddy. A first printing produced 150,000 copies, but further certainty is unavailable, as the book was published in 1987, before data was compiled by the Nielsen BookScan.

A Wikipedia footnote adds that “several magazine and book accounts” state that the book sold “over one million hardcover copies”. And if you think that sounds like the sort of non-specific, big bollocks boast the supposed author might make, you won’t have any argument from me.

I only mention Trump and his boastful book in order to compare it with the new one by Boris Johnson. This terrifying tome is called The Art of the No-Deal (subtitle A Charlatan’s Charter).

The pages are written in magic ink. Some are full of bluster about “do or die”, only for those words to dissolve on a second look. On page one, Johnson blusters that the chances of a no-deal Brexit are “a million to one”, even though that’s what he’s betting the house on.

Pages two to 33 show the man who chanced his way into Number 10 in a variety of poses with his thumbs up and an inane grin occupying his features.

Page 34 features the foreign secretary Dominic Raab lying through his teeth about how everyone was talking about the possibility of a no-deal Brexit during the referendum.

Raab did the fibbing through his fangs business on the BBC Today programme last week. After his claim that just about everybody had been talking about a no-deal Brexit (spoiler alert, they weren’t), the Press Association archive was shown to reveal that no-one was quoted as using the words “no deal” during the referendum campaign period of April 15 to June 23, 2016.

Somehow a simple yes/no question, narrowly won by yes (no spoiler alert), has been turned into a manifesto for Mad Boris to drive the country off a cliff.

As far as I can tell, the art of no-deal is that you shout your nonsense louder than anyone else, while keeping your fingers crossed.

Johnson is skidding the charabanc towards the tufted grass at the precipice of infinity (or at the very least a long drop to God knows where). He has no clue what will happen, just a belief in his own brilliance at improv-politics, making everything up at the last minute, as always.

Talking of minutes, Johnson has had an Armageddon Clock installed in Conservative HQ. This 24-hour timepiece sits beneath the slogan: “We will have delivered Brexit and left the EU by…”

The squandered seconds count down to Halloween, the latest deadline and one Johnson has wedded himself too, like a doomed actor in a hammy horror film who believes he can make that jump over the precipice (spoiler alert, it’s a long way down and the parachute has been nibbled by moths).

A no-deal Brexit is hazardous, foolish, and a sign of failure. But it’s being promoted as an indication of political virility, a badge of swaggering pride. Well, you know what they say about pride? It comes before a fall in the pound. And, boy, that pound is plummeting.

When Boris Johnson was “elected”, Donald Trump said one of those vainglorious stupid things. “They call him Britain Trump,” he said of Johnson, coining a phrase literally no-one had ever used. He also said: “They like me over there” – another phrase from Donald’s Fantasy Diary.

Trump thinks a no-deal Brexit is a great idea, but only because in the ensuing chaos we will be prepared to sign whatever dodgy deal the US offers us.

The Art of the No-Deal? Everyday Boris Johnson writes the book, as Elvis Costello almost said years ago. But is he working on a sequel? Yes, and it’s called Don’t Blame Me It Was Europe’s Fault.

Here is my advice about writing, wrapped up in a distraction concerning 30-50 feral hogs.

The crime writer Elmore Leonard had ten rules and the most important to him was: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

He wanted his writing to be real and direct, not fanciful or showy.

My rules concern the everyday business of sitting down and trying to write fiction. The sensible rule, the one passed on to young writers or students who want to write, is brisk: just do it.

That’s the only advice writers need, as without sitting down and writing – something, anything – you can’t be a writer. Instead you merely fancy yourself a writer. Take that from someone who spent years in those unproductive pastures.

My other tips concern such time-frittering diversions as Twitter and Netflix. Distraction and prevarication are the enemy of getting words down. So, too, is getting down words other than the ones you intend to write.

If you want to write novels, don’t write a blog for heaven’s sake. That blog will be fun, it will be writing/journalism, but it won’t be the novel you are meant to be writing.

Avoiding Twitter and Netflix is good and important advice, if only I could heed it. My attention often drifts from writing dialogue, say, to the bottomless chatter of Twitter. For its faults, and all the incidental nastiness, I like Twitter; I even the incidental nastiness when it is directed at the ‘right’ targets.

This is where those feral hogs come into the picture. Anyone who remains innocent of Twitter can excuse themselves for feeling confused at the juncture.

Certain themes or memes run wild on Twitter, and last night it was the turn of those 30-50 feral hogs.

The day had been filled with sombre or angry reflections on the two mass shootings in the US. People expressed horror at what had happened, and despair at the chance of the US doing anything about gun deaths. They reacted with incredulity to Trump’s rhetoric about how there should be less hate in the US; they cried and shouted; they shared their despair.

And then a man in Arkansas asked a simple question alien to anyone who lives an urban life. In response to calls for a ban on assault weapons, he tweeted: “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard with 3-5 mins while my small kids play?”

William McNabb reportedly identifies as a libertarian. In American terms, he is likely to be wedded to owning high-powered rifles (as were said to have been used in the shootings in El Paso and Dayton).

Those feral pigs rooted all over Twitter, inspiring mockery and puzzlement. Anyone joining the party late wondered why on earth the Twitter-sphere was obsessed with feral pigs.

But McNabb did seem to have a practical point: how do you control the rampant wild hogs that are a problem in rural American south?

Maybe a gun is the only answer; perhaps guns do have legitimate uses. And then I remembered the humble fence. If McNabb got his children to play in a safely separate compound, those wild hogs wouldn’t present a threat. Maybe he just prefers guns to fences.

There you have it: incidental advice about writing, trampled over by a band of feral hogs.

Now I need to get on with writing and avoiding Twitter or Facebook.

Two mass shootings in one weekend is a new low even for the United States. No other country regards multiple murder of its own citizens with such apparent equanimity.

It’s hard to know what to say; hard to know if there is anything to say that hasn’t already been said as many times as bullets have ended innocent lives.

Short version: it’s the guns, stupid.

No one president is to blame, they all are – but the present incumbent is the pits. After 29 people were killed in mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend, President Trump made the usual noises of muddled regret. He blamed mental health, saying this “was a problem if you look at both of these cases”.

Perhaps, or perhaps not, but guns are the bigger problem. Guns are always the problem, but the US is welded to some demented old frontier mentality about guns offering protection.

Mental illness may well be an element, but only when combined with the ease of acquiring weapons. And who signed a bill overturning an Obama-era regulation that prevented individuals with mental health problems from buying guns? Your man Donald (photographs of Trump signing that bill are reportedly being hidden).

The attack on a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas is said to have been carried out by a young man who had a grudge against Mexicans taking over the state. Maybe that shooter, still alive, will turn out to be mentally ill. But race hatred is a fact, too. The sheriff of El Paso, Richard Wiles, said on Facebook: “This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics.”

You cannot separate that hate-filled intent from a president who stands up to his fat ankles in a swill of racial hatred. Everybody knows Trump is an avowed racist – however much he backtracks afterwards.

It’s not possible to say Trump’s vile words about migrants and Mexicans (and all people from that place called ‘foreign’) directly lead to such attacks. But it is possible to say Trump gives tacit approval to white supremacy.

The people of El Paso feel they have no choice but to call this a hate crime and an act of terrorism against Latinos. They live in a city much reviled by Trump. Yet that city was largely safe, until a hate-filled young white supremacist arrived.

Yet what does Trump say after the attacks; what words of soothing good sense does he offer? Oh, try this one: “This has been going on for years, for years and years in our country and we have to get it stopped.”

More buck-passing: it’s been going on for years (don’t blame me) and “we have to get it stopped”. Er, you “get it stopped”, mate. You’re the president.

Oh, and Trump also said “hate has no place” in the US. Yes, the most hate-filled president there’s ever been thinks hate has no place in the US. That’s the man who fills the small hours firing off hate-poxed rants on Twitter.

Incidentally, public expressions of hate are not confined to the US. We have our own versions, thanks to Brexit. Leave.EU posted a tweet the other day in which Remainers were described as “vermin”.

When one half of the country starts calling the other half “vermin”, we have a problem.

Have you noticed the Jeremy Corbyn sigh? It comes out whenever he is asked a question he doesn’t like. There is a pause, an impatient expulsion of air before he addresses whatever impertinent question he has just been asked.

The sigh hasn’t been spotted yet today, so far as I know. But the Labour leader has plenty to sigh about after the result of the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election. His side garnered only five per cent of the vote in a tight contest between the victorious Lib-Dems and the Tories.

The good news is that the Tories have seen their Commons majority cut to one. But Labour came behind the appalling Brexit party, more of a Nigel Farage pyramid-selling scam than a true political party. Five per cent of the vote; in Wales! Heavens that’s gloomy.

Let’s return to that sigh. It was spotted in Westminster during Boris Johnson’s first PMQs when Johnson started puffing and blustering and being a pompous buffoon. Corbyn sighed and looked ratty before he responded with a series of questions Johnson declined to answer.

This might seem a trivial matter, but is Jeremy Corbyn’s sigh enough of a weapon against Boris Johnson’s absurdist bluster? I fear it isn’t up to the job.

To the non-political obsessive (ie most people), Johnson is fun and a bit of a character, whereas Corbyn looks like a geography teacher who is disappointed in your homework. Yes, Corbyn was inspirational during the election he nearly won/actually lost. But that was yesterday’s tussle, and the next one will be different, especially with the revived Lib-Dems and the bothersome Brexit party complicating the picture.

Labour’s polling is appalling and Corbyn’s personal ratings are terrible. Still, the faithful will stand by their man. They will repeatedly share social media posts about how he has received the worst media treatment of any politician; they will insist that the antisemitism scandal is a put-up job engineered by Corbyn’s enemies.

Maybe the Corbyn ultras have a point, certainly about the hostile media. But the newspapers have mostly always disparaged Labour leaders (apart from a flirtation with Tony Blair). Yes, Corbyn has had even more aggressive treatment than usual, but in a sense that was always going to happen. As an ageing, unreconstructed leftie, he’s an easy target, a perfect hate figure for the right-wing press.

People vote for important reasons or shallow reasons. Sometimes they vote because they ‘like’ someone. Boris Johnson is such a Marmite politician than even jars of Marmite can’t make up their minds. But he has a robust personality: a scheming, truth-bending put-up job of a personality, but his act might fool enough people.

Jeremy Corbyn’s sigh should worry anyone who despairs at the prospect of Johnson winning an election, rather than being handpicked in a disgraced Tory beauty contest.

Johnson’s hard Brexit cabinet may be a deeply dispiriting band chosen exclusively for their willingness to go for a no-deal Brexit if necessary.

But Brexit remains the endlessly tedious, ticking time-bomb of the day. Corbyn has shown no willingness to disarm that bomb. His long game plan has always been to wait for the Tories to mess up so he can win an election. Along the way, his inconsistency over Brexit (does Labour have a firm policy; does anyone have a clue what it might be?) has undermined his reputation as a straight talker who tells it like it is.

Brexit is toxic all round, unless you are that appalling Farage man. But that toxicity is harming Labour.

Jeremy Corbyn needs come up with a way to puncture the Boris balloon. His sigh alone isn’t sharp enough for the job.

These thoughts are offered not in hostility but in a mood of quiet despair.

LUIS TORRES VIA GETTY IMAGES

A seesaw is a perfect plaything, perfectly balanced too at its midpoint.

There seem to be different theories about the name: some sources cite an anglicisation of the French word ci-ca, meaning this-that, suggesting the back-and-forth motion.

The Norwich-born linguist Peter Trudgill points to the Nordic language word tittermatorter – also a dialect word for seesaw in East Anglia, giving us teeter-totter.

Seesaw demonstrates what is known in linguistics as reduplication, where a word or syllable is doubled, often using a different vowel in the variation.

And should you be carried away with thinking that I am remarkably well informed, let me introduce you to Google.

All of this might seem a long way from Donald Trump, so big and lumpen he broke the seesaw. The US President is famously obsessed with his wall on the US border. Last week, his plan to keep out the neighbours was boosted when conservative judges on US Supreme Court cleared the way for his administration to spend billions of Pentagon dollars on building it.

There is nothing cheerful about a racist president’s demented wish to blow billions on a wall designed to repel foreigners. People have died in the shadow of that wall; migrant children have been separated from their parents, possibly forever; concentration camps have been built to house migrants.

Last month, the sombre reality of this wall found a horrid symbol in a photograph of a father and his 23-month-old daughter lying dead and face down in the Rio Grande.

Sometimes it takes an artist to see a different side to the grim divisions of life; sometimes it takes someone whose mind is on a pleasing slant.

That’s what just happened as seesaws were placed either side of the wall (in truth a high slatted fence). Photographs and a video posted on social media show the grey slats of the fence penetrated by pink metal planks. This allows kids on either side of the US-Mexico border to play with each other on these seesaws.

Such a brilliant idea you want to laugh and cry at the same time. A beautifully slanted response to the intransigent cruelties and unfairness of life.

The seesaws may have appeared overnight, but they are the result of a ten-year dream by two professors, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello.

Rael posted a video on Instagram, explaining that their conceptual drawings of what they call the Teetertotter Wall were made in 2009. He wrote: “The wall became a literal fulcrum for US-Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side.”

While it is depressing the world contains the likes of Trump, it is supremely uplifting to know it also contains two professors capable of coming up with such a notion.

What a zinging idea – one of the best. A perfect riposte to the nasty neighbour. Let’s just pray they don’t send in Trump to sit on one end and break the brilliant pink planks.

‘People love him or hate him’ says a headline in the Observer above a report about how Boris Johnson is regarded in Leeds. Twenty-five miles down the road in York, this ledge-bound observer is caught between dislike and hate so intense it curls the rim of my soul, but there you go.

Before we progress further, here is a question that’s been bothering me: what should we be calling the new prime minister kissed into power by a minuscule Tory rump?

This ‘Boris’ fellow we keep hearing about in the news is a chummy creation designed to hide a scheming and nasty political manipulator who’d sell his grandmother for five more minutes in the political limelight.

His predecessor was always Mrs Maybe in this blog. Johnson is not a surname to inspire such wordplay, but we should resist giving this Boris chancer his preferred name.

It will be Johnson around here until anything ruder springs to mind, although that rule is broken immediately in examining what is being called a “Boris bounce”. And, no, this is not an unwelcome reference to the Downing Street bedsprings, but a phrase to sum up a smallish boost in the opinion polls.

New leaders often experience such a fillip, so there is nothing surprising in this bounce. Gordon Brown experienced such a temporary uplift after similarly becoming prime minister without worrying the electorate.

Johnson is going around the country at present, trailing promises. Where Mrs Maybe told a nurse wanting a pay rise that there was no magic money tree, Johnson has planted a forest of these munificent conifers. He’s been shinning up them and throwing Monopoly money all over the place.

According to today’s headlines, he has set aside £100m for an ad campaign talking up a no-deal Brexit. A bonkers amount of money in a country where 4m people are trapped in poverty, according to a study by the Social Metrics Commission. That £100m should be spent on the impoverished or on schools, not passed onto the advertising agencies to produce vain propaganda.

Here to close a swift blog are three Brexit thoughts…

ONE: As it was never clear exactly what Brexit was, or how it would work, those Leavers who say their dream is being betrayed essentially betrayed themselves by having mad, unrealistic dreams about an EU-free world.

TWO: The no-deal Brexit now being shoved in our faces by Johnson and his Leaver-loon Cabinet is not a simple act of box-ticking, like declining to sign a new contract. It’s merely the start of a long and tortuous process likely to last for years.

THREE: If Brexit is so good for Britain, why is its chief architect Nigel Farage foraging around in the US with Trump supporters, raising money to fund the UK leaving the EU? If rich, right-wing Americans are so keen for us to leave Europe – along with their dangerous and inconstant president – how exactly is Brexit good for Britain? It sounds more as if it’s good for those who wish to exploit Britain once we leave the EU.

Suddenly those ‘shackles’ don’t look so bad.

Excuse me while I stop screaming and remove this paper bag from my head.

There is much to say today about blustering braggadocio, bollocks and bluster. But no, let other people worry about Boris Johnson’s attempted hard Brexit coup. My fingers are already threatening to walk out on strike if I keep typing the word ‘Boris’ all the time.

Sorry fingers, here are two sideways thoughts about our new prime minister.

ONE. Boris Johnson is a journalist/politician, a dangerous sort of hybrid if you ask me. Journalists are meant to be on the outside looking in. But you can’t really do that if you are also on the inside. He is also a columnist, and they always know the answer to everything, with or without available evidence.

Anyway, the Daily Telegraph is pleased with Boris Johnson. The newspaper’s chief executive, Nick Hugh, posted a memo on a staff messaging board yesterday (according to the Press Gazette website) with the title: “The Telegraph’s own columnist becomes prime minister today.”

Mr Hugh pointed out that Johnson was the “first Telegraph journalist since Sir Winston Churchill to lead the country”.

As has been noted before, not without envious grinding of teeth, Boris Johnson is reported to have been paid £270,000 a year to write his column. Think about that for a moment. That’s a lot of money for a columnist, more than can be justified by words alone. Was this in truth a Daily Telegraph job creation scheme under which the newspaper group paid a fortune to Johnson while also slavishly promoting him on their front page? Yup, I’d say it was.

Will there be a price to pay; will the owners, the famously reclusive Barclay Brothers, want a return on their investment? Seems likely, as suggested by this headline from a Telegraph column yesterday: “Boris can win the Brexit war by smashing the Remainer enemy in a snap election.”

Yet how depressing that roughly half the country should be branded as “the Remainer enemy” in the Brexit uncivil war. Doubly depressing that Johnson’s Number 10 new-boy speech said the same, more or less.

Anyway, put down that paper bag and take another deep breath. Take comfort, and comfort surely is needed, in noting that Steve Bell of the Guardian has started drawing Boris Johnson with a blond mop and an arse for a face. Ah, better already.

TWO. An interesting feature from 2014 (Guardian again, sorry about that all you Guardian haters) saw psychotherapist Nick Duffell reprise his argument about why boarding schools produce bad leaders.

His thesis is too involved to share here in full, but the nub is that sending boys to board at the age of seven does them great psychological harm. What Duffell calls ‘privileged abandonment’ (blatant child neglect, surely, in less elevated circles) can turn men into bullies or bumblers – or both in the case of Boris Johnson.

Duffell was writing about David Cameron, but the same applies to Boris Johnson, and many other politicians, mostly Tory but not all (Tony Blair is included in this theory).

Duffell argues that such socially privileged children are “forced into a deal not of their own choosing”. Under this arrangement, a “normal family-based childhood is traded for the hothousing of entitlement”.

Cut off from home and a loving family at the age of seven, “they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults”.

In short, these overly entitled politicians are basically overgrown seven-year-olds with abandonment issues. Suddenly it all makes horrible sense.

Charles Hutchinson

Let me take you by the hand into an office in York. Almost everyone has gone home. Two men are still there, one fuming as he can’t leave until the other concludes his scowling and keyboard bashing.

A small scenario, but inescapable when summoning up these personal farewell thoughts about Charles Hutchinson, who leaves the Press on Friday.

There is history between us, you see. We worked across the decades in a fond squabble. Like a bickering old married couple, affectionate but prone to sniping. There were three of us in that marriage, two men and Mistress Deadline. One of us had a tongue sharp when provoked, the other a temper primed to explode.

Journalists who leave a paper are given a mocked-up front page. Mine was amusing and had a photo of me training for the Great North Run (“Man on the run”). A strap across the top read: “EXCLUSIVE: Charles hits What’s On deadline: never.” Another strap said: “Julian’s David Cameron tribute column: page…”

That framed page is on our stairs, a daily signpost to the past.

Charles is sometimes infuriating to work with, yet capable of being lovely and kind, too. And no one can question his commitment or passion: Charles is devoted to what is about to leave. He dedicated more time to that job than seemed humanly possible, or sensible. But that was his way, early starts, staying on late, working at the weekends, always working, but almost always because that’s what he wanted to do, even when it made him cross.

There can’t be anyone connected to the arts in Yorkshire who hasn’t come across Charles, who hasn’t been interviewed by him, or spotted him in the stalls at the theatre, pen and notebook in hand, scribbling and frowning and laughing sometimes.

Charles was first threatened with redundancy in November 2017, but the editor relented, possibly because of a backlash from the arts community. They all know him, and many appreciate the unending scroll of stories he has written about the arts: theatre, music, art, cinema – oh, anything and everything arty (along with incidental soliloquies about Leeds United).

A newspaper shedding its arts editor might not seem much in these days of loss and redundancy. But it’s another link broken, another connection severed, another reason for reading removed.

Two sports journalists, Dave Flett and Peter Martini, left recently, too. Think of all the connections those three have between them; think of all the community links severed; think of all the people who know those three.

Some newspaper executive with a spreadsheet for brains thought it was a bright idea. That executive probably swears it’s all good for news and newspapers. Perhaps that unseen boss is behind all those messages that pop up online asking for a contribution, a pound a week – invest in local news. Well, I will if you will. Although my wife has banned me from ever giving money to that newspaper; and who can blame her?

Another newspaper tradition, along with the mocked-up front pages, is the banging out of journalists as they leave. An old custom dating to printers drumming metal hammers and rulers against their desks, a hot-metal farewell that rings sometimes still.

My own knocking out, and the short speech I almost managed to deliver, still brings a lump to the throat, especially as others left that day, too.

Oh, everyone thinks journalists are a hard-nosed lot, and sometimes that is true. But they can be sentimental too, especially after years on one newspaper (30 for Charles, 27 for me).

Goodbye and good luck, Charles. Not sure I’ll ever work with anyone like you again, or for so long. Apart from anything else, I’d have to keep going until I was 90 odd.

It is hot in the car. Van Morrison is in the passenger seat, belting out a live version of his old hit Gloria, with the name spelt out – “G-L-O-R-I-A!”

Then the CD stops and it’s over to the news on BBC Radio 4. Another name is being chanted but to less uplifting effect – “B-O-R-I-S!”. Excitable Tory MPs gather round the microphone, glad of something cheerful to talk about. Their names come and go without making a dint in my mind.

Boris Johnson gives an acceptance speech as his victory over Jeremy Hunt is announced. And what a cliff-hanger it’s been, as we’ve waited to learn which privileged posh boy was going to win the prize of running the Conservative Party and being prime minister (as chosen by 160,000 mostly male and pale party members with gin and tonic for blood – and, yes, that’s a caricature, but then so is the man who calls himself Boris Johnson).

The speech Johnson gives is better than anything Theresa May managed. But the greatest hits of the speaking clock would be better than anything Theresa May managed.

He’s going on about delivering Brexit, uniting the country and defeating Jeremy Corbyn. “Some wag,” the blond wag waffles, has already pointed out that his election campaign slogan of deliver, unite, defeat spells dud. “But they forgot the fine e, my friends, e for energise. And I say to all the doubters: dude, we are going to energise the country.”

What’s this? Boris Johnson as The Big Lebowski in the Cohen Brothers’ film… “I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing…”

Dear God, I think as the countryside melts off go the side, are we going to have to call the new prime minister His Dudeness? The nasty thought evaporates in the heat as another Tory lickspittle clogs the airwaves with observations about the Eton Dude’s greatness, about how he is going to sort everything out and unite the country. Well, according to some critics, it will be a good day when he can keep his trousers united, but never mind.

It was a typical spot of Boris Johnson stand-up, the usual blustering baroque bollocks, a crowd-pleasing gale of words thought up on the hoof.

The Times columnist and former Tory MP Matthew Parris pops by on the radio to pull down the bunting. He points out that a “two to one majority” of those in the Conservative Party doesn’t represent the wider population…

“He was always going to win because he’s appealing to an obsessive, ideological, extremist streak in his own national membership,” Parris says. “He appealed to it shamelessly and it’s won him the leadership, but it has not won him any sense of national consensus at all.”

As I approach a nasty right-hand turn in the road (and as the country approaches a nasty right-hand turn, too), I am glad of that sharp-tongued former MP. Minutes earlier one of the anonymous Boris fan-boy MPs had been saying Johnson had secured a massive majority and now had a mandate to rule, and would sort Brexit in a twinkle.

Boris Johnson has been scheming for this moment for years. And it is, I suppose, a testament to an Eton education that a lifetime of cocking things up needn’t hold back a man who believes enough in himself.

Those of us in the cheap seats can just settle back and see how he cocks this one up.

Should we feel sorry for Mrs Maybe as her premiership dribbles to an inglorious end? No thanks, I’d say, although the Queen is reported to be sympathetic.

According to the Daily Mail writer Sebastian Shakespeare, the Queen said goodbye to Theresa May, her 13^th prime minister, this week with “a poignant tete-a-tete at Buckingham Palace”. Shakespeare was tipped off by a courier, which is more than most of us can say.

His report observes: “Insiders say the Queen has bonded with vicar’s daughter Mrs May over their shared Christian faith and frugal values. ‘The Queen really warmed to Mrs May’s quiet understatedness,’ an insider tells me. ‘It will be fascinating to see how she reacts to the next PM’.”

Were those the same frugal values that prompted Mrs Maybe to splash out a reported £995 on a pair of brown leather trousers? She wore the trousers when being interviewed by the Sunday Times in 2016.

Asked to comment on such extravagance, former education secretary Nicky Morgan told the Times she had never spent so much on anything other than her wedding dress. Morgan promptly found herself “disinvited” to a meeting to Downing Street to discuss Brexit (every cloud and all that).

The Queen’s liking for Tupperware was reported long ago, but it is possible to overdo the frugality of a wealthy woman who lives in palaces. As it is possible to exaggerate the frugality of a prime minister with a millionaire husband and a liking for expensive, if somewhat eccentric, clothes.

I don’t know much about women’s clothes, but Theresa May always looks to me like a nerd trying too hard to show she’s got style. Or a vicar’s daughter trying too hard not to be a vicar’s daughter.

As for their shared Christianity, that is a bond for sure, but again it is hard to see much evidence of faith in the way Mrs May conducted herself. In an almost-there speech last Wednesday, she condemned the “absolutism” of politicians such as Boris Johnson (whom she didn’t name) and had another go at the folly of fellow Conservatives who pursued ideological purity at any price.

In short, she regurgitated her old arguments about Brexit, saying that she was right all along. And she may well be proved right, but for now we are in fantasy interregnum land, where anything goes – and Boris Johnson can appear at a rally waving an Isle of Man kipper wrapped in plastic. His aim was to disparage the EU, yet he’d muddled his facts as always, forgetting that the Isle of Man isn’t in the EU and it was a UK rule anyway.

Anyway, there will be no tears on this ledge when Theresa May leaves. The best to be said of her is that she hasn’t been as truly dreadful as David Cameron, who landed us in this Brexit mess, then departed whistling.

But she is gilding the lily here, rather than wearing it for a change, when she says this absolutism is a belief that “if you simply assert your view loud enough and long enough you will get your way in the end”. Exactly how she conducted herself all the way along, consulting no one over her Brexit deal, then flogging a deal no one wanted until it died at her feet (spoiler alert: Johnson may end up having to kiss that dead horse back into life).

But Mrs May’s biggest sin of absolutism was the hostile environment over immigration, a policy that brought the Windrush scandal to a head, a policy that saw fully integrated migrants who have lived here for decades suddenly treated as unwanted guests who were shown the door (or the airport immigration holding area).

That was Theresa May’s truest disgrace, and she should be reminded of that every time she tries to spit-polish her legacy.

Bye-bye, Theresa, you were truly terrible and hopeless, but history – and all of us in the cheap seats – may look back more fondly once we’ve suffered endless self-serving machinations from the kipper-waver in chief.