The ghost of Dr John is sitting in the passenger seat. He is wearing one of his hats, a battered trilby accessorised with chicken feathers, and sunglasses more suited to New Orleans than the flatlands of East Yorkshire. He is humming a voodoo chant through bearded lips and beating out a rhythm with his walking stick.

The obits tell a good tale about Dr John, a tale repeated on the BBC news. This blues, jazz, boogie-woogie uncle of funk, a onetime pimp and three-times husband, and a former heroin addict (sacked by Frank Zappa for his drug use), almost lost a finger in a brawl at a gig in 1960. Someone, a fellow band member, was threatened with the butt of a gun, and Dr John grabbed the barrel. It went off and nearly removed his finger.

The digit survived but the injury affected his guitar playing, so he switched to the piano, the instrument that made his name.

I like this story because is gives me something in common with the Night Tripper. Two or three months ago, I gave my little finger a nasty bash while playing squash. Medical attention was not sought, and the finger can’t have been broken, but it’s not quite right either. Playing some chords on the guitar, or reaching for some notes, hurts and the finger isn’t as straight as it was.

There you have it: my singular similarity to Malcolm John Rebennack, named after his father, and renamed Dr John Creaux, aka the Night Tripper. Or Dr John for short. Other similarities are more tenuous, and it seems a bit late in the day to be a pimp or to try heroin. Or to be married three times, plus indulge in assorted affairs.

We did both meet Jools Holland, but only one of us was asked to play the piano.

Dr John Trippin’ Live is playing on the car sound system. Wild Honey sweetly comes and goes, then Such A Night, followed by the song most mentioned in the obits, Right Place Wrong Time. He wraps up with Goodnight Irene, that old blues classic written by Lead Belly when he was in jail. Dr John turns to tell me the tale, tapping his walking stick some more. “The governor liked the song so much, he said to Lead Belly, ‘I’m gonna let your ass out of jail’,” he says.

Goodnight Irene is a fantastic song, and Dr John does a great job, with a driving rhythm and blues start, before that jaunty/sad chorus rattles in.

Certain people die and you think, “Oh, well.” Certain people die and you think, “Oh no!”. Dr John and John Martyn fell into the “oh no!” category for me. So too, perhaps oddly, did the death in 1985 of Roy Plomley, creator of Desert Island Discs. Not sure why, but I was sad about Plomley, a familiar voice muffled perhaps.

Leonard Cohen, too, of course. The artist Lubaina Himid was cast away on that auditory island the other day. She was fascinating and showed great musical taste, picking Nina Simone’s version of Cohen’s Suzanne, which somehow I’d never heard. And it’s fantastic.

Anyway, Howden Minster has just appeared on the horizon. The car slows as Goodnight Irene plays out. As I pull into the car park, the ghost of Dr John disappears. I don’t think a day sitting in an office is his sort of game.

I say goodbye to Dr John, great musician, pianist singer and fellow sufferer of a famous finger injury and go inside for another Saturday in front of a computer.

Ske-Dat-De-Dat, as Dr John says on his Louis Armstrong tribute album.

Here are a few post-it notes slapped on the arse of the past few days…

Slapped note one: The 75^th anniversary events for D-Day were without doubt deeply moving. The tears of old men always touch deep, and some of the D-Day veterans were wonderful witnesses to the past. That said, we shouldn’t see this anniversary as an excuse to big up Britain’s exceptionalism. Or to somehow cast modern Britain in a better glow than it deserves (a tough call at present). And we certainly shouldn’t allow Brexiteers to rattle the war as a reason for Brexit. Rather, let’s listen to D-Day veteran Eric Chardin, speaking on BBC News. Here is part of what he said: “Brexit worries me. It would be an awful shame if what we’ve gone to so much trouble to do, to collect the European big nations together, to break it all up now would be a crying shame.” Sober words from a wise old man with reason to worry.

Slapped note two: That byelection in Peterborough. A win is a win and it was good to see Labour pipping ahead of the Brexit Party. That said, it is possible to over-interpret such a small victory. For some this win suggests all that sitting on the Brexit fence was the right policy after all. A pro-Remain message, they chunter triumphantly, would have lost the election. Hard to know for sure, especially with such a minuscule majority. And Jeremy Corbyn shouting himself hoarse – “They wrote us off – they said we couldn’t do this, etcetera” – sounded like the was laying it on a bit thick, if you ask me (and even if you don’t).

Slapped note three: By splitting the right-wing vote, the Brexit Party could open the way for a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn. This is a possibility, but something in the stale Westminster water tells me Corbyn’s near-miss election might be as close as he gets. Something else in that unwholesome liquid tells me there is a bad smell about the Brexit Party/private company/protest group. But you knew that already.

Slapped note four: Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage does seem to get an awful lot of attention on the BBC, but not always in the way that’s put about by some people. A popular post yesterday by Mike Galsworthy complained about the BBC Today programme giving its prime slot to Nigel Farage as if his party had won in Peterborough. “I’ve had enough of the BBC,” said Galsworthy. “They promote him when he wins. They promote him when he loses.” His views were widely shared. Easy to be annoyed by the vile NF and his eel-slippery conniving. But that interview was in the early slot, whereas the main 8.10am slot was dedicated to Labour’s win. Labour MP Andy McDonald was interviewed and got the better of John Humphrys in a scrap over Donald Trump. Conclusion: we should tick the BBC off when it gets things wrong, not build up a caricature argument that isn’t true. Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t interviewed, but he was shown earlier on the BBC news declining to speak to a reporter in Peterborough .

Last slapped note: The main problem the BBC has with Nigel Farage is not exactly over-promotion, even if one appearance is one too many for some of us. No, it’s a failure to forensically pin him down. Farage is clever at engineering a broadcast scrap, editing the footage and then pumping it out on YouTube to polish his crooked crown. That was also almost the only reason he turned up to the European Parliament: YouTube footage. Oh, and the salary. And the expenses.

Slapping off now…

It’s hard to avoid thinking about Donald Trump today, even if sticking your head in a bucket and shouting “No!” is a more tempting prospect.

The orange blimp floated above all those protesters who weren’t there yesterday. “Fake news,” according to Trump, who saw no protesters, only streets lined with waving fans. Or sky out of the helicopter window. And no one had any disobliging banners up there, although a passing seagull may have pulled a rude face.

What Trump said about the NHS will detain us in a sentence or two. First let’s cheer ourselves up with the blimp. Not the inflatable baby Trump, even if that always is a sight to see.

No, I am thinking more of the over-inflated human baby blimp squeezed into a dress suit for dinner with the Queen. That white tie arrangement was something else. It seemed designed to make Trump appear even fatter and more ridiculous than usual.

He looked like a penguin who had swallowed two other penguins. Worn to match this arrangement was his serious person face, the one that suggests a bad bout of post-cheeseburger indigestion.

This morning’s newspapers are an over-stuffed feast of Trump. Many highlight the President’s statement that he wants the NHS to be on the table in any US-UK trade deal. He said such a deal would be “phenomenal”, but the NHS would have to be on the table.

The Daily Mirror’s headline sums up the general feeling on flogging off the NHS to American insurance businesses – “BUTT OUT, MR PRESIDENT.”

Too late for the printed papers, but Trump changed his mind after all-round hostility greeted his earlier statement. He told Piers Morgan in an interview for Good Morning Britain that he didn’t see the NHS as being on the table.

Well, make your mind up, Donald: is it on the table or off the table? What this should remind us of is Trump’s ability to say any old shit any old time. Is the future of the NHS still tied up in a post-Brexit stich-up with Trump’s USA? It seems unlikely any British government would swallow that, unless it was one led by the malign huckster Nigel Farage (sorry for spoiling your day in such a careless manner).

If Trump can change his mind so quickly, and change it back again no doubt, his “phenomenal” trade isn’t worth the paper it isn’t written on. It’s just another meaningless superlative from a spout of meaningless superlatives.

I’ve never truly understood what the Brexit-lovers mean when they shout “Sovereignty!” at the top of their voices. The dictionary offers “the ability of a state to govern itself”, and if that’s your definition, handing over the NHS to US insurance companies hardly sounds like a sovereign improvement.

Thinking of Nigel Farage as prime minister is the stuff of horror stories. It is also the stuff of Russel T Davies’ Years And Years. This dystopian family drama on BBC1 is by turns witty, distressing and horribly plausible.

Now (spoiler alert) the female Farage Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson, cast against type to excellently jarring effect) has become prime minister. Perhaps Davies knows something we don’t.

Last night’s episode was truly shocking for another reason, and I’ll say no more for fear of spoiling anyone’s viewing.

Davies is a clever writer, entertaining, smart and deeply thoughtful. One of the things he is doing here is showing how we are all part of a wider world, and that the refuge crisis is everyone’s crisis. Humanity’s crisis, if you like.

Years And Years is so unsettling it’s too much to watch the news afterwards. This drama about the Lyons family is the news accelerated by 15 years: a rocket-powered ‘now’ that isn’t heading anywhere pretty.

And ‘now’ is hardly pretty, as that human Trump blimp reminds us.

I didn’t think the other morning to ask the young Chinese student about Tiananmen Square. It seems unlikely she would have known about the demonstrations of 30 years ago today.

According to a report in the Guardian, “hundreds or possibly thousands of people were killed” after Beijing deployed tanks and troops against student demanding democratic reform.

The events in Tiananmen Square three decades ago have been written out of official Chinese history. Discussion of this dark chapter is suppressed, so it seems unlikely a girl born eight years later would know much.

Her parents may have been aware. They are in their late 40s and would have been around 18 at the time.

Yesterday security forces were reportedly deployed in Tiananmen Square. Tourists had their ID cards checked and bags scanned and “plainclothes and uniformed police patrolled the perimeter of the area”, again according to the Guardian.

Activists in China planned to protest by fasting, while the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei accuses the west of being complicit in a whitewashing of history. Hopeful theory assumed the rise in capitalist wealth would make China more democratic as it became richer. Not so, according to this dissident: “China has become wealthier and more powerful on the world stage, but it has never matured into pluralism or democracy.”

None of this was discussed over breakfast the other morning. But our guest did reveal smaller details of Chinese life, including making her own breakfast as a young girl as her parents liked to stay in bed.

She was 22 but looked about 12. She was tiny and slight, spirited and strong. She was doing her masters for a year in England and had already studied in China. She picked a university a three-hour flight from home, a safe removal. Now the distance between daughter and parents was even greater.

What I took away from this breakfast-table encounter was how lively this young woman seemed. How much fun she was, full of what you might call world smarts. She wasn’t that different to the students I teach here in Yorkshire. And that seemed a positive thing.

You cannot generalise from one encounter, however charming. Still, this young woman hinted at a rising generation that may not want to follow their parents’ path. As an only child, she was living proof of the Chinese policy used to control rises in population. Two or three years after she was born, this policy was modified to a two-child policy.

We once had an older Chinese guest (another woman, equally lovely) who told us, rather sadly, that her parents had laid out her life and that of her sister: one would be a teacher, the other a nurse. No choice was offered, and those paths predetermined form birth were followed. I told my young guest this story and it was one she recognised. Her parents had fixed ideas about what she should do, but she wasn’t impressed.

When her mother was the same age, she’d given birth to this lively single child. The daughter laughed off any idea yet about children of her own. Instead she was studying abroad, staying in her first Airbnb, and travelling alone for the first time (Edinburgh next).

Foolish to romanticise one encounter, I know. But if China is raising a generation of such spirited, smart young people, they may one day want to a different life, to shape a different sort of China.

Anyway, I went off to work, driving away as our young guest stood outside the house, staring at her phone. Looking up, she gave a sweet wave.

I’ll remember that wave, and the way she insisted on eating an English breakfast instead of her usual rice. We don’t run to a cooked breakfast (well, it’s only 25 quid a night). She had cereal and toast. Butter and jam were provided, but instead she floated the toast in the cereal milk.

President Donald Trump is on a state visit to Britain. Well, the place is in a bit of a state.

Trump sent some of his ‘luggage’ ahead, telling the Sun newspaper that Boris Johnson would make a good prime minister. And bellowing sweet nothings to the Sunday Times about how Nigel Farage should be included in the Brexit negotiations.

Trump said of Johnson: “I think Boris would do a very good job. I think he would be excellent. He has been very positive about me and our country.”

The italics are mine, to highlight the way Trump always brings himself into everything. Maybe we need a new letter or font for this important job: Trumplics, perhaps, to be used to illuminate the president’s penchant for endless self-glorification. Mind you, we’d soon run out of letters.

After Trump’s endorsement, Led By Donkeys projected footage of Johnson being disobliging about Trump on to Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben.

Dating to his time as London mayor, the clip shows Johnson saying: “When Donald Trump says that there are parts of London that are no-go areas, I think he’s betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president of the United States.”

Johnson never said a truer thing. But he probably denies saying it now. Being economical with the truth is a skill that comes naturally. Much in the way that his presidential pal told the Sun that Meghan Markle was “nasty” for things she’d said about him, then outright insisted he’d never said such a thing. Even though the Sun provided an audio clip of Trump saying exactly that.

Both men are no strangers to mistruth. It’s hardly surprising that one rampant egotist accused of past shagging misdemeanours should think another rampant egotist accused of past shagging misdemeanours would be perfect for the job.

Johnson is even being taken to court for his bus-side lie during the referendum about how Brexit would save Britain £350m to spend on the NHS. He knew this wasn’t true at the time, as TV interview footage suggests, but he kept saying it anyway. That’s because the truth is but a speck in his greedy eye. Oh, and if Boris Johnson were taken to court over every untrue thing he ever said, that would keep him well away from the Tory leadership tussle.

As we enter deeper into the bullshit vortex, it becomes harder to say anything new about anything much. We know Trump lies; we know Johnson lies; and we know Farage lies. Loaded whoppers all round. They do this because if you shout a lie loud enough, the truth is drowned out. And we all just end up standing in a shouty corridor echoing to lies old and new as the bullshit stains our socks.

As for Farage and his Brexit Party, this remains a one-man band led by a clever, duplicitous showman. A politician who wins voters round by pretending he isn’t one: and for some reason they swallow his self-serving spiel.

Many of Farage’s electoral tactics are straight out of the Big Book of Trump Lies. Note the way he got into a scrap with Andrew Marr the other week. He engineered this so clips would show him standing up to the ‘crooked BBC’, again casting himself as the innocent victim, rather than a seasoned truth manipulator.

On the radio this morning, a Trump fan was put up against a commentator who sees the president as a fascist. The Trump fan said something notable: Trump came to power because people felt let down by politicians – they liked him because he was different and not a politician.

I sided with the woman mumbling fascist in the background. Yet the Trump fan does remind us this is where being anti-politics gets you. Being anti-politics and pro-Farage gets you supporting an extreme right-winger who pretends to be your friendly naughty uncle, when he just wants to slash taxes for the wealthy and flog off the NHS to US insurance firms.

Nigel is mostly making plans for Nigel. Remember that if you are ever tempted to swallow one of his old boiled sweet lies.

Sometimes I sit on this ledge and despair at the state of a Britain so Brexit-bothered and bewildered.

Across the rubble I spy the Conservative Party lining up to replace the last hopeless prime minister with one of at least a dozen hopefuls (maybe another unknown quantity has joined the queue since I started typing, but Boris Johnson is still harrumphing away at the front).

And at the other side of the valley, up on Quarrel Hill, the Labour Party is squabbling over members who voted Lib-Dem in the Euro elections, having expelled Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, for that sin. By some accounts, around 40% of Labour members are thought to have done the same – and that’s not including all those habitual Labour voters who followed suit or voted Green (three at least in this family of five).

Then I raise my eyes to the horizon. Donald Trump, who will be visiting soon, is busy bullying everyone at home and abroad, issuing violent Twitter threats against Iran, and diverting the usual procedure to supply arms to the Saudis, so that they can continue to bomb the shit out of Yemen.

This morning Trump has announced tariffs on all goods entering the US from Mexico, until all illegal immigration stops – another stamp of his bullying foot that will only hurt the weakest, and probably add to the six migrant children who have already died at the Mexican border. It will also cause another trade war (he does like those). Trade wars, in Trump-land, are more important than the climate crisis or the threat of mass extinction.

Now under his malign shadow, assorted US states are trying to ban abortion – a move that will mostly hit the poor who can’t afford to travel to have the procedure. What it won’t do is stop abortion; it will just make it dangerous again.

One of the mysteries of the attitude of the right in the US to abortion is that human life is sacred, all babies being a gift from God and so on, until they grow up and go school, where they might be shot. Then suddenly the right to carry guns out-votes the right to life.

This assessment is a caricature, perhaps: but sometimes caricatures come close to the truth.

Anyway, it must be time to read a book or listen to some music, or meet with friends, chat to the kids, phone my mother (well, not yet, it isn’t Sunday) or text my dad (on a cruise again, that man is cruising into old age), get in touch with the brothers. Anything but contemplate the state of the world.

A friend recommended the new Steve Earle album, and now it’s arrived, to go with all the others on the rack. It’s called Guy and is a tribute to the country legend Guy Clark, with Earle singing Clark’s songs. It’s wonderful and an export from the US I can thoroughly recommend. Unlike the one arriving here next week.

A headline in The Times today catches my occasionally bloodshot eye – “The big binge: four years to watch every Netflix show.”

Watching Netflix threatens to become an infinite loop in time, the binge that never ends. In Greek legend Sisyphus was a cruel king condemned to push a large rock up a steep hill, only to find it rolling back down near the top.

Our modern equivalent is more of a self-selecting punishment: watch Netflix until it ends, although it never does (and to these calculations should be added the days you can spend trying to find something to watch on Netflix, a sort of digital jumble sale).

Although it’s not eternity yet, but four years or 32,600 hours of programmes. This calculation has been made in a report commissioned by Ofcom into the video-on-demand market in Britain.

Amazon Prime and Now TV, Sky’s streaming service, are next in the binge queue, while the BBC iPlayer gets by on 5,100 hours – not even a year’s worth of watching, as a year contains 8,760 hours – while poor old ITV can only offer 2,950 hours.

Channel 4’s on-demand service All 4 runs to 10,120 hours, including popular box sets and foreign language dramas “which have low viewing figures”, according to The Times. Watching foreign language cop shows on Walter Presents once was my favourite waste of time. Sadly, Walter doesn’t present on Virgin TV, so that distraction is now lost.

What we have here is our old friend quality versus quantity. The traditional broadcasters will never be able to match the deep pockets of Netflix and Amazon Prime. But more isn’t always better, and it’s fair to say that finding something to watch on Netflix is a lucky-dip plunge. My favourite watch so far is Four Seasons In Havana, an addictive Cuban crime drama. Russian drama The Method was good too. And the Netflix-produced British TV drama Sex Education was a delight.

Away from the highs, there have been lows too many to mention, assorted programmes started and then never finished. My watch of the moment is The Break, a French-language Belgian crime drama. Three episodes in, it’s not bad. But there is one big clunking problem: like many foreign-language dramas on Netflix, it has been dubbed. And dubbed dramas end up terrible even when they’re OK.

My half-educated guess is that it’s because Americans don’t like dubbed dramas, yet this theory is undermined by a report in Variety from as long ago as April 2014, headlined: “Why US audiences are more comfortable with subtitles than ever.”

In the quality vs quantity argument, British TV holds its own with big-interest BBC dramas such as Line of Duty and The Bodyguard. Or with quirkily engaging period dramas such as Gentleman Jack on BBC1 or the tough/tender Shane Meadows drama The Virtues on Channel 4 (quite possibly the drama of the year, but not an easy watch).

Another aspect to all this is that some programmes on Netflix have already been seen on BBC, ITV or Channel 4.

I like the occasional binge and then hate myself in the morning. TV dramas such as Line of Duty that are shown once a week and keep hold of their secrets are still a more rewarding watch.

Binge TV is the modern way, but it’s too much like staring at rubbish on your phone for hours: a bottomless pit of stuff that only ends in a headache.

Or you could always binge on a book. Ah, that feels better already.

The European elections seem to have been staged as a sort of Nigel Farage tribute match, with all the other parties upping their contributions through political negligence.

The Brexit Party did well even though there was only one word written across Nigel Farage’s forehead (the closest thing to a manifesto for this one-man-band private company/sort of political party).

Labour’s policy of constructive ambiguity saw them unambiguously screwed, although not as unambiguously screwed as the Tories, while the one-policy grumble that is Farage’s Brexit Party unambiguously won – depending on how you add up the votes.

The result looks depressingly like a win for the worst man in British politics (it’s a shove, but he wins by a shoulder). There is room for interpretation, and by some calculations more people voted for Remain parties than Leave parties.

Farage’s old tribute band UKIP were even more unambiguously screwed than anyone else, even though their only real policy was the same as the Brexit Party: get out now.

Why did voters desert Farage’s old crew in favour of his new rabble? The depressing conclusion is that people are attracted to Farage, with one woman interviewed on last night’s BBC news saying she’d voted for the Brexit Party “because it’s Nigel”. People are very strange when you look out from inside your own bubble, where the air is stale from all the muttered swearing.

The only glint of optimism in the continuing shitstorm of British politics is that far-right trouble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – who pretends that he is called Tommy Robinson – got 2.2% of the vote and lost his deposit. He’d earlier boasted that he expected to “walk into Brussels like Connor McGregor” after the election. Instead he skulked off with less swagger than Mr McGregor in the Beatrix Potter books.

I voted Green for only the second time. This was mainly because Jeremy Corbyn wore out my patience with his refusal to say what he really thought about Europe. And, yes, I know that Brexit is a distraction from more important matters – especially the ‘project’ that Corbyn’s supporters like to talk about – but in terms of broadcasting politics to the wider public, his stance was infuriating.

Corbyn has disliked Europe since the 1970s and as he hasn’t changed his mind about anything since then, he stymied himself by refusing either to speak his personal truth or adopt an up-to-the-minute proposal to help us through the quagmire.

His only tactic was to sit on that fence and watch the Tories mess everything up, then hope for a general election – without ever saying how he’d negotiate Brexit if he won.

And by unambiguously sitting on that fence for so long, he laid the ground for Farage’s victory – a pyrrhic one with any luck, although Farage himself reportedly says he has his sights on Downing Street. Well, we all say all sorts of stupid shit in the heat of the moment, and perhaps life will calm down eventually.

For it’s all very well worrying about Boris Johnson as prime minister, but the notion of Nigel Farage ever getting there is the stuff of poorly written political thrillers (Day of the Jackass).

While the Tories were the truest losers, even as they jostle each other in the world’s least pretty beauty parade to replace Theresa May, Labour’s dithering boosted the Greens and the Lib-Dems. Today, Jeremy Corbyn is reported to be backing a second referendum; or maybe he isn’t, as that’s all a bit of a black hole.

Peer too deeply into that hole and you’ll be vacuumed off to oblivion.

Tearful Theresa takes me right back to 1990 when the column I wrote on my old newspaper was in its infancy and Margaret Thatcher was in her political dotage.

Mrs Hacksaw was the name she got in that column, while years later her successor was rechristened Mrs Maybe.

The ejection of Margaret Thatcher was a bigger deal than the slow political suicide of Theresa May. The ignoble doing-in of Thatcher was the last act of a long tragedy, whereas Mrs Maybe’s lachrymose farewell was the final rancid puff of air leaving a prime minister who had never been fully inflated in the first place.

Thatcher left after Michael Heseltine launched a failed leadership bid, and there’s a political irony there as Lord Heseltine, as he now is, eloquently speaks out against Brexit and said he was voting LibDem in the euro elections. And Brexit did for May in the end, as it may well do for all of us, it seems.

Writing about Mrs Hacksaw was how I cut my teeth as a bit-part commentator on this and that. Lord, I hated that woman, and didn’t I let my readers know, almost certainly to a fault, looking back, but Thatcher did raise the bile. But she was a good Tory leader, if you like that sort of thing, which I didn’t and still don’t, unsurprisingly.

This morning’s front pages are covered in Theresa May’s tears. Sorry, but I don’t feel sorry for her at all. Those who sympathise (“Tears for the love of her country” – the Daily Express; “A crying shame” – the Daily Mail) see May as noble but failed.

Mrs Maybe grabbed the Tory crown with a ridiculous speech about fairness, then carried on in the same wilfully autocratic manner that characterised her years at the Home Office. She will only be remembered for Brexit. But she should also be remembered for the disgrace of Windrush and her blind obsession with her hostile environment policy over immigration.

For a woman often shown dutifully bumbling into church of a Sunday, she has an unchristian heart when it comes to immigration.

Anyway, she’s gone or going, a hopeless politician to the last, quite wrong for the job – but who on earth is right for that job? If May was introverted and cautious, and unable to win friends in politics, her possible successor Boris Johnson is the polar-opposite – or the sort of polar bear opposite, a scheming nasty piece of working pretending to be a big white-haired, stammering fool.

But I have felt sorry for Theresa May sometimes. Mostly just every time Iain Duncan Smith opened his mouth to splurge out something nasty about her. That man was the most appalling Tory leader. I know, they are all appalling, it’s in the job description, but he was the pits. This culminated in him saying the other day that it was time to ask Philip May if he could talk some sense into his wife. She’s the prime minister, not a great one, but still the prime minister – and there was a man suggesting that it was time to talk to the husband.

The dirty dozen or so jostling for May’s job make for a depressing sight, none more so than Johnson. But perhaps there is a cautionary tale here in the unlikely shape of Gordon Brown, who grabbed the job from Tony Blair and never won an election. Brown thought of holding a snap election in 2008 to give himself electoral legitimacy, but he bottled out. He was haunted by that failure to move for years, and probably still is.

As for Brexit, could Boris Johnson sort it out? Ah, well, um, you see, jolly japing hell and all that…

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.