AS we stumble towards the general election, even some of Jeremy Corbyn’s allies are saying the Labour leader is about to fall into that trap in the ground laid by Theresa May.

This morning Len McCluskey has been managing hole-falling expectations by saying that Labour is unlikely to win the election. McCluskey is general secretary of Unite, Corbyn’s biggest union backer and a key political pal. His gloomy prediction rather takes the gloss from Labour’s election manifesto, which yesterday boldly set out spending pledges of £50bn and higher rates of tax for high earners.

McCluskey does not believe Labour will win. You and me both, mate. The only reason Mrs Maybe called this election was because all the signs were that she would win easily. Forgot all that cant about a bigger majority giving her a stronger hand in the Brexit negotiations. Nothing more than a cunning ruse. She wanted this control-freaky election so that she could win big.

That’s politics for you, naturally. A Labour leader with a similarly strong lead in the opinions polls would probably do the same. And it would be just as wrong in that instance, too.

Although this is now a pointless distraction, it is still worth remembering that the Fixed-term Parliament Act – as introduced by David Cameron under the coalition government – was designed to prevent the calling of elections for flaky reasons. There was and is no reason for this general election, other than the fact that Mrs Maybe fancied her chances (after piously droning on for months about how there was no need for a general election).

That fixed-term act was one of the few good things Cameron did – and yet it turned out to be useless.

McCluskey is managing expectations downwards by saying that Labour will be successful if the party keeps 200 seats or so. What would be the party’s worst result since 1935 is being reimagined as a victory – how marvellous. If Labour wins 30 fewer seats than it managed under Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn will have done well.

Sorry, but that’s like me saying that when I lose at squash again tonight, I will have done well under the circumstances. I won’t; I will have lost again

Naturally enough, McCluskey in part blames the hostile media for the impossibility of Corbyn winning. When Corbyn loses, we will hear much more muttering about the villainous media. One glance at my Facebook feed usually reveals assorted examples ‘proving’ that the media, and especially the BBC, is being vile about Jeremy.

Yet when his supporters booed journalists asking questions at his manifesto launch in Bradford, Corybn said that it was important for journalists to be heard and to do their job.

Blaming a hostile media doesn’t really wash – not because it isn’t true, but just because that’s the way it’s always been, and successful Labour leaders find a way through the media thicket.

Jeremy Corbyn seems to be having a good election campaign, and he certainly comes over better on the BBC – stop booing at the back there – than the risk-averse Theresa May, with all her dull slogans and stage-managed gatherings of blue meanies.

But he is still almost certain to lose. And when that happens, talking up his defeat, or endlessly blaming the media, won’t get around the sorry fact that the Corbyn experiment will have failed. Not that his acolytes are likely to accept that for a moment.

Frankly, I’ll be glad when it’s all over and I can flick the political switch to off for a while.

ONCE in a blue and fatty moon we used to go to McDonald’s, back when our three were small. They’re all grown-up now and take themselves off to foodie places.

The fries were good and the coffee passable, but I stayed away always from those burgers. Nowadays I wouldn’t cross the threshold, but that’s just one of those burdens a food snob must carry.

McDonald’s knows its way round a clever TV advert, none of which appear to show groups of teens hanging around and causing a spotty nuisance (too many burgers, I guess). The street outside the branch in York is a magnet for teens at night, but then teenagers always have found somewhere to gather.

Even a stranger to McDonald’s cannot help but notice those ads. They are smart, smart enough usually to appear not to be an advert for McDonald’s at all, until you arrive at the ‘punchline’. After the tease comes the greasy reality: oh, it’s just another advert for burgers.

The latest McDonald’s advert has caused the wrong sort of stir, although it is possible to wonder at the way controversial adverts bring out the apologies, but are noticed far more than responsible ads. A cynical person might almost believe they do it on purpose.

Anyway, the latest McDonald’s ad has been accused of exploiting childhood bereavement. I haven’t seen the ad yet, and perhaps I never will now, but it shows a mother and a boy who is struggling to find something in common with his dead father – until he learns that they both liked the same McDonald’s meal.

The bereavement charity Grief Encounter says it has received “countless calls” from parents saying their bereaved children have been upset by the advert. McDonald’s has responded as you would expect, saying it had not been their intention to cause offence. “We wanted to highlight the role McDonald’s has played in our customers’ everyday lives – both in good and difficult times,” a grovelling-to-the-public-person said, according to the BBC News website.

Way to go, McDonald’s. Using grieving children to sell your burgers is an idea that should have stayed in the fat-fryer. I suspect that what happened here is that the advertising agency thought it was being responsible and sensitive – only to find that their efforts had entirely the opposite effect. At least they stopped short of calling it an Unhappy Meal.

In a sense, you can see where they were coming from, as there is an emotional side to food, although usually the memories are stirred by old family meals, not a favourite cheeseburger. Perhaps bereaved boys and girls could be taught to cook the meals their lost parent used to love. Or maybe nobody cooks anymore and they all go to McDonald’s instead. But food is too important to be left to McDonald’s, Burger King Subway and the rest.

Funnily enough, those Tesco recipes adverts are quite clever. People are shown cooking meals which you can then find on their website. The food looks decent, especially the veggie burger recipes, and Tesco keeps its presence low-key but friendly.

That’s the reasonably positive side of TV advertising. But presenting mass-produced burgers as a cure-all for childhood grief is a step too far. The advertising executive who came up with that idea should be forced to eat ten cheese-burgers on the trot.

THE Frenchman is in the shower and I am at the laptop on the breakfast table. He’s from Nantes and there is an accidental reciprocity about that. Last year I was in Nantes and a man from there is now over here with us for a few days.

He arrived despite a bit of difficulty with the bus driver. “I think it was the accent,” he said when he got  here.

This man is visiting York as a tourist but I don’t know much else about him. You discover very little about some Airbnb guests, while others tell you their life story over toast and tea.

Some people arrive on holiday, others are pushed here by an emergency or last-minute arrangements. We’ve had two of those lately. One man had come to York on holiday with his wife and daughter, staying in a proper B&B at first. The wife had complained of feeling unwell in one morning, which wasn’t like her, and ended up in hospital with an appendix on the point of bursting. N drove his daughter home, then came back here, not knowing if his wife would be OK to leave hospital. He left in the morning and we didn’t see him again, so she must have been.

The other ‘emergency’ visitor was a vet covering a last-minute shift in the York area. It was badminton night so we told him to arrive before or after a certain time. Eventually he turned up at 10.30pm, dirty, tired and ready for the shower. I was sweaty, tired and ready for the shower after getting bad tempered at badminton.

“I’ve been dealing with a prolapsed cow,” the vet said.

“I’ve been dealing with an uncooperative shuttlecock,” I could have replied but didn’t.

The young vet was from the Dales, a proper Yorkshireman. Next morning, he left before seven without the breakfast that’s included in the price (missing something free – not such a proper Yorkshireman). He was off to deal with more poorly livestock.

The vet was replaced by a young woman from Indonesia, who stayed for three nights. We chatted over breakfast on the first morning, but after that she kept to herself. My wife didn’t even meet her. When she left on the Saturday morning, I was up in the study, tapping away. Hearing the door, I dashed downstairs in my pyjamas and caught her just as she scuttled off.

That seemed strange, and I wondered if she hadn’t enjoyed her stay. Later she sent an email saying what a lovely time she’d had and telling me to get in touch if ever I am in Bangkok.

That young woman was replaced by the eccentric cyclist. He came to York for a gathering of some sort. He’d cycled from Swindon but gave up at Derby thanks to the wind, putting his bicycle on the train.

He left at 6am on the Sunday, saying that we shouldn’t get up on his account. But I was awake so came down at 5.45am and attempted to chat – it was early and he was a few words short of talkative. Perhaps it was the prospect of all those miles. He was intending to cycle 200 miles home on a bike with a fixed-wheel – in other words, a bike without gears. Some of us only get up hills thanks to those gears, and he didn’t have any. He was on the road by 6am and calculated that if he kept pedalling he should be home around midnight.

The Frenchman has just come downstairs. He tells me that he once read a book about York. “When I was 18 or 16,” he says. “And now 30 years later, here I am.”

He works in IT and we chat about that, then we chat about French politics. He voted for Emmanuel Macron in the second round, although not with a glad heart. Yesterday morning I missed my brother the professor. He was on the radio again, this time on Broadcasting House, talking about French politics as usual. So, we can both do that, although my talking takes place over toast, while he addresses the nation, or those parts awake at that time on a Sunday morning.

THERESA May’s election campaign is turning into a personality cult. Something about this is rather puzzling: how do you build a personality cult around someone who doesn’t have one?

Search teams have been out with the sniffer dogs, the helicopters have been circling in the sky, but they have all returned empty-handed. They hunted high and low but couldn’t find any trace of a personality.

Yet just look at Theresa’s battle-bus. On the side are the words: “Theresa May: For Britain” and “Strong, stable leadership in the national interest”, with Mrs Maybe’s signature underneath. Is something missing there, perhaps? Ah, yes – the word ‘Conservative’. It is there but you need a magnifying glass to find those tiny letters on the door.

This suggests that Theresa is bigger than her party; or it suggests that she thinks that being branded with the ‘nasty party’ – as she once labelled her lot – might not be good for her image.

She’s becoming very presidential, isn’t she? Impatient with detractors or even anyone who might just want to ask her a question – you know, a real question and not one she has approved beforehand. Mrs Maybe did expose herself to the political rigours of The One Show, yet even as they bowled soft-toy questions at her, she looked as if that BBC sofa had been stuffed with drawing pins.

As for all that “strong and stable” business, the slogan seems ridiculous, but perhaps it will work. The idea is that most people don’t take much notice of politics, so Theresa keeps saying that to get her message across. Or until she is blue in the face. Or ever bluer in the face.

But here’s the thing: just imagine if I went around saying: “Hard as nails, me.” I could repeat that slogan endlessly and people would still look at me and laugh. Or kick sand in my face before I could get the words out.

Personality is such an odd commodity in politics. Jeremy Corbyn has what appears to be a good personality, in that when people meet him he comes across well. His views are honestly held – yet they are views which make many some voters suspicious, allowing the ‘good personality’ to be forgotten in favour of the other one: the raving old leftie (a caricature, but one that sticks).

The sniffer dogs sent to look for Donald Trump’s personality ran away and were never seen again. Their handlers believe they found something too terrible to accept. Yes, Trump has a personality, but what a strange thing it is: thin-skinned, swaggering, insecure and bursting with bluster and ignorance undiminished. His personality is to toxic it has turned his hair a strange shade of yellow.

The biggest personality in British politics belongs to Boris Johnson – and that is not intended as a compliment. His blustering chap patter is a put-up job that should fool no one. Nothing about Boris is cuddly. The search dogs sent to find his personality were given a friendly pat on their head and then kicked when no one was looking.

Thinking further about Mrs Maybe’s robotic personality, the answer suddenly drops into my grateful hands. She has clearly been captured by ransomware just like that which has hijacked computers belonging to the NHS.

Look into her eyes and you will see the warning reflected back: “Oops, your personality has been encrypted.” And that explains why she has been hit by a virus that leaves her smiling awkwardly and repeating the words “Strong and stable” at every opportunity.

OH, I know I shouldn’t go looking at the front page of the Daily Mail as I’ll probably go blind or something. But the one yesterday was hard to avoid.

The page I saw wasn’t attached to the rest of the newspaper, as the only time I read the Mail is when leafing through my mother-in-law’s copy. Reading that borrowed newspaper usually leaves two impressions: one, there is some vile stuff in here; two, it’s well put together and there is plenty to read. That interior dialogue is between the journalist inside me and the ordinary person.

I do look at the front page online, usually when reading the newspaper review on the BBC website. Those pages are studies in stern virtuosity and barbed hypocrisy, and that’s just on a quiet day. Yesterday’s paper had a lead story about Labour’s manifesto being leaked and the headline was: “Labour’s manifesto to drag us back to the 1970s.”

My first reaction to this wasn’t political at all, but personal. Drag us back to the 1970s? Oh, yes please. I loved the 1970s. I was young and had hair and hope. The hair’s gone and the hope can be threadbare too on a bad day, but everything was in place back then.

The way we divide time into labelled decades works on different levels, in that the tag is historical/political and personal. The 1970s – three-day weeks, power-cuts, uncollected rubbish and so on – took me from 14 to 24, formative years I suppose, embracing the sixth form at school, university and the early years of work.

Those were also the tender days – tender ego and tender heart; the easily bruised days and yet the days when time stretched to the horizon and anything could happen. The days of John Martyn and Van the Man and Fairport Convention, with prog-rock excursions too (King Crimson, Yes), and American trips with Grateful Dead and the Steve Miller Band and others lost in the fuzzy layers.

That Mail front page drew much scornful comment online, as those pages often do. This time it was down to the blurb at the top of the page which read: “Girl jobs and boy jobs are the secret of lasting love” with pictures of Philip and Theresa May bookending the words.

What people noticed was that this banner for the Sarah Vine column was itself a throwback to the 1970s. I didn’t read what Sarah had to say, but then she never reads what I have to say.

I can sympathise with the prickly outrage, but really what do you expect from the Mail, which earlier in the week praised Mrs Maybe’s plans to curb energy prices in a manner that was diametrically opposed to the way it reported Ed Miliband’s plans to do the same two years ago.

If you want hypocrisy, they keep a mouldy fridge full of the stuff at the Mail.

Without wishing today to delve too deeply into the politics of it all – we are in danger of being politicked to death by this dreary election – it is unsurprising that Labour should have a 1970s-themed manifesto as that was when Jeremy Corbyn formed many of his beliefs. They have since been nudged by time perhaps, but not budged a lot; in fact, ‘nudged but not budged’ might almost be a slogan for Corbyn. He can have that one for free.

What I loved yesterday was Mrs Maybe’s reaction to Labour’s manifesto, or at least to the Mail version. She had the screaming gall to say that “Labour wants to drag us to the past” – this from the woman who is obsessed by grammar schools and scrabbling around for scraps of the British Empire.

But back to the 1970s? Oh, go on then. I think I shall go and put Solid Air on the hi-fi.

GHOSTS are popular in York. There are walks you can go on. Whether you will meet a spectral being during such a stroll around the city is not guaranteed, although a corporeal one might jump out at some point to give you a fright.

Yesterday the ghost walkers were gathered around one site, with groups of tourists tagging along. They were on the trail of the Blue Wraith. This elusive spirit was said to be able to materialise inside buildings apparently without passing through the doors.

“She go through the walls?” asked one of the tourists, raising his camera.

“Ah, if only we knew the truth of it,” said the leader of the ghost walk. “She may well do that. One minute she is there, and then she has gone, disappeared in a puff of blue. Special cameras from the BBC can sometimes capture the Blue Wraith, but ordinary cameras capture nothing at all.”

“How long she been in there?” asked the man with the camera.

“Ah, no one knows. No one ever knows and that is part of the mystery of the Blue Wraith. And although we like our ghosts in this city, we cannot claim exclusive rights on the Blue Wraith. She has been seen around the country, appearing mysteriously inside locked buildings.”

“Ah,” said the man with the camera. “Locked-room mystery?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the ghost-walker. “We tried all the doors and no one can get in or out – unless they are dressed in blue. Once inside, the doors are sealed and after the last one has clanged shut, only then does the Blue Wraith begin to speak.”

“What she say then?” asked the man with the camera.

“Ah, she strikes fear into the hearts of many. She rattles her strong and stable chains…”

“Why she do that?”

“Oh, perhaps in case someone in the back row has dozed off. Mostly though she has the strangest effect on those gathered around her, who gaze at the Blue Wraith as if she has cast a most dreadful amorous spell. They cannot take their eyes off her. It is as if they were trapped by her basilisk stare. And then she laughs. Those who have survived the experience say that sound stays with them for ever. It is said to chill their very bones.”

“She still in there now?”

“Ah, that’s the question. You never can tell. That spectral lady comes and goes without leaving a trace. No single local person sees the Blue Wraith with their own eyes. They only know she has appeared thanks to those special thermal imaging cameras from the BBC.”

Eventually one door creaked open and the ghost walkers and the tourists shuffled nervously inside the building. And there was no sign of the Blue Wraith at all. She had vanished without trace.

“Where she gone?” asked the man with the camera.

“Funny you should ask that,” said the ghost-walker. “But she has just mysteriously appeared inside the One Show studio at the BBC.”

“They using those special cameras again?”

“I guess they must be.”

Yes, Theresa May was in York yesterday, or so we all found out long after she had disappeared. She came and she went without speaking to anyone local or normal, only to the smitten horde of blue meanies. Later she mysteriously appeared in a Leeds factory where one or two workers were allowed a question. When someone raised their hand, the Blue Wraith trembled with rage: “Is that a pen in your hand – are you a journalist? We’ll have questions from these handpicked workers whose questions have been thoroughly vetted, not from your impertinent likes. Who let you in here?”

Well, some of that sentence may have been embellished, but the first part wasn’t.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is in York today. Say what you like about the man – and my suspicions run deep – he will be out in the open in St Helen’s Square. True, the square will be thronged with his supporters, but they won’t have been bussed in and Corbyn will put himself at risk of meeting ordinary passers-by.

And that’s not something the Blue Wraith is ever likely to do. Instead, she prefers to stage-manage democracy by mysteriously appearing inside locked buildings.

“How she get away with it,” asked the man with the camera.

“Because we let her,” said the man with the laptop.

TODAY I can offer you a full-fat diet of news that is good and bad. Here are political policies with a hard, old rind or policies pinched from the other lot’s cheese board.

And here, to get us rolling, are a few wise words from a defeated Ukip candidate in the local elections in Skegness. Danny Brooks was quoted in last Sunday’s Observer, saying: “The Tories are talking the talk. Theresa May could nearly be Ukip leader the way she is talking.”

Hard cheese, sir – but what you say is true. Mrs Maybe is wrapping herself in an empurpled version of the Union flag, and many of her speeches could have been given by that bloke who is attempting to lead Ukip, including yesterday’s pledge to slash migration to less than 100,000 a year.

That bit of mouldy old cheddar has been in the Tory tuck box for so long the edges are turning green. It’s a pledge that has failed before and will fail again; a pledge that won’t be met and can’t be met; a pledge that on another day you might say was a bit of red meat for the Ukip supporters. But we are not talking meat today, so it will have to be red cheese, Leicester perhaps.

Incidentally, Ukip is said to want cut immigration to nothing and to operate a “one-in-one-out” policy – exactly the same policy the party has for its leaders.

To top it all, Mrs Maybe has announced today that she will cap energy prices – a policy championed by former Labour leader Ed Miliband, and lampooned by David Cameron for being a communist plot. And now the prime minister has swiped that one from the Labour cheeseboard.

A heckler interjects…

What’s with all the bloody cheese references, buster?

Ah, all will become clear in a moment.

And this morning, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is quoted as saying that he will hang around even if Labour loses the election next month. That news is about as welcome as the bad smell we get when the cheese box in the fridge needs a wash. Not content with pushing his party to an almost certain electoral disaster, now Corbyn says he won’t budge afterwards.

Yesterday it was announced that York is to host a special edition of Question Time on June 2, where Mrs Maybe and the immovable Jeremy Corbyn will debate head-to-head – well, sort of. They will share the same bill and answer questions from audience members, but whether there will be an actual face-off is unclear, as Mrs Maybe does like to control these things.

Perhaps she will appear surrounded by those blue-tinged Daleks that usually accompany her in place of the ordinary people she always says she wants to meet but never does. Those smitten Daleks, so in love with the chief Dalek, were there yesterday when she got out that bit of mouldy old migration cheddar.

“Exterminate Corbyn!” they chorused, while almost wetting their tin pants at the excitement of being so close to the great leader.

Anyway, cheese. Today there is a story to make my cheese-laden old heart sing. “Eating cheese does not raise risk of heart attack or stroke, study finds,” says the Guardian’s headline on its website. Well, I’ll say a haloumi hallelujah to that; or a cheddar chorus; or a Stilton stanza.

Consuming cheese, milk and yoghurt – even the lovely full-fat versions – does not damage health, say an international team of experts who conducted a meta-analysis of 29 previous studies of the health risks associated with dairy products. The study concluded that eating such food had a “neutral” impact on human health.

And, if I may paraphrase, the study concluded that we shouldn’t be eating any of that low-fat muck either. What cheering news, so long as you ignore the miserable muttering from Public Health England, who are still pushing the reduced-fat stuff in our direction.

Politics and cheese, all wrapped up in one tasty sandwich.

AFTER being down in the dumps over Trump, we can raise a cheer for Emmanuel Macron. That may be simplistic – but not as simple-minded as Nigel Farage’s reaction to his old pal on the far right, Marine Le Pen, failing to secure the presidency.

First up, the Twitter account of Leave.EU – Farage’s pro-Brexit pressure group – spat out a spittle-flecked tweet saying that the French “rolled over in 1940. This time they’ve saved Germany the fuel and bullets”.

God, at least no one can accuse Farage of looking forwards. Instead his lot view the world through a rose-tinted lens smeared with the grease of old hatreds. How telling that his reaction to a president elect cast from a modern mould should be to drag the war up again. And just in case you missed the point, the tweet included a picture of a newspaper headline from 1940 reporting the surrender of France to the Nazis.

Under his own account, Farage tweeted: “A giant deceit has been voted for today. Macron will be Juncker’s puppet.”

On television yesterday, he also praised Le Pen, saying that she had lost weight and was “looking pretty fit”. Of course, ‘fit’ can have different connotations, but if you imagine Farage raising his fist and pumping his arm, you will probably arrive at his intended definition. That man is so far beneath contempt he must have moles for company.

And should Farage’s foul Twitter scribblings not be enough for you, there is always Katie Hopkins, who mocked the 24-year age difference between Macron and his wife, Brigitte, tweeting: “Macron’s wife has promised him a special new toy from the shops tomorrow for being such a clever little boy.”

Yup, she’s down there with Nigel and those moles. Well, their woman lost and the right are rarely magnanimous in defeat. Most of the papers this morning either ignore the result altogether – just imagine the front page of the Mail if Le Pen had won – or see the result purely in terms of how it will affect Brexit.

Some, including The Times and Financial Times, offer straight reports on Macron’s landslide, while the Guardian goes with “Macron wins French presidency – but a country remains divided.”

That sounds about right, because Farage’s political girlfriend did win 30 per cent of the votes in the run-off – a big result for the far-right. Many complications and compromises will follow, but at least France had the sense to turn against a party based on old hatreds and the exploitation of those who feel left behind in the modern world.

As for Donald Trump, he had previously declared that Le Pen was “the strongest on borders” and the “toughest on radical Islamic terrorism”. But not the strongest on winning elections, thank heavens. Trump would no doubt have been disappointed by the result, but he did tweet on Macron’s victory, saying: “Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron on his big win today as the next President of France. I look very much forward to working with him!”

How disappointingly unDonald-like was that: no howlers at all, just that exclamation mark at the end. Sometimes it is possible to see Trump as a fencer who swordfights with exclamation marks. His whole world seems to be one of exclamation, childish superlatives – note that “big win” – repeatedly tossed on a wind of his own making.

Anyway, the narrative that the right is sweeping all before it has not been repeated in France, so that’s a relief. But Marine Le Pen and her Front National won’t be going away.

The lovely Nigel thinks she’ll win next time round. Perhaps by then the former Ukip leader will have disappeared and we will be spared his rancid wittering. As for my wittering, that is over for another day.

ACCORDING to YouGov, I should be a raving Tory by now. The internet-based research organisation calculates that people are eight per cent more likely to vote Tory for every ten years older they get.

Fewer than one in five people aged 65 to 75 identify as Labour – a figure that drops to one in ten for those over 75.

By that calculation, I should be 24 per cent more Tory than I was at 30. While my voting intentions this time round remain unresolved, I can confidently state for the record that I remain no per cent Conservative, zero, zilch, nought and nowt per cent Tory. Not one iota Tory. There is not a single grain of Tory sand in my castle.

Well, I am sure you get the idea. I always disliked Margaret Thatcher but at least she had a philosophy. Mrs Maybe remains a political vacuum to be filled with whatever suits the moment. I honestly don’t know what she believes other than that she’s the best woman to sort out Brexit (which she opposed until she didn’t) and to do that she needs to win a strong mandate in the election (which she swore blind 11 times she wasn’t going to hold, until she did).

I may have my doubts about Jeremy Corbyn, but there is just no way I could vote Tory unless my voting hand became possessed and took on a life of its own. Couldn’t do it – not in 100 years (by which time I should be a truly toxic Tory, if YouGov has done the electoral maths right).

Many of this morning’s newspapers are splashed in blue, as you would expect, after the local election results.I won’t bother passing them on: you could probably make them up.

Here are two thoughts: at least the purple gang seems to be disappearing. UKIP always was a single-issue party, and now that it’s got its way over Europe, it no longer has a reason to exist. Unlike its former leader Nigel Farage, who still has a reason to exist: finding new ways to infuriate in that unique Farage way.

UKIP is a pimple on the bottom of British life – and now that zit is about to burst, but it hasn’t half made a mess.

The other thought comes from research in this morning’s Guardian, where the main headline has Corbyn admitting that he faces an historic challenge. So much, so unsurprising. What is interesting is the paper’s argument that Britain was evenly divided, with the Tories and UKIP taking 43 per cent of the vote while Labour and the Liberal Democrats received 45 per cent.

So that love affair with Mrs Maybe you hear proclaimed everywhere is not as ardent as it may seem

Against that, though, is the incidental evidence of people being interviewed on television who keep saying things like: “I always vote Labour but this time I am voting for Mrs May.”

I honestly don’t understand that, but perhaps I am just an old leftie without a cause.

PRINCE Philip yesterday joined the ranks of those pronounced dead before their time. As he is 95 that mistake might be accounted a near miss – “Damn close thing that,” you can imagine the Duke of Edinburgh saying. “Saw the whites of the blighter’s eyes.”

Someone at the Sun pressed the wrong button on their computer after updating the prince’s obituary ahead of the ‘emergency announcement’ from Buckingham Palace yesterday morning – and the refreshed obit went onto the website, but was quickly taken down. Anyone who edits on a modern newspaper will feel for that person: it’s easy for an unwitting finger to turn a sub-editor or writer in an accidental assassin.

Many people have been pronounced dead ahead of time, perhaps most famously the writer Mark Twain, who was reported dead twice – long before the days of the accidental finger. He retorted: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

The writer, poet and critic Clive James, who announced poetically that he wouldn’t live to see another year, and has since stumbled along, playfully borrows that quotation for the title of his column in the Guardian Weekend magazine, entitled Reports Of My Death (a must for anyone who likes a well-placed word).

My favourite undead person is the folk violinist Dave Swarbrick, who was written off by the Daily Telegraph in 1999. Never in the soundest of health, he had been admitted to hospital with a chest infection, prompting the quip: “It’s not the first time I have died in Coventry.”

Sadly, last year Swarbrick died for real.

The accidental entombment of Prince Philip, however fleeting, reminds us that obituaries are written well in advance – so much so that when the writer Colin Dexter died last month, his obit in the Guardian was composed by a dead man, fitting in a way for a crime writer. Dennis Barker died in 2015 but the obit he wrote for Dexter outlived him.

As a non-royalist sort of person, I have got this far without saying much about Prince Philip. Even those of us who aren’t in love with the royals have a soft spot for Phil the Greek, as he used to be called on Spitting Image years ago.

Another nickname for the prince might be Phil the Gaffe, as he is famous for them, and his clangers have shocked and delighted down the years. Here are a few…

“I declare this thing open, whatever it is.” (Said on a visit to Canada in 1969 – and one of my favourites)

“Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.” (Said during the 1981 recession, and not remotely funny)

“It looks like a tart’s bedroom.” (Said on seeing plans for the Duke and Duchess of York’s house at Sunninghill Park in 1988 – and, if true, hilarious)

“Yak, yak, yak; come on, get a move on.” (Apparently shouted from Britannia to the Queen, who was chatting on the quayside)

“If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.” (Said to British students in China during the 1986 state visit – and proof that the nation’s mad uncle can step way over the line).

Yesterday morning a Twitter storm blew up about that announcement at Buckingham Palace. It was at first assumed that someone had died, and it couldn’t have been the Queen as that would have been announced differently, so people thought that Phil might be on the way out (hence that mistake at the Sun).

In the event, it was announced that the Prince would be retiring from public life. Whatever you might think of him, he deserves a rest. “You get less for murder,” you can hear him saying. “I’m 95 don’t you know.”

When Prince Philip does die, all those misunderstandings, as he is said to call them, will be rolled out again, along with the sort of praise from politicians that can make a person feel squeamish.

So, yes, plenty of people have a soft spot for Philip, which is understandable on some levels, but odd on others: in truth, we know little about him, aside from his long servitude, his unguarded mouth and his acerbic nature.

The Queen is always circumspect in public, and only occasionally do her opinions leak out, usually through a gossipy daisy-chain: someone who heard that someone else heard the Queen say something spirited or mildly controversial. But she has been able to leave the unguarded moment to her husband.

It seems odd to me that we still have royalty, but plenty of people seem to like them. The argument about what would replace the royal family is usually so dull that it is unlikely ever to be resolved.

And, yes, he has kept on going on, but perhaps that’s easier when you have the advantages he has enjoyed. Still, at nearly 96, he does deserve a sit-down.