ACCORDING to the front page of today’s Daily Mail, ‘self-drive’ cars will be in the UK this year. The only sensible response to this is to cling to the steering wheel and shout “no!”.

This is partly a matter of safety, partly a matter of language.

A hands-free car, or whatever category of madness this might be, is not a self-drive car. Those of us who have cars drive them ourselves, they are piloted by a self, the self sitting in the driver’s seat and counting the motorway miles to the next disappointing coffee in spiritless surroundings. It is us who owns the ‘self’ and not the car.

Admittedly this is a point to obsess perhaps only the few, but there you have it.

In the story itself, the Mail refers to “driverless cars” and this is an improvement, although only linguistically.

The report adds that ‘lane-keeping’ technology would take over, allowing the driver to “go on the internet or read a newspaper”.

And if this were available today, they might pick up their copy of the Daily Mail and exclaim, “Well that’s stupid idea” around the same time that the self-driving, lane-keeping car suddenly throws a  technological wobbly, and swerves into the path of an HGV whose non-driving driver is having a moneyed dream, having fallen asleep in the back after buying a lottery ticket on his mobile.

These stories roll around every so often, and usually they are not quite what they seem. The headline treatment suggests that by the end of the year, our motorways will be filled with cars driving themselves. My own foresight is blurred at the best of times, but I can’t see it happening this side of a far distant tomorrow.

Earlier this month in the US, a Tesla Model S crashed in Texas, killing two men. First reports suggested that no one was in the driving seat and the car’s Autopilot was to blame.

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and well-known tantrum on legs, wasn’t happy about the reporting. According to USA Today, he said: “This is completely false”, adding that journalists who suggested Autopilot was at fault “should be ashamed of themselves”.

The crash is still being investigated, so it’s hard to say either way, although the police officer who attended the accident told various media outlets that “investigators were 99.9% sure no one was behind the wheel when the vehicle crashed”, again according to USA Today.

Maybe one day we will all be driven around automatically, putting our feet up and leaving the car to become irritated by all those other automatic cars and their terrible driving. Until then, these hands are staying on the steering wheel, whatever Elon Musk says.

All of which is a diversion from having to think about Boris Johnson spending £850 per roll for wallpaper to renovate No 10. You don’t often see that in B&Q.

In a sense the row about who might have lent Johnson £58,000 towards the refurb seems a small matter compared with other Johnson-inspired losses, including countless billions on the test and trace system. Not forgetting a reported £53m on that Garden Bridge across the Thames (a fortune for something that was never built).

But sometimes smaller matters contain larger truths, and Changing Rooms: The Downing Street Edition isn’t going away.

As mentioned on this ledge the other day, Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, described Boris Johnson as a “vacuum of integrity”.

While he intended to suggest a moral void on legs, his meaning could be taken another way and used as an advertising slogan for Dyson vacuum cleaners. Buy this one, it’s a vacuum of integrity… our language is weird like that.

Still, the day I get a Dyson will be the day I pop into Wetherspoons for a pint in celebration of having brought a new vacuum cleaner.