Not yet scared shitless? You will be if Mr Edward Lucas has anything to do with it

It has long been my contention that one tactic newspapers adopt to try to keep up circulation is to scare their readers shitless. It is a commonplace that ‘bad news is good news’ and that the headline ‘Boy Scout does good deed’ would never sell a single copy, although the game is, in fact, more subtle than that. It can’t all be bad news. The horror and reports of how evil the world is have to be leavened a little with heartwarming pieces in which rampant sentimentality usually plays a significant part to make it all a little more palatable (and keep up sales).

What the bad news is - and occasional what good news is supplied that is necessary to achieve a commercial balance - obviously depends upon the newspaper (and what I call bad news is not the obvious stuff – 2,ooo die in Pakistan earthquake or, as recently, Russian tourist plane crashes in Egypt’s Sinai desert killing all onboard). Just as right-wing and left-wing politicians are said to have dog whistles, a quick blast on which is believed to summon the faithful, so the different newspapers cultivate their own particular schtick.

Here in Britain, for example, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun and the Daily Mail, all seen as being on the right of centre, will resort to horror stories along the lines of ‘Every British family will house two immigrant families under proposed new law’ and ‘EU to tax toenails!’ That kind of stuff always gets the readers huffing and puffing with indignation bordering on fury, and though even the papers themselves will gladly admit it is all outright fiction, that doesn’t matter: no one, but no one remembers what was in yesterday’s paper. It’s today’s horror story that counts.

On the other political wing, the saintly Guardian (‘Nothing too trivial to agonise over’) and the Mirror (or has it now reverted to calling itself the Daily Mirror?) play the same game. So their pages are full of horror stories of how Tory death squads are scouring the shires seeking out folk on benefits and executing them on the spot. Last week, the Mirror (Daily Mirror?) reported that several food banks in the North of England – the North of England always suffers more, apparently - had been firebombed by masked men shouting capitalist slogans.

NB For practical purposes the Independent can also be lumped in with those two caring papers, although it might well deny it is ‘left-of-centre’. The paper is read by folk who, like Guardianistas’ pride themselves on ‘having a conscience’ and ‘being thinking people’, but who for whatever reason can’t for love or money bring themselves to read a paper which is ‘left-wing’. The Independent is also, uniquely among papers the world over, the only publication I know of whose circulation is in minus figures. Add to that very curious fact that it – and its stablemate London’s Evening Standard – are owned and run by the KGB’s successor the FSB, and the paper really does stand out.

Global warming is a special favourite of the Guardian and the Independent: describing its horrors is useful on many levels: not only can readers feel virtuous because they occasionally ditch the car to use a bike or turn off the heating on cold winter nights to ‘save the planet’, they have something to talk about when they meet each other for supper parties (‘When will we learn!’) and can compare energy-saving measures (‘Becky and I sleep in the garden two nights a week’). There are always hours of fun to be had castigating ‘global warming deniers’, universally regarded by thinkers and those who care as the very personification of evil, and if, by chance, a group of them happen upon a sole example of one such denier, they day is complete: waterboarding is the least of his worries.

The psychology behind the strategy of scaring the shit out of its readers is simple: after an hour of reading of all the horror the world has in store for them, it is a moment of pure joy to sit back and reflect on their own less than ideal circumstances and realise, but for the grace of God, they could be. Then, of course, there is the outrage to be savoured: outrage how the evil EU led by a jackbooted Angela Merkel will stop at nothing until Britain is under the Brussels heel; outrage at how evil Tories have made it their life’s work to reduce to miserable penury and beyond ordinary, hardworking folk who ask for nothing more than a portion of fish and chips and an evening watching Downton.

. . .

Every newspaper has is stable of writers, each of whom knows full well what the hand that signs the cheque expects to hear from them. The Daily Telegraph has in recent years employed one Dan Hodges, who still masquerades as a staunch Labourite, but can be relied on to tell the Telegraph readers what complete shits the current bunch of Labour leaders are.

Dan is a former union official and Labour Party apparatchik, and the son of former Labour MP and one-time actress Glenda Jackson, so if he, Labour to his fingertips - apparently - Telegraph readers tell themselves, think Labour has finally and irrevocably lost the plot, well it must be true, mustn’t it, straight from the horses mouth, don’t you know.

The Guardian plays the same game: it has hired on Matthew d’Ancona, a former deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph and then of the – true-blue – Spectator, who in his weekly column of the paper informs readers that the Tories have finally and irrevocably lost the plot and he really doesn’t know what is becoming of the right-of-centre these. Well, Guardian readers can tell with his track record working for the Tory press Matthew must surely know what he is talking about, and if he thinks the Tories have well and truly gone to the dogs – well!

So Telegraph readers and Guardian readers are once again reassured in the respective prejudices, all is well with the world and both papers have staved of bankruptcy for another day by ensuring their readers are still reasonably happy.

Depending upon the topic, all papers have their tame tigers: the Mail, for example, which is perpetually fighting off accusations that it is sexist and racist will counter the charges by getting a well-known ‘feminist’ or a high-profile Asian to write a piece if and when the occasion might demand. The names Jenni Murray, the grande dame of BBC Radio Four’s Woman’ Hour, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown spring to mind.

Both can be relied upon to push the Mail line – more or less a British version of Kinder, Kirche, Küche – but given that Murray is a ‘feminist’ and Albhai-Brown is ‘Asian’, the reader is reassured that if even Murray/Albhai-Brown thinks this particular piece of progressive nonsense really has gone too far – well!

. . .

One writer whose picture byline regularly turns up in the Mail every few months is Edward Lucas. And given that Lucas is a ‘senior editor’ at The Economist, a former Moscow bureau correspondent for that paper and a ‘fellow and contributing editor at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington DC, we really should, the Mail hints, take the man seriously.

According to his website Lucas’s ‘expertise includes energy, cyber-security, espionage, Russian foreign and security policy and the politics and economics of Eastern Europe’ he is surely not a man whose views and prognostication we can safely ignore. Lucas’s particular hobby horse is what a complete and utter shit Vladimir Putin is, and warning the West about that dangerous demagogue for several years now.

His latest piece in the Mail outlines how by taking sides with Assad in Syria against Islamic State – and one of his country’s mysteriously crashing out of the sky above the Sinai desert – Putin might well have bitten off more than he can chew. Well, perhaps, or perhaps not. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

The point about Lucas, who is undoubtedly well-informed as a journalist (although I would be careful about pushing the ‘works for The Economist’ tag to much – so once did Graham Hancock who is vying for the title of World’s Greatest Nutter), is that he does bang the drum just a little too hard for my tastes, and that always makes me just a tad sceptical. And to be honest I find it exceptionally difficult to take seriously such polemic when it appears in a tabloid.

Were he to read this, he would undoubtedly retort that my complacency in the face of his dire warnings about Putin simply plays into the hands of that nasty dictator and I mustn’t be at all surprised if within just a few short months I am obliged to eat borscht for breakfast and sing Red Army songs with with no chance of parole. Well, Edward, I’ll take my chances.
The first piece by Lucas I read in the Mail was several years ago, but here are a few of his more recent offerings: comparing Putin to Hitler, why war in Europe is now more likely than ever before, why Russia flying nuclear bombers over Britain should make us very scared indeed and how the death of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov has chilling echoes of Stalin’s terror.

So what is my point? Well, it is quite simple: I am a firm believer in the adage that what really is news doesn’t appear in the papers. Or put another way: if you are reading about it in your favourite rag, to all intents and purposes it isn’t really that important. For all his hi-falutin’ contributions to the Center for European Policy Analysis (and what does that mean, what does it do, who finances it?), his years covering Eastern European politics and affairs and his expertise in cyber-spying, Lucas is something of a nine-bob note, a man whose opinion of himself is quite possibly rather high than is healthy. And I also believe the Lucas simply protests too much.

I don’t doubt that Putin is a complete wrong ’un (and the circumstances of the death of Nemtsov are particularly murky) and no one in their right mind would allow him anywhere near the family silver. But is Putin’s behaviour really much different to what the U.S., Britain, France and Germany get up to? At the time Lucas made a big song and dance about Russia’s annexation of the Crimea: this is just a foretaste of what is to come if we don’t shackle the Russian bear now! But forgive me, Edward: just what were the Russians to make of the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and Britain in 2003? What were the Russians to make of the U.S. Britain and Nato’s involvement in Afghanistan.

You might argue, as many do, that ‘we are the good guys and those Ruskies are the bad guys, so what we do has God’s stamp of approval’. The trouble is that’s not how the Russian’s see it. I don’t at all doubt that Lucas has his ‘contacts’ in the security services and I don’t at all doubt that they ‘brief’ Lucas every so often. But I also don’t at all doubt that they tell Lucas just as much as they want him to know but no more and are rather happy to have a man who is invited to rant in the pages of a national tabloid passing on what they would like to pass on.

As for the Mail, of course, Lucas serves a purpose: he can be relied upon to scare the readers shitless, just what they like.

I say goodbye to an old friend, one with whom I have seen good times and bad. But I do have a new cap. Well!

Well, there’s a pretty state! It has been several week now since I put digits to keyboard and blathered on here, but it’s not as though my life has been without incident. Not once, not twice, but three times I’ve been to the shops for my stepmother and forgot to get the milk my wife asked me to get! Then the other day I took the dog for a walk — and only forgot my cap! You can imagine how much I regretted that omission when within ten minutes it began to drizzle a little. But, you know, ‘turn that frown upside down’ as they say and it’s not as though life has been all misery — at lunch today my wife announced that for a change we will use the good spoons for our soup at supper. Well!

Long-time readers of this blog might remember the glory days when I recalled all the marvellous, marvellous motor cars I have been proud enough to have owned: well, there’s further news on that front. For these past eight years I have been driving — as in driving into the ground — a 16-year-old Rover 45 and it seems that car will soon be driving its last mile. (NB Cars aren’t ‘she’ and ‘her’ but ‘it’ — you must be thinking of boats and ships and rafts and ferries and that kind of thing.)

My Rover, surely one of the very few cars on the still active on Her Majesty’s highways painted ‘British racing green’, is slowly dying on its wheels and showing its age. But it has done me good service — there were 82,000 miles on the clock when I bought her for £800 from Davidstow Garage (a landmark in these here parts — there must be at least 40 cars in various states of disrepair on what passes for Rob Gibbons’s forecourt) and now there are 211,000. Furthermore, I must have spent at least five times the sum I paid for it since then on MoTs and repairs.

Once, I had to have the whole front of the car repaired after I went into the back of some stupid woman’s 4x4 on Wentfordbridge. She had braked suddenly so as not to run over a sodding weasel that had suddenly scampered over road. Then I had to have the head gasket replaced — and it’s not cheap to have that done, I can tell you — when the radiator fan died of old age just at the end of the M4 outside London and I overheated. (I am in the RAC and my membership entitles me and my car to be repatriated from anywhere in Britain. As it turned out and because of RAC logistics the opted to take the car back to Cornwall on a low-loader over a matter of days and pay for me to get a hire car. It was a top-of-the-range new 1.6l Vauxhall Astra with so many dials, knobs and gadgets I didn’t know where to look).

On another occasion I again ran into the back of a car in the rush hour driving out of London one night, and stoved in the left-hand side of the car, though it wasn’t as badly damaged as in the previous collision. Getting that done wasn’t cheap, either. Most recently, the windscreen wipers packed up — twice. First the link on one went wiper, bringing both to a halt. Then once that had been sorted out, the other went. On that occasion I had just set out on my 240-mile drive home in pouring rain and it carried on raining for the next two hours (but then it stopped). And I can assure everyone that negotiating commuter traffic on the M25 in heavy rain at 7pm at on a weekday night is no picnic.

But what has decided me to give the piece of junk a coup de grace is that the cooling system has sprung a leak and I now have to top it up substantially before every weekly schlepp to London, then again before I set off home again four days later.

So why, I can hear everyone reading this ask, has this moron not junked the sodding car years ago. Well, I promise you there was and is method in my apparent madness. I can’t really go into details. All I can say is that I was able to park quite legitimately in the streets around where I work in West

London without incurring heavy hourly parking charges. The time has now come to make other arrangements, so my dear, dear Rover 45 is off to the knacker’s yard.

The odd thing is that although I know it’s a wreck and a true piece of junk, I am finding the parting quite hard. So people get attached their spouse, family and friends. I am apt to get attached to my cars. Now, forgive me a moment while I go off and shed a quiet tear. There, that’s better.

The good news is that courtesy of a very generous brother I am not obliged to buy another car because I already have one. When a gay friend of my father’s died a few years ago, he left his flat and his car to my brother. And as my brother had no use for the car, he gave it to me. I have to say it is not in its first flush of youth — it was first registered in June 1999 — but as the old codger had bought it more or less new and hardly ever used it, there were only 38,000 miles on the clock when I took it over about four years ago, and I have hardly used it since.

As I say, I might have neglected this blog for a few weeks, but my life has most certainly not been dull or without incident. Oh, and I have bought a new flat cap, a ‘newsboy’ style one in subdued red tartan. But surely news of that and other pieces of headgear I am proud to proclaim myself owner-user must wait for a subsequent entry. But here’s a pic of it.

Unbelievingly, breaktakingly smart or what?

. . .

Just to reinforce the point I made in my last entry: depression, or at least the variation, I am apt to suffer from every so often, has fuck-all to do with ‘being unhappy’ and ‘being sad’. I really would like to make that clear. Yes, you — I — can get to feel low, but that is only because of the physical symptoms, of which, unfortunately, you are too aware your every waking minute. But it’s getting better now, and thanks for asking. I think it must be the smart new tartan flat cap.

Depression - what it is not

I thought I would, for a change, give one of my blog posts a succinct and straightforward title, and one which entirely sums up part of what I want to say. It is a commonplace to bemoan that ‘depression’ and ‘mental illness’ are not spoken of and discussed as much as they should be and that there is still stigma attached to being ‘depressed’ or ‘mentally ill’, but that complaint and social attitudes to ‘depression’ isn’t at all what I want to write about, or rather not at all directly.

I have previously mentioned in this blog that I have over my past 65 years suffered bouts of ‘depression’, both mild episodes and, far more rarely, quite severe ones. And in those 65 years I believe I have come to understand a little better what is going on, and the very first thing I should like to say is that ‘depression’, or at least the ‘depression’ I have on occasion suffered is a wholly physical not a mental affliction. And the second thing I should like to point out that it has, in my experience at least, nothing at all to do with being ‘sad’ or ‘unhappy’. Absolutely nothing.

On the first point I suggest that ‘depression’ (and I keep writing it in quote marks to highlight how much, in my view, we are mistaken about its nature and to try to distance what I am writing here from hitherto accepted notions of what it is) came to be regarded as a ‘mental’ illness simply because there are few, if any, physical symptoms. It doesn’t make you sweat, you don’t change colour, you don’t run a fever and you are almost always capable of functioning as ‘normal’ (another word I would prefer to leave in quotes). In fact, the rest of the world might well be unaware that someone is suffering from ‘depression’, unless and until that sufferer volunteers information about themselves.

As for depression having little to do with ‘sadness’ or ‘unhappiness’, well, I know that at first hand. I do admit to being, if I allow myself to be, a little to rather irritable when it comes over me, but that has nothing to do with sadness or unhappiness.

My symptoms are quite straightforward: I always have a perpetual ‘thick head’, one which I liken to the headache you have when you are hung over. This can be mild or severe, but it is continuous and

Fuck, they’re going to think I’m sad!

ever-present. It is at its worst in the morning when I wake up and lifts bit by bit as the day goes on. Another symptom is an almost crippling lassitude a marked reluctance to do anything at all. I just don’t want to do anything, but oddly when I do do something, I get very impatient to get on to ‘the next thing’, however trivial or unimportant that next thing is.

This lassitude goes hand in hand with frittering the day away, finding it very difficult to concentrate on anything - reading, watching TV, writing (I am writing this at 3.30 in the afternoon, but twice tried to write it before lunch and just couldn’t get my thoughts together), conversation or whatever work I should be engaged on. Related to that lassitude is outright boredom, completely boredom with everything and everyone. I just want to be alone and count the hours until I can go to bed and go to sleep (and dream - I always look forward to dreaming).

In the past, when things got very bad (I had a very bad bout when I started my first newspaper job in Lincoln in June 1974) my neck and shoulders locked tight and that in conjunction with an appalling and perpetual ‘thick head’ headache is enough to bring anyone down. But note: ‘feeling down’ is a consequence of physical symptoms and should be understood as ‘feeling bloody fed up with this never-ending bloody headache and aching shoulders’.

The first rather severe bout I remember was when I began my first term at boarding school. and I think it developed as a result of a rather drastic change in my life, from being a happy-go-lucky, possibly rather smug, 13-year-old German kid attending a Jesuit college in Berlin where the emphasis was on positivity and doing your best to being a rather plump, very naive and outspoken 13-year-old who didn’t take well to being teased about his shape - I was still only about 5ft 5in - and still hated the glasses I had had to wear for the past year or so. Home was warm and comfortable and my mother was a good cook. School was cold and uncomfortable and the food was rather worse than pigswill or so it seemed to me. And I was very homesick (I was one of only two boys in my year’s intake of 49 who had not already spent several years boarding a prep school).

My second bout came in my second year at college when I was possessed by what I can only describe as an ‘existential’ crisis which, I think, much to do with the final transition from childhood to adulthood and I truly felt all at sea.

But I must stress that although, as it seems to me, circumstances, or rather a change in circumstances, brought on these bouts, the affliction on each occasion was physical not mental - the thumping thick head to which I awoke and the rigidi shoulders and neck which, if nothing, else was almost painful.

As for not being ‘sad’ or ‘unhappy’, I am by nature a chatterbox and cheerful, both a day person and night person, as likely to talk ten to the dozen at 6am in the morning as 1am at night. And that doesn’t change when I am suffering from a, usually mild, bout of depression, except that often I would prefer to be on my own and that bloody thick head can make me quite irritable and short with people.

So there you have it. It is now 4.20 (I had to interrupt writing this to pick my son up from where his school bus drops him) and, having taken - just the one - paracetamol, my head isn’t too bad. But I can’t deny that I can think of nothing else at the moment than getting undressed, brushing my teeth, getting into bed, turning out the light and falling asleep. And dreaming. I always dream.

Oh, and as for the oft-made claim that ‘depressives’ are often ‘creative’, I have to say I don’t buy it and never have. For one thing both terms are far to vague to allow for any sensible discussion, ‘creative’ being even vaguer than ‘depressives’.

Pip, pip.

Labour turns left as it elects as leader The Devil Incarnate/A True Socialist (delete as applicable)

A quick look at the viewing figures for this blog shows that, for example in the past four weeks, less than one in five lives in Old Blighty. So the name ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ (right) will quite possibly mean very little to four out of five bods who happen my way. Yet if you listen to the hype surrounding that name, the man is either the Devil re-incarnate or a latter-day - and secular Jesus Christ come to save Britain from all that is evil in this overwhelmingly capitalist world.

As Britain has been only too aware in the months since we held our last general election and the ‘left’ party was beaten soundly and it’s leader resigned (quite possibly to his quiet relief despite leading his party to defeat), Labour has been in the process of electing a new leader.

There were initially three runners, all to a man and woman pretty much clones of what contemporary politics thinks is great and good, albeit with the obligatory, and entirely understable, left slant. They could all three have come from central casting and had all in one capacity or another served in previous Labour governments (although not necessarily in a senior capacity).

Labour, which sees itself - and, and more to the point, markets itself as the very essence of fairness, realised that all three were pretty much from the right of the party (that’s right, the right of a left-of-centre party - it does make sense if you read it slowly), and that, you know, let’s be even-keeled here, we really should have a bod from the left of the party just to show how fair we are. Jeremy Corbyn has been the MP for Islington North for the past 32 years and from the outset was ‘a man of the left’. At first he was reluctant to stand, but was persuaded to do so in the interests of fairness and so the voters should have a real choice of candidates. He almost didn’t make it onto the list of candidates because his supporters couldn’t drum up sufficient nominees. Eventually, again in the interests of fairness, several MPs agree to nominate him even though they didn’t want him as candidate and wouldn’t vote for him and said so publicly.

From the outset Corbyn was given less than a snowball’s chance in Hell of being elected Labour leader - it was argued that he was too far out on the left to be the man (or woman) to lead Labour and persuade Britain’s electors to put the party back in power. But then something very odd happened. Under the outgoing leader, Ed Miliband, a new protocol for electing Labour’s leader had been introduced: for £3 anyone could sign up as a member of the Labour Party and would then have the right to vote in the leadership election.

Various Tory wiseacres suggested that Tory voters should do exactly that — join up and vote in the ‘unelectable’ Corbyn to ensure the Conservatives held power until Labour ditched him for someone with a better chance success. Perhaps some did, but most certainly a lot more folk on the left also signed up, folk who, it is now assumed, were of a decidedly socialist persuasion and had given up the current Labour Party as more or less being Tory-lite. And bit by bit Corbyn’s chances of winning the leadership contest improved. And as they improved, Labour gained even more members.

Finally, two weeks ago, Corbyn was voted in as leader by a whacking 56pc. The Tories crowed, reasoning that that was Labour’s goose well and truly cooked for the forseeable future, and Labour ‘grandees’ despaired, also reasoning that that was Labour’s goose well and truly cooked for the forseeable future.

. . .

Corbyn is marketed - indeed markets himself (if ‘marketing’ isn’t too insulting a word to describe the behaviour of a devote anti-capitalist) - as a straight-talking, sincere and honest politician, and that might well be true. He makes no secret of his politics which can be summed up as ‘all them cornfields and ballet in the evening’. Whether or not he is the right leader to help Labour back to power is highly debatable. Straight-talking, sincerity and honesty are not three virtues which usually come to mind as the key to political success.

He was long at odds with the majority of the Labour party and voted against it in Parliament many times. He opposed the invasion of Iraq (which, admittedly, wasn’t billed as ‘an invasion’ although that’s exactly what it was) and is a convinced nuclear disarmer. More controversially, he had nice things to say about the IRA while the IRA was setting of bombs on the British mainland and in the longstanding Israel/Hamas stand-off is not just an unashamed champion of Hamas but has previously had close links with one Paul Eisen, a controversial character made out by many to be a ‘holocaust denier’. (Odd how just adding the word ‘denier’ immediately seems to prove your guilty and establish beyond all doubt that you are wrong ’un.) I mention Mr Eisen, of whom I know little, because a great deal has been made of Corbyn’s acquaintance with him and suggestions that Corbyn is a crypto anti-semite.

What has been hugely entertaining has been the buckets of bile several papers have been pouring over Corbyn. Britain’s press are quite distinctly split down the middle: the Guardian and the Mirror are his champion, whereas the rest, most notably the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, are daily printing stories demonstrating just how evil the man is. Guess what? He had an affair in the 1970s (though after his wife had left him); he refused to sing the national anthem at a ceremony honouring Britain’s fallen servicemen but sang the Red Flag at a meeting not days later; he has been invited to join the Privy Council but there are doubts as to whether he will agree to bow before the Queen! It all begs the question: just how shameless can a man! To put those last two into context, Corbyn is a longstanding republican who would like to see the end of the monarchy, and as for the former - single young man goes to bed with single young woman? Shocking or what?

The Daily Mail attacked him for being a misogynist because he didn’t appoint any women as shadow spokespeople for the ‘top four offices of state’. It overlooked that of his shadow cabinet of 32, 15 appointees are women. Both the Mail and the Telegraph are making much of the fact that Corbyn is ‘the most unpopular party leader in history’. Well! And with very new horror story about the man from the Mail and the Telegraph I find myself asking again and again: exactly what are those two papers afraid of? If, as contemporary wisdom has it, Labour under Corbyn will never be voted into office, why all the angst?

All the above might make it sound as though I am a Corbyn supporter. I’m not, but neither am I a Corbyn opponent. I must admit I find it refreshing how he has to an extent shaken up the increasingly cosy political consensus prevalent in Britain at the moment, but I think it is highly unlikely we would ever seem Corbyn as Prime Minister, which, in my book, is no bad thing. The man is certainly an idealist, but he is an idealist the rest of the world’s politicians would eat from breakfast. I am, however, vastly entertained by it all and am curious to see how it will pan out.

Has the rot finally set in for the EU? Who knows, but it ain’t looking great, but why is Ukip so quiet these days? And I come clean though details, I trust, are admirably vague

Here in Britain our ‘swivel-eyed, looney, United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) has gone rather quiet of late. Granted no general election is imminent, but I do seem to remember them adding their two ha’porth on more or less everything. Where have they gone? It’s not as though I miss, them, however. For better or worse - and they insist it would be for better - they insist that the Great Britain should leave the European Union, a body which, they further insist, is directly or indirectly responsible for more or less every ill known to mankind, or least every such here in Britain.

They did quite well in the general election held her last May, with one in eight of all those who voted supporting their local candidate, but because of our electoral ‘first past the post’ electoral system, they won only one seat (and that seat in the Commons was ‘held’ rather than won). Ukip got 3,881,099 votes, 12.6pc of those cast. By comparison, the Liberal Democrats got 3,881,099 votes (7.9pc), but won eight seats, and the Scottish National Party got 1,454,436 votes (4.7pc), but won an astonishing 56 seats, exclusively at the Labour Party’s expense. You can look at the figures here.

This is not, however, a piece about how hard done-by Ukip are. The description of Ukip and its supporters as ‘swivel-eyed loons’ is attributed to our esteemed Prime Minister, who immediately denied saying it, or claimed that the description was now ‘inoperative’ or that he ‘misspoke’ or whatever his excuse was, but I happen to agree with him. I have met several Ukip supporters and none struck me as being an Einstein in the making with a cute political nose to boot, although, of course, that doesn’t mean they are not entitled to their political views. (I like to think I was one of the first to point out that, counter to then contemporary wisdom, it would not be the Tories who would lose the most votes to Ukip but Labour, and that’s apparently what happened. The fatal blow Labour suffered last May was losing more than 50 of its seats to the SNP, but they also lost several English seats to the Tories and I suspect that was because some of their support in those seats went to Ukip. After all, it was her large ‘working class’ support which had switched its allegiance from Labour which kept brought Margaret Thatcher to power and kept here there (she never lost an election) and Labour are completely in denial whenever they believe there’s nothing ‘the workers’ want more than ‘all them cornfields and ballet in the evening’. Given the apparent unfairness of getting several million votes more than the Lib Dems nationwide but ending up with seven MPs fewer, you’d think Ukip would be up there on the barricades demanding electoral reform. Well, you would, wouldn’t you, but so far I haven’t heard a peep from them on that score. But that’s as maybe.

What I now find so surprising is just how quiet Ukip seems to have become, especially now. As far as the EU is concerned and Britain’s membership of it, I hold the, by now distinctly unfashionable, view that Britain should carry on in the club, notwithstanding that the EU needs root and branch reform. Both the pros and antis on British membership like to portray people who hold that view as a mandate short of an issue, but that happens to be what I feel.

The EU (I would tell you at length given half the chance) is a good idea gone increasingly wrong, but essentially a very good idea, though, I see it as more of a trading community and fight just as shy as Ukip of any move towards ‘greater political union’, the ostensive objective of many. But in view of the crisis over the migrants arriving in southern Europe hoping to make their home in the EU, that objective is rapidly losing support.

Many thought that the ongoing shilly-shallying over Greece and the euro was the test of the EU’s resilience and many, pointing out that the EU seemed as rock-solid as ever once the dust had settled (not that it has settled, but that’s what they think), smugly thought the EU had come through with flying colours. Well, the recent response by EU members to how to handle the ‘migrant crisis’ should really make them think again.

A test of anything is how well it does in bad times as well as good times and for all its pseudo-socialist talk of ‘one for all and all for one’, the EU seems to be faring rather badly. From where I sit any talk of unanimity is in very poor taste and the faultlines in the EU are - as in time they always would - becoming very apparent. It doesn’t help that in Hungary’s Viktor Orban the EU is dealing with someone who might well have felt at home in the Nazi party and is not shy about doing just as he pleases, especially when it comes to demonstrating his anti-semitism.

I’m sure all the EU queens in Brussels will find some way to smoothe over the cracks, but cracks there are between the East and West of the EU - between some countries who were in the old Soviet bloc and those who weren’t. (I suspect that after being under the Soviet heel for well on 50 years, those new members are not yet quite in the mood to be dragooned again, this time by Brussels. I’m curious as to how all this will pan out. And why is Ukip so quiet about it all. As it happens I don’t actually care, but I am a tad puzzled. Until May and for the past few years you couldn’t keep them quiet.

. . .

For the past two weeks I have been conscious of not posting here and there was a reason for that. This blog is a mishmash of this, that and t’other, and not the least of its charms are my longwinded and boring accounts of trips abroad. The trouble is - or, rather, was as I have now got around to mentioning it - I didn’t enjoy my last trip very much at all, but felt - feel - that as I went to stay with someone, it would have been churlish to say so.

‘Well, you don’t have to mention it, do you’ you might remark, and, of course, I don’t. But somehow, in a way I don’t even myself understand, I do have to mention it, in that in a sense it would be dishonest not to. Savvy? Well, if you do, I still don’t, but I shall mention it and hope that my comments will not find their way back to my host (and I shall be as vague as possible to boot - no names, no pack drill. It didn’t help that the weather was pretty awful.

The country in which I was staying is usually regarded as one of Europe’s sunny countries but for the seven days I was there - at the beginning of September, no less - there was precious little sun. Instead, we got quite a bit of rain and when we didn’t get rain the weather was generally overcast and dull. Then there are the conditions in which my host lives. In previous visits I didn’t seem to mind them too much, but this time that state of the place just got to me, especially the state of the kitchen.

My bedroom was clean as were my bedsheets, and there was a small bathroom with a hot shower, but the rest of the place is a tip. That wouldn’t necessarily matter too much were it not for the fact that because of the rain and the generally cool and overcast weather we were indoors most of the time. And even when the sun did shine - it never actually got hot and there was the persistent threat that the weather would change - sitting outside was no fun, either, what with broken-down chairs and tables, a discarded this and a discarded that.

There was the fact that on my second or third day I must have eaten something which disagreed with me and I felt off-colour for a day or two. Then there was what I feel most ashamed about: that I felt my host had become rather boring. The anecdotes were the same as was the conversation. So overall, I didn’t enjoy my break very much at all and was pleased to get home.

I don’t know why I should feel guilty about writing that, but I do. However, as I said, I somehow felt it would have been dishonest to carry on writing this blog without mentioning it, so I’m glad I have. Odd, but true.

Pip, pip.