IT seems that the exciting announcement from Rishi Sunak that he’s going to give A-levels a new name has not caused many people to faint with joy.
And nor did anyone really care about his proposed new law which, in time, will mean a 75-year-old will have to provide proof of age before being allowed to buy a packet of cigarettes.
Polls suggest that his big Tory party conference speech on the future of everything didn’t really move the needle.
We all still think that he’s just saying words.
So what about Sir Starmer and his merry band of innumerate Labourites?
What do they have in store for us?
Well, in the first of a series of announcements before their conference in Liverpool starts tomorrow, they’ve said that — drum roll — children will be forced to brush their teeth under supervision while at school.
Yup. That’s it. Their opening shot. Their big headline.
And it’s a worry, because what’s next? Will kids be forced to do star jumps in the playground for an hour a day?
Before being led into classrooms where they learn about the importance of socialist principals.
Maybe Sir Starmer could go further and build a gigantic holiday camp on the bracing North Sea coast, on the basis that children and their hard-working parents could spend a few cheap days at the beach each year.
He could even give this project a name: “Strength Through Joy”.
No, hang on a minute. This has been done before, I’m sure of it. Yes, of course, it has. By Hitler.
In the 30s, he became obsessed by the idea that even the lowliest German should be fit and happy and have clean teeth so he started Volkswagen so everyone could have a car, and his henchmen organised fitness classes and hiking holidays.
And then he built a holiday camp by the sea. It was called Prora, and it was three miles long. There were 20,000 beds and all rooms had a sea view. It was a socialist utopia.
But then Germany invaded Poland and that was the end of that.
Starmer, then, is talking nonsense and so is Sunak really. Clean teeth and a new name for A-levels are not going to mend this basket-case country of ours.
It’s like cutting the toenails on someone with terminal cancer.
Britain, right now, is extremely broken. The rivers are filthy, the trains don’t work, air travel is on its knees, the road network has been hijacked by morons who think 20 is plenty, farming is f***ed, immigration is completely out of control, the planning laws are useless, the police are frightened mice, the teachers are worse, universities have become a breeding ground for idiocy, the Armed Forces are given equipment that doesn’t work, foreign policy is all over the place and we can’t even trade with our nearest neighbours any more.
We’ve even reached a point where two doctors who suggested to hospital bosses that Lucy Letby might be murdering babies were forced to apologise to her because they were middle-aged men, so they were wrong.
And Letby was a young girl, so she was right.
As a result of all this, we desperately need a big thinker with big ideas and a big determination to bulldoze through any nonsensical pronoun-based opposition.
Not a Colgate salesman with National Socialist tendences or a tiny anti-smoker in Mothercare trousers.
LABOUR says it will fund its nationwide teeth- leaning campaign by removing the so-called non-dom tax status on wealthy individuals whose primary residence is abroad. But who live here.
They say this will generate £111million a year but I’ve just done a calculation and I reckon that if this tax hole is closed, it will actually generate literally no money at all.
Because non-doms are the sort of people who will simply move to a country where they are welcome. And spend their money there.
EVER since it happened, we’ve all known that the plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group boss who staged a mini coup against Putin, was shot down by a Russian missile.
But blow me down with a feather, it seems we are all wrong.
Mr Putin announced this week that, just before the crash, Prigozhin was playing with a hand grenade while off his face on cocaine and booze. Of course he was.
In the same way that double agent Sergei Skripal had bought a chemistry set from a Salisbury toy shop just before he ingested a Novichok nerve agent that put him in a coma for three weeks.
A BUSY-body curtain twitcher in Oxfordshire noticed that a policeman had pulled up outside his house and thrown some bread crusts out of the car window.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s just bread and it’ll be eaten by various robins and blackbirds.
But the man went berserk, swearing at the policeman who, we are told, has been “spoken to” by his bosses.
Hmmm. I hope they said: “Don’t worry son. Some of the people you meet in this job are mad. Now go and catch a burglar.”
SO, Britain is not now going to spend £4,000 million billion on a train line which will get people from London to Manchester four seconds faster than the trains we have now. Oh no.
CLIMATE change enthusiasts say they are unsure if global warming is responsible for Mont Blanc shrinking by seven feet in just two years.
But I am. It isn’t.
ALARMING news from over the hedge.
The faceless business people who set the price of milk have decided to pay farmers 5p a litre LESS than it costs to produce.
This makes me so angry that my teeth itch.
Because dairy farmers – who I swear are the hardest-working people on God’s green earth – are being forced to sell their herds.
Or – and this is happening a lot – kill themselves.
And for what? We can’t import milk from other countries. It would be economically and physically impossible.
And we can’t switch to almond milk because whatever some pasty-faced acne enthusiast tells you, it’s not milk.
We have to buy it from dairy farmers here. And when they’ve all sold up, or killed themselves, there will be a shortage. So prices will skyrocket.
Surely, then, it’s best to stop all that happening by paying a fair price now.
And before you write in to say I have skin in the game, I don’t. I don’t produce milk on my farm.
Working 16 hours a day, 365 days of the year is not my thing.
BOFFINS who were using satellite trackers to monitor the movement of Cornish tuna were alarmed to see that one of them was heading at speed up the M5 motorway.
I’ve long had my doubts about the worth of these trackers.
When I arrived in South Africa last month, a bag belonging to one of my Grand Tour colleagues didn’t appear on the carousel.
Being an organised soul, she had put a tracker in it and a quick fiddle with her phone revealed it was still at Heathrow. And . . ?
Exactly. She knew where it was but what good was that?
She still had to spend four days in the African bush wearing James May’s pyjamas.