Good morning. It's three minutes after ten. I hope you had a lovely weekend. I really do.

And my commiserations, if you didn't. I think we're getting closer, aren't we, to the days of,

I'm going to talk briefly about Jacob Rees-Mogg. I don't know whether that should come with a trigger warning.

But here we are. I think we're closer now to the days when he and people like him, I think most obviously of Nadine Dory's,

we can just sort of roll our eyes and giggle. The days of having to treat them like serious

contributors to political discourse are pretty much behind us. I think they've both signed up

for one of these weird new television channels for people who think that the

Rupert Murdoch dominated British media isn't right wing enough.

I mention that because it's not, we're not quite there yet and in a way I'm not sure we

have the will be because the damage done to this country by the promotion of nonsense and

the promotion of fools is immeasurable and continuing,

and it's impossible to know where it will eventually end.

But Rees-Mogg, in his early career, was someone who was sort of regarded with a mixture of bemusement and amusement.

This very carefully cultivated, utterly, inauthentic persona as some sort of Victorian undertaker, a penny-fadding in human form, if you prefer. It was quite funny. I fell for it. I remember, I think I wrote a caption for a story once when he was campaigning with his nanny somewhere in the north of England and he contrived to

step over a garden fence by putting his leg from the knee down at an almost horizontal angle and it

was it was funny of course we had no idea at the time that behind that ridiculous exterior

their beat a very very dark heart. But of course, externally ridiculous,

masking a sinister interior is one of the marks of dodgy politics through the ages. But, you know,

saying that Boris Johnson should come back as Tory Party chairman sort of puts him back in the era of absurdity, of sort of, I think in any other country, you don't really get away with this sort of manufactured eccentricity. But coming out with something so obviously ridiculous, a man who professes to be a Christian, still cheerleading for one of the most morally depraved politicians ever to achieve high office in this country, never mind the highest office of all, a man who only last year was sneering at the suggestion that we might need tanks in Ukraine. And yet today, in some corners of the media, has managed to secure a front prages by claiming, as far as I can tell,

by claiming that Vladimir Putin threatened to target him individually with a specially designated missile.

Now, I'm not suggesting Boris Johnson is lying, although it's very hard to sink off the top of one's head of examples of him telling the truth,

but I would quite like that story to

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