One day quite soon someone at a petrol pump is going to get a tyre iron wrapped around their head. It will almost certainly be the middle-aged male driver of a Land Rover Discovery — a flatulent showboating car driven almost exclusively by smug pigs — while he is busy filling up his 16 jerry cans with unleaded. It will take place in a city — there’s still quite a bit of petrol left in our towns, because townsfolk are not sociopaths — and the assailant will be a Ukip-voting working-class man in his early thirties called ‘Matt’. With any luck, the jury will acquit.

I do not know (and nor does anyone else, seemingly) the extent to which this current fuel crisis has been occasioned by a shortage of tanker drivers and hence fuel, or by the owner of the Land Rover Discovery and his idiot friends, who 18 months ago were pillaging Morrisons for every last roll of bog paper, bottle of hand sanitiser and — mysteriously — tinned tomatoes. Can’t beat a clean arse, clean hands, and tomatoes on toast for supper.

During the first lockdown last year we survived on little more than one third of the amount of fuel usually consumed, because nobody went anywhere. I wish people still didn’t go anywhere: it was much better then. One thing is for certain — the crisis has not been occasioned by Brexit, as the Land Rover man would undoubtedly aver. Brexitmerely gave us the freedom to decide to have a massive road haulage shortage: it was not actually part of the deal, nor was it an inevitable consequence of it. The ideal is indeed that those lorry-driving jobs in the end go to indigenous British people. But this will take time.

The road haulage firms need to become accustomed to paying a decent rate for the job, to start with. Next, young people with the IQ of lichen must somehow be convinced that a salary of £70,000 per year is preferable to paying £30,000 to gain a pointless degree in gender studies at somewhere that once trained useless teachers and has now been dignified with the title ‘university’.And finally, they need to learn a whole gamut of skills to be an HGV driver: how to abduct women and dispose of the body carefully; how to time their overtaking on a dual carriageway so that it coincides with an uphill gradient and therefore takes them 25 minutes to complete, thus ensuring the maximum inconvenience for a hundred cars behind them.

All of this takes time, and in the interim I doubt that anyone objects to a few thousand licences being handed out to European drivers, so long as they are not Dutch. If this government had any sense, it would hand out those licences exclusively to drivers from countries which any sane British person would admire, such as Hungary, Poland and Israel. Trouble is, I am not absolutely convinced that this government does have any sense. But then one looks at the Labour party conference — a convocation of the genuinely deranged — and must surely reach the conclusion that we are stuck with Boris Johnson indefinitely. Unless another vibrant political party comes along…

I had thought that Labour was in about the same state that it was in back in 1987. Watching the conference, I’ve moved that back to 1983, although in a certain sense 1883 is nearer the mark. When the half-woman-half-banshee AngelaRayner spews out her gutter bile, full of primped-up self-righteousness, does she not understand that the people she calls ‘scum’ are the very people her party needs to vote for it next time around? When red-wall voters hear that Tories are ‘scum’, they assume she means them — or their friends, or their parents. Please let her become the leader of the party: it will diminish and diminish until nothing is left of it at all apart from a small brown stain and the slight smell of hummus. Simply calling people ‘scum’ does not denote passion, it denotes a stunted, totalitarian mentality.

Still, at least we are discussing the cervix at last — always exciting to me as I have not encountered one for God knows how long and can’t even remember what they look like. When a Labour party leader can insist that stating a scientific truth should not be allowed, you know that you are in the presence not of a political party but instead of a maniacal cult with a profound aversion to that important thing, reality. It does not matter how many universities or charities or quangos chant the same idiotic mantra, the country does not remotely buy it. This is an issue, after all, of sanity and honesty. A woman is an adult female with a cervix, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

The truth, then — not a downright lie promulgated so that all the liberal non-sequiturs and shibboleths can be shoe-horned into a kind of delusional order. The truth exists and it is provable, whether you like it or not, Starmer: the earth is not flat, dinosaurs did not live alongside human beings, and only people with a cervix are women. I doubt he believes his guff, if I am honest. He cannot be that stupid.

And yet in his stewardship of this once great party, he has not been especially deft or acute, has he? Understanding that the party needed to reform after Corbyn’s 2019 debacle, he jettisoned all the stuff which those lost northern voters actually liked — investment, bigger state, tax the rich, public spending at a Wilsonian level and bringing us up to about the halfway mark in Europe as a proportion of GDP. He kept all the stuff that really put off the voters, the wokery and the wariness about anything that might be called patriotism. Under Starmer, Labour has simply become the provisional wing of the Liberal Democrats: knee-bending and genuflecting to patent untruths.