Of course Baroness Royall and Bruce Hogan are right! (my word, I never thought I'd say that.) It's clearly absurd of Dave and Nick to try and sell us anything we already own.

But at least Dave's and Nick's idea, farcical though it is, brings back happy memories (and don't we need them) of some of Arthur Daley's more inebriated scams beside the bar of The Winchester.

Unsurprisingly, the Baroness and Bruce are careful to avoid any reference to the reason why Dave and Nick are rummaging around in the nation's attic like a couple of teenagers who've mislaid their medication. But who can blame the Baroness and Bruce for wanting to ignore Britain's 'Years of Living incontinently', the years this country spent living it up in La-La Land on the moonshine distilled by the Blair/Brown Brewery, the scam to end all scams when the UK's real debt soared to 560 per cent of GDP or £7.9 trillion, which is £300,000 for every household.

Bottled by Appointment to the European Commission and dispensed as a pick-me-up to every half-cut customer looking for a fix, this brewery's hooch has been as lethally addictive as anything Dave and Nick are currently desperately seeking down the decaying back passages of Downturn Abbey.

This is an abbey once gloriously, but now precariously, perched on the white cliffs of Dover, which, while our backs have been turned, has become a bolt-hole for tax dodging Tories, New Labour parasites and Lib Dem...(well, until they wake up to the fact that a voting referendum is irrelevant unless it's proceeded by an EU referendum, the less said about them the better). And we, its long suffering residents who's body politic has become so weak-willed and accommodating, can barely raise a squirm when Wole Soyinka, the greatest contemporary African writer and the first African to win a Nobel Prize, declares in despair that 'England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground for fundamentalist Muslims.'

But no-one can say we weren't warned. 'Don't believe politicians,' said Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another Nobel Prize winner, 'don't fear them, and don't ask anything of them.' And with eerie prescience he went on to tell us not to be afraid of misfortune, and not to yearn after happiness. 'It is, after all, all the same,' he said, 'the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.'

So forget Dave's 'happiness' quota... and instead boost your morale where it matters! Throw out the Philistines, whether they're dressed up as Westminster politicians encroaching on our Forest of Dean or as Brussels bureaucrats throttling Albion's endeavour, and take your country back.

– John Muir, Newnham.