Toby Neal: Another big foul-up for Boris the Menace

It's an animated cartoon story full of surprise and suspense featuring a nihilistic (not to be confused with nealistic) high tax, high spend, chaotic communist who gives the evil business community what for.

Having prepared a two word speech to his audience embodying his whole creed and reading simply "**** business", BTM has a last minute change of heart, although he doesn't care anyway, and invokes his friend Peppa for guidance in his self-imposed challenge of running a small country and having laughs along the way.

Not personally being attuned to Peppa's place in popular culture, I had to consult the official Peppa Pig official website. It says: "Welcome to the grown-ups' site for Peppa Pig and friends."

Another big foul-up then for our Prime Minister, although he can do no wrong. He can do no wrong because according to a new report nothing he does matters as the Tories are going to win the next general election anyway.

Peter Kellner, in the executive summary of the From Red Walls to Red Bridges: Rebuilding Labour's Voter Coalition report, says the size and urgency of the task facing Labour is hard to overstate.

The former YouGov president says: "To secure a majority at the next general election, Labour needs to gain more than 120 seats. This will require a 12 per cent lead in the popular vote – and a swing to Labour greater than in 1997."

From Boris Johnson's perspective, that rubs two ways. If the Tories are going to win anyway, then they might as well ditch him and have a true blue traditional Conservative at the helm, somebody like Sir Keir Starmer.

Boris Johnson does seem to have a habit of going through surreal patches. Remember what he became like when his brother Jo resigned both as an MP and minister in 2019 saying he was "torn between family loyalty and the national interest."

Boris was on a visit to West Yorkshire at the time and walked around in an evident daze and bumble fest.

The underlying assumption in all this is that his speech to the business community was important, when the common feature of political speeches, with only a few exceptions, is that the politicians say things which you would expect them to say, and those things they do say are as connected to reality as financial forecasts in the Budget.

On the subject of underlying assumptions, I can bring you an exclusive preview of the findings of the Covid-19 public inquiry, which is some going as it hasn't even begun.

It will say: Idiot government reacted too late.

If we could agree on that now we could save months and months of evidence and expense – the Bloody Sunday inquiry cost £200 million and the interminable child abuse inquiry is still continuing although everybody seems to have forgotten about it.

If the inquiry comes up with lessons that can be learned that will in itself be a national scandal, as any lessons worth learning need to be learned now while they can be beneficially applied.

The underlying assumption behind the inevitable "idiot government reacted too late" finding is that if the government had introduced lockdown measures earlier, the public would have meekly accepted them. We know now that they did, and so would have, but I for one never took it for granted.

I thought rebellion and riots on the streets were possible, and 21st Century British society might reject such an imposition on its freedoms. We have not seen the unrest we now see in Europe, but that does not mean it was not a possibility.

Let's give a deserved shout out to the prophet Lembit Opik, the former Lib Dem MP, for whom the launch of an asteroid-bending rocket is a vindication of his warnings.

Lembit was mocked for leading a campaign to get the government to take the threat of "Near Earth Objects" seriously.

In 2018 Lembit was named the head of parliament of Asgardia, also known as the Space Kingdom of Asgardia, a proposed and self-proclaimed nation in outer space.

If an asteroid heads this way, I'll get my application form in for citizenship.

Lastly some satisfying news for Adele. I am not going to shuffle her latest album, because I'm not going to buy it. But if I did buy it I would want to skip any tracks I didn't like, and stuff the carefully thought-out track order.