Political column – February 8

One week on from that thing that he won't now mention, the signs are there. Our motorways are gridlocked. France beat England. Liverpool beat Shrewsbury. There's been a frost.

And yet Boris is a model of optimism. He waves his arms about, flicks his well-coiffured locks, and metaphorises, if that's even a word, in that way of his.

I predicted when he became Prime Minister that he was a ticking timebomb and it was just a question of time before he blew up. Maybe this is his fuse fizzing.

This is not a Prime Minister, but a mood, a cheerleader for the nation. Boris is radiating upbeatness. Down with the gloomsters and doomsters, up with the sunlit uplands, although with the threat of global warming they will hitherto just be described as uplands.

Jeremy Corbyn is angry, downbeat, worried, upset and anxious to tell us how terrible everything is and that it will be getting even worse.

In the vision thing, his vision of a socialist utopia to save us from the forces of darkness which he warns are enveloping us would be more appealing if he could make it sound more of a party.

One of my many theories, and it does to have many theories because the more you have the more likely one of them is to prove correct, is that one of the underlying reasons that Britons voted for that thing we are not mentioning any more is that those who supported the idea, like Boris and Nigel, seemed the sort of people who would make more for a more fun party than those who were against, like sober economists and Chancellors of the Exchequer.

Having never been to a party with them, I may be doing them an injustice, but I can't imagine a party with George Osborne and Philip Hammond being much of a rave-up.

Now I'm not saying policies don't matter, as they plainly do, but the new big thing in the politics of the 21st century may be mood politics, in which the mood you create plays a leading part in determining whether people are happy to throw in their lot with you.

There are two camps. There is the good-tempered, upbeat, camp, which I shall label the Blonds. And then there's the bad-tempered, downbeat camp, which I shall label the Beards.

Despite his clean-shaven disguise, we all know which camp Ian Blackford of the SNP falls into, as he warns of impending doom in the manner of a scowling preacher, a fate Scotland can only escape if it is freed by the nasty British Government and allowed to return to the warm clutches of the EU saviours.

Boris Johnson slapped him down with:"There's only one party with 'nationalist' in its name."

He didn't say which party he had in mind, and to be honest it's really difficult to know, especially as Ian Blackford does not belong to a party with "nationalist" in its name. He's the Westminster leader of the Scottish National Party.

Boris doesn't do detail.

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If we're all going to be forced to buy new electric cars in the next 15 years, they need to crack on in building millions of them.

That will mean tapping in to the world's natural resources, transporting the raw materials, and expending energy in the production process.

Given Britain's place in the league table of global emissions, our move to all-electric will amount to a national example of commitment which doesn't make that much difference.

I'm up for driving an electric car, but range anxiety is, er, an anxiety. When I get down to around 100 miles of fuel left in my 1.4 litre petrol motor, which is an environmentally friendly 12 years old – with many folk getting a new car every three years, that saves on four energy-sapping new car production cycles – I'm starting to think it's time to refuel.

But some of the cheaper – a relative term – electric cars have a maximum range not much better than that. And that's before you've turned on the heater, windscreen defroster, lights, radio...

I did get 60mpg on one trip to Skegness by the way. Although I did get overtaken a lot.

And anyway, why is the policy so fixated on keeping cars on our already overcrowded roads? Why not have fuel rationing, which would kill two birds with one stone?

It would mean that people would only make the journeys they only really needed to, and would provide a boost to public transport use in the process.

To combat black-market activity, fuel for essential use would have a special dye.

All this, of course, will be familiar with some older readers.