Obviously, as per the General Election we had the other day, I am contractually not supposed to comment on politics during the campaign for fear that my millions of readers might return Tim Farron as Prime Minister.
But it's less clear whether I can still make a literary point, like considering if the renowned Classical scholar, Boris Johnson, might be familiar with the work of the SNP poet, Robert Burns, who wrote,
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
The reportedly sidelined disaster area has an idiosyncratic style that attained new heights in his assessment of Jeremy Corbyn as a 'mutton-headed old mugwump'. And I'd be the first to acknowledge that if I were to review another poet's work as 'pedestrian, composite, unalarming and yet vaguely competent within its own unambitious parameters' then I might reflect that the same could equally be said about mine.
So I will be brazen enough to suggest that some people are prone to find faults in others that are equally, if not more, manifest in themselves. And that's probably what Burns meant and what Boris, enormous intellect though he undoubtedly possesses, failed to grasp.
And that is that from me as far as the election is concerned, a purely literary point that should not affect the outcome. I'd pile vast amounts of cash on the result of this election except for the fact that I bet on two political certainties last year and all that happened was that it took me longer than it should have to gather enough to buy the Complete Works of Buxtehude.