Racetrack Wiseguy

 I will only have myself to blame if Pied Piper (Cheltenham, 2.40) doesn't repay my blind faith in him tomorrow. I plunged in peremptory fashion on the even money even though the two Gordon Elliott raiders I backed today got beat and only then did I check his record for the last 14 days, which isn't very good.

But, the scientific way of reassuring myself that it could be okay is that the even money is disappearing from the early prices and he is a bit more odds-on at the moment. He's also probably expected to be a better horse in time than Knight Salute who he dead-heated with before a debatable disqualification at Aintree last season. The entirely unscientific reason for hope is that Pop Music Theory did well by us earlier in the week with You Wear It Well and so perhaps Crispian St. Peters might prove as good a tipster as Rod Stewart.

They don't make videos like that any more.

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After the debacle of 2016 when I invested confidently in a Remain vote of 50-55% and Hillary Clinton, I'm not betting on politics any more. Common sense goes out of the window. However, I note the sustained market move for Boris Johnson in the Next Prime Minister market. My friend, armed with his degree in politics, is confident that Rishi Sunak wins but, as in the previous race, the best horse doesn't win if not suited by the conditions.

The conditions of this event are that two names go out to the Conservative Party membership who are a seriously deranged group of insulated weirdos with no concept of much beyond Rule Britannia, the Union Flag and, yes, Boris Johnson. They don't care that he's an incompetent scoundrel, narcissist and compulsive liar. And it's them who decide, so if Boris has 140 MP's prepared to back him, we've had it and even at 7/4, he's the bet although you could have had 10/1 last week. And that's the trouble with politics these days, you simply can't imagine what will happen next.

The prospect is too gloomy to contemplate. We simply can't have two more years of that bad circus act followed by the faint chance that something might go disastrously right for him and he gets a second, or you might call it a third, term in office.

My next job is to scan a list of countries to emigrate to. I've heard good things about Antarctica and I'm not a fan of hot weather, I'm just not sure if the library system, brilliant as it is, will deliver biographies of Brahms, Schubert and the like when I want to read them to somewhere nearby I can collect them from.

To re-write the Carpenters,

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft,

Please could you drop the Conservative Party

back at the planet that you brought them from.