Brexit has driven me mad, but I can’t let it go

Rosé wine is, I know, considered naff. Were you unaware of this you’d fast conclude as much from the incidence of lifestyle commentary informing us that rosé is newly smart. As with those columns advising that everyone is drinking sherry now, or that some prosecco is actually OK, or that men will be wearing skirts this summer, it’s usually a safe assumption that the opposite is true but an enterprising journalist aims to surprise us with an amusing unlikelihood.

Anyway, I love rosé wine and we had brought a case of pretty inexpensive stuff back from Rioja, of all places. The bank holiday weather was glorious, the llamas were frolicking and blackbirds sang in the wood as I sat outside in the Derbyshire sun and sipped.

But there was a shadow. Something troubled my soul. In the immediate it was a rancid little attack on Douglas Hogg by Charles Moore in the Telegraph. Douglas sits in the Lords and no doubt has a title but these things mean little to me and I shall not bother with titles: one leaves that kind of thing to Mr Moore. I just know Douglas as a valiant friend, a kind heart and a prosecuting intellect: a man whose sense of public duty and personal honour is almost too keen for his own tranquillity.

It will be beneath him to answer or even care about a mean-spirited and gratuitous piece of spite from a journalist who appears to have a grudge against him for even being a peer, let alone taking a different view on Brexit from Mr Moore, and Douglas will be cross with me for even writing about this. So I shall desist — but only after a gentle reminder to Charles that we cannot all be in the House of Lords, and no doubt Moore’s time will come once his lot are in charge and hurtling, whooping like Dr Strangelove, towards perdition, while Douglas and I and all the sensible people are penned up in re-education camps.