When people ask me what my politics are, I have to explain that I support a dwindling faction you might call the Terry-Thomas wing of the Conservative party. This faction dominated the party in the 1980s – the kind of spivvy garagiste who, no sooner was your back turned, would knock down a row of medieval cottages to open a Hyundai dealership. There were probably a few too many of them in the 1980s. Today we need them back.

Shakespeare depicts this archetype very well, possibly because (as a Brummie entrepreneur) he was one himself. He understood that you need a few chancers and opportunists around to make things happen. Where are they now?

What could be better for Britain than to divert money from Scottish nationalism and spend it on the private sector instead?

I raise this point because, while we know that Britain is overly regulated, the root cause may be that we are also far too moralistic and judgmental. At some point, merely having a personality will disqualify you from politics.

Was it ridiculous to appoint Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US? Maybe. But the furore means no one will risk making any imaginative appointments for the next five years. (I recently heard of a meeting where a senior civil servant had to ask permission before eating a sandwich their hosts had provided.) I still don’t understand what was that bad about the Downing Street parties during Covid. But then I was born in 1965.

What about Peter Murrell, you ask? In my view, he didn’t go nearly far enough. What could be better for Britain than for someone to divert money from the tedious and divisive cause of Scottish nationalism and spend it in the private sector instead? He is a true patriot, the Scottish Benedict Arnold. His statue should be on the fourth plinth.

Besides, the nature of his purchases suggests that Peter, if he wasn’t a brilliant undercover operative working on behalf of MI5, was at least motivated by patriotism. A Jaguar car. Bremont Watches. Smythson leather goods. Dyson hairdryers. These are bizarrely Anglophile purchases for a Jock. Even his shoe polish came from La Cordonnerie Anglaise. If anything, his Anglophilia went a bit far. Some of the finest independent watchmakers in the world are in Scotland (I’m only a quarter Scottish, but I would have bought an anOrdain watch years ago if it weren’t for the fact that my wife, unlike his, reads our bank statements).

His other fetish seems to have been luxury German brands – Montblanc, Miele, Wüsthof. It made me wonder: do all Scots secretly wish they were flashy Saxons, but have to pretend otherwise just to fit in? (You find the same bogus austerity among rich Scandinavians, who live ostensibly frugal lives at home in Denmark or Sweden, until you discover they own a huge villa in Italy with three Ferraris and a swimming pool lined with gold.)

But I’m grateful to Peter for another reason. You see, when people complain about the cost of living and the increase in food prices, I constantly have to remind them that the proportion of our income we spend on food, and indeed consumer goods of all kinds, has been shrinking for the past 70 years. In the 1950s and 1960s, if you asked the typical American or British family to add up what they had spent on all their possessions – furniture, cars, washing machines, clothes, etc – the sum total would typically come to an amount more or less equivalent to what they had paid for their house. (My grandfather was the fourth person in Wales to own a dishwasher. It cost £80. His five-bedroom house in Crickhowell cost £4,000, only 50 times as much.)

Today it would be almost impossible to find someone, other than an art collector, whose possessions were worth even a fraction of the value of their home. Which shows consumer capitalism has done a cracking job over the past 60 years. It’s the housing market that has screwed us over.

So, intriguingly, Murrell may have been, for a time, the only person in modern Britain whose possessions were equivalent in cost to the value of their house. Or, to put it another way, if it weren’t for house-price inflation, we could all live like Peter Murrell.