There are no easy answers, but here's one for starters, as my political and moral mentor Sir Leslie Colin Patterson so aptly put it. Bring on the Tories. Bring on yer boy David and his gang of floppy-haired numpties. The Government has been unmasked as a bunch of ageing, self-serving incompetents, so let us for the sake of continuity introduce a slightly younger bunch of self-serving incompetents.

They could hardly do a worse job for this beleaguered sector than my own beloved DRIP, could they? Well, let us examine the retail heritage of the Conservative & Unionist Party. First up we have Sir Archole Norman, former Hon Member for the Trotskyite hotbed of Tunbridge Wells and officially the worst shadow minister since all the others. Some may recall that Norman also spent a few days at the helm of the formerly adequate British supermarket Asda before flogging it to the Yanks in a belated homage to Thatcherism.

And Baroness Belgrano was of course herself the son of a Grantham grocer, a qualification that allowed her to bang on about good economic housekeeping and gave her unmatched credibility with the proto-chav underclass she helped create. Fast forward to the present day and we have Tory luminary Nigel Evans demanding booze-only checkouts to help smooth things along on Saturday mornings, and my personal favourite, Philip Dunne MP.

For those not in the know, Dunne-Heap is chair of the Tory Retail and Consumer Goods Group, a glad-handing club of such monumental ineffectuality it makes the Mexican Ministry of Epidemiology look razor-sharp. His qualifications? Well, he was an investment banker and then started a bookshop, so he should know a thing or two about running businesses. Into the ground.

So again I say, bring on the Tories. I've been two years in this job this week and I could use a little holiday until my own dear nitwits are back in power. Eighteen months should be about right.