The self-indulgent, self-aggrandising stupidity of our political class and those responsible for our hopelessly inadequate and hideously expensive public services continues to plumb new depths.

Not for the first time, I don’t know where to start. This is no longer a serious country.

We’re on the brink of World War III; the economy is so far down the gurgler that only an accomplished bog-snorkeller could detect signs of life; the NHS is a basket case; our capital city is a gridlocked, crime-ridden hell-hole; immigration - both legal and illegal – is wildly out of control; and yet those responsible can only indulge in an orgy of onanistic displacement activity.

Instead of turning their attention to solving the myriad problems facing the country, the political class has spent the past week arguing the toss over the Supreme Court’s ‘statement of the bleedin’ obvious’ ruling that someone with a penis cannot by law – or by any stretch of the imagination in a sane society – be described as a woman.

Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions was dominated by it. Kemi Badenoch could have pressed the PM on any number of more important issues, starting with the shameless and cynical reversal of Brexit by stealth. But she opted to make school playground jokes about him not having the ‘balls’ to admit he was wrong over trans rights.

Laugh? I thought I’d never start. And she wonders why Tory voters are deserting to Reform in droves. If I had a vote next week – which I don’t because I live in London – I’d vote Reform, too. In the past I’ve voted both Labour and Tory, but won’t get fooled again. More recently, I’ve abstained. As Ken Livingstone once said: If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.

Meanwhile, back on Fantasy Island, everyone from Labour ministers to the overpaid bureaucrats who run the NHS were busting a gut to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The health service is falling apart at the seams but those in charge are more concerned about continuing to insist biological men can use women’s wards and toilets than tackling interminable waiting lists and sorting out the GP crisis.

The political class has spent the past week arguing the toss over the Supreme Court’s ruling that someone with a penis cannot by law be described as a woman

Kemi Badenoch opted to make school playground jokes about Starmer not having the ‘balls’ to admit he was wrong over trans rights

Donald Trump may be, in the words of American comic John Mulaney, a ‘horse loose in a hospital’, but in the UK he wouldn’t get within a mile of A&E for at least 18 months before being stuck on a trolley in a corridor. Not with seven million people still waiting for treatment.

Speaking of Trump, Rachel from Complaints has been in Washington trying to seal a trade deal with the US – without which, industrialists are warning, mass job cuts will start within weeks.

And how has the Left back home reacted? They’re dusting off the childish orange Trump blimp and demanding that his state visit and address to Parliament is cancelled. That should do wonders for the special relationship.

So much for acting in the national interest. They’re more interested in polishing their performative social media profiles.

Prime mover and shaker behind this idiocy is ‘Sir’ Genghis Khan, London’s two-bob chancer of a mayor, who keeps insisting in the wake of Brexit that his city is ‘open for business’ – except, apparently, for tariff-free business with Trump’s America.

The primary objection to a US trade deal still seems to be the hysteria over the import of poisonous ‘chlorinated chicken’. Oh, for heaven’s sake, how many more times? American chicken is no more dangerous than the bags of chlorinated salad sold in every British supermarket. In the US, they eat 800 billion of the buggers a year, and last time anyone looked the streets weren’t littered with the corpses of KFC-related casualties. Yet this is the level of debate to which we have become accustomed here.

Never mind chlorinated, our political class behaves like headless chickens.

All this while Rachel was attempting to persuade international investors that Britain is a haven of ‘political, financial and economic stability’.

Surkeir is even preparing to surrender our sovereign fishing waters to the French to become part of a European defence force

Was she taking the proverbial or does she really believe her own fairy tale, which is about as convincing as her Mickey Mouse CV? She was certainly insulting the intelligence of her audience both in the US and back home.

You don’t need me to remind you that her disastrous, vindictive, Sixth-form socialist, class-war Budget has crashed the economy, suffocating any green shoots of growth.

And despite her best efforts to strike a deal, she’s still insisting British food standards must be maintained and American chicken is off the table.

The bulk of the Labour Party, Starmer and Reeves included, would much rather crawl back into the EU. Funny how they weren’t that bothered about British food standards when we were cheerfully importing Romanian horsemeat masquerading as pork via Ireland and donkey burgers from France and Spain.

Surkeir is even preparing to surrender our sovereign fishing waters to the French to become part of a European defence force.

The EU should be making concessions to us if they want to benefit from our world-class Armed Forces and advanced defence industry. EU countries, France in particular, are not our ‘friends’ or ‘partners’. They are at best our rivals and, commercially at least, our enemies.

Can you imagine if during World War II Churchill had told De Gaulle there would be no D-Day and no liberation of Europe unless he signed over La Manche and the Mediterranean to Britain’s trawlers? Precisely.

Europe also wants us to agree to grant unlimited access to millions of EU citizens as part of a ‘youth mobility’ scheme. In this case, ‘youth’ applies to anyone under 30 – the same demographic as all those military-age men making their way across the Channel in dinghies. As if we haven’t got enough of them already.

Instead of a defiant Gaullist ‘Non’, our Government is almost certain to comply in its desperation to suck up to Brussels.

As far as the political class – especially Labour and the Lib Dems, led by that inane circus act Ed Davey – is concerned, the interests of British people always come a distant second to ideology.

If you want something to cut your wrists by, listen to Ed Miliband being interviewed by the excellent Nick Ferrari on LBC yesterday. Mister Ed, an urban spaceman roundly rejected by the people when he attempted to become PM, is now in charge of destroying what’s left of the economy once Rachel’s tax rises have done their worst. The interview was classic Flowerpot Man.

Mouthing platitudes about ‘sustainability’ and ‘energy security’ he is comprehensively trashing this country’s ability to both remain competitive internationally and keep the lights on as a result of his insane Net Zero obsession. And Starmer is letting him get on with it, carpeting our green and pleasant with his hideous windmills and pylons in the process.

British industry is already shackled with the highest energy prices in the developed world. Miliband’s latest cunning plan is a proposal to make people in the South of England pay more for electricity than the rest of the country as part of a ‘zonal pricing’ strategy. Who voted for that?

Still the grandstanding, incompetence and spineless dereliction of duty isn’t confined to the inhabitants of the Westminster bubble. I could fill this column week in, week out – and often do – with countless examples of the way in which none of the people who run our ‘world class’ public services is able, or even willing, to do the job for which they are paid handsomely.

From the car crash which is the NHS; to the piles of rubbish in Birmingham and the pot holes everywhere; to the refusal of the police to patrol the streets or investigate everything from burglaries to phone thefts – 66,000 in London alone last year – while at the same time nicking people for ‘non-crime hate incidents’, we are being betrayed, bullied and treated with contempt at every level. Mind you, there’s never any shortage of money for bumper salaries and vanity projects.

Sorry if all this sounds a bit dyspeptic, but I’m not far off Tom Robinson Band territory – giving up reading the papers, giving up watching TV. Which is a bit of a depressing admission from someone who makes a living as a newspaper columnist.

Frankly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the state of the nation these days. Or whether to file this column under Makes You Proud To Be British or We’re All Going To Hell In A Handcart.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Still, it’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.