Melanie Phillips is away. What is the Daily Mail going to do?
Put these words in order: Care. Couldn't. I. Freaking. Less.

But it needs urgently a top rightwing thinker to hold down its op-ed column during August, preferably one as forbidding-looking as Phillips, though ideally less troubling to the horses.
Philosophy professor Anthony O'Hear comes up with yards of intemperate conservative blah and he looks like as much fun as an Institute of Directors' conference in Mablethorpe. Or maybe Lynda Lee-Potter could write about why schoolgirls with cellulite must be shot. Taki has some ground-breaking views on racial tolerance.

All good ideas.
Perhaps too good. Who did they go for instead?

Joan Collins.
The actor unfairly rumoured to have dallied with every Hollywood male except Wile E Coyote? The woman who in 1978 played sexpot Fontaine Khaled opposite Oliver Tobias's eponymous love machine in The Stud? The British national treasure who went on to play predatory ballbreaker Alexis Carrington in 80s' US soap Dynasty?

The same.
Blimey. How old is she these days?

Seventy, but the picture byline, while not quite as vast as Anne Robinson's in the Saturday Telegraph, is big and makes her look decades younger and winningly hotsy-totsy.
That's nice. About what did she expatiate in her debut column?

"Before the euro, a pair of moccasins in St Tropez cost the equivalent of £25; now these same shoes cost more than £35."
Again, this isn't really registering on my give-a-toss-o-meter. Is this "What I did on my holidays" plus an anti-euro rant?

Broadly, yes. She adds: "I was charged eight euros (about £6) for a half-a-dozen lemons in the same market."

Don't say: "
Is there much more of this?"

Do say:
"If Melanie doesn't come back, we can fill her slot with this guff for years!"