As Bonfire Night approaches, I find myself sympathising ever more strongly with good old Guy Fawkes and his dastardly gunpowder plotters.

No I am not going to burrow into the cellars under the Houses of Parliament with barrels of explosive and sizzling fuses but the latest setback yesterday to the Brexit process makes me feel sick at heart. And isn’t it tempting to imagine Squeaker Bercow, that awful little gargoyle running about with a stick of dynamite fizzing around his starched shirttails?

I have to admit that despite all the carnage I have witnessed in the course of a very long life, I would secretly welcome a big comic-style ‘kaboom’ in the Palace of Westminster. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to witness the serial Brexit wreckers like Hilary Benn, Dominic Grieve, Yvette Cooper and Oliveoil Letwin stumbling about with their faces blackened, their immaculately permed hairdos awry and their torn trousers flapping around the knees that are knocking like runaway castanets.

Oh what a lovely mental image it conjures up! A man can only dream.

Way back when I was a young man and the cold war was in full swing (it seems a long time ago) Soviet politicians were noted for their grumpy visages. None more so than their Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko. This goon was the very epitome of grumpiness and bad temper. I am sure he had a brilliant mind but just looking at his face was a depressing exercise and reminded one of all the things that could go wrong in the world.

Gromyko wanted no change. He wanted the status quo to last forever and inevitably he was known as Mr Nyet because he opposed virtually everything as a matter of principle.

But good old Smiler Gromyko stood on the wrong side of history. Soviet Marxism was eventually shattered and the Berlin Wall came down. The current crop of Parliamentary diehards who oppose the Peoples’ expressed will on Brexit will one day be seen to have been as miserably obstructive as Gromyko and hopefully they too will fail.

Like that long forgotten Soviet politician, the only answer they have is in the negative. They don’t want reform or change. They are determined to stick to the status quo whatever the people want or might vote for.

Is this because they are stupid I wonder? No probably not. Labour’s chief opposer Keir Starmer and that giggling twit Letwin are said to be highly intellectual, whatever that may mean. Hilary Benn is probably a great deal brighter than was his old man Tony and those renegade Tories Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry Loo are both lawyers, though I certainly wouldn’t want them defending me in matters important. They would be sure to get on the wrong side of any juror with their stony-faced insistence that no one else can possibly ever be right.

And of course there is the arch obstructionist, Squeaker Bercow himself. What a miserable specimen of humanity, the man is. A bouncy, noisy and horribly verbose little porker and not so long ago, one of the most public cuckolds in the land, but he must surely have a good brain on him to have reached the dizzy heights he has attained.

No, I don’t think it is a lack of brainpower that afflicts these people. It is a lack of common sense and a feeling that they alone are right and thus everyone else has to be wrong. It is their inability to realise that the public wants hope and that there are other viewpoints out there apart from their own.

Voters crave optimism in their politicians. People want leaders who offer solutions and will push ahead through difficulties. They don’t want the dismal gloom merchants like Labour’s John McDonnel – or Corbyn himself for that matter. Nor do they want the shrill carping of people like the Libdem harpy, Swinson or that other self-satisfied piglet of the Scottish Nationalists, Ian Blackbird.

And after more than three years of Brexit wrangling that sees us no further forward than we were at the beginning, the public desire for optimism and a decided result has never been more focussed.

This is why Bunter Johnson’s lead in the opinion polls increases with every showing. At least he gives us hope.