I've been bitten by a bat. I'm so excited! It flew into my bedroom in Derbyshire on Friday and I'd just trapped it in a flower-pot when it pushed its tiny face through a hole and sank its fangs into my finger.

Wow! Two black puncture marks, just like in the movies. If only I had applied the flower-pot to my neck. The internet advice is to wash the bites with soap and water but I cannot bring myself to desecrate this bat shrine on my own body and am treating the site as sacred.

My partner says I may get lockjaw soon, or rabies in 34 days. But what a way to go - in agony, of course, but the first British columnist in history to die of rabies.

Or perhaps I shall enter an altered state, become a new Batman and go on fearlessly to combat evil...

...which brings me to the present Government. It's Tuesday afternoon, 4.30. I'm passing down Whitehall on a London bendy-bus, a No 12, taking a note for my dossier every time passengers get on without paying (which Ken Livingstone says does not happen).

My mobile rings. A deranged fellow passenger eyes me suspiciously. I answer. It's the Ministry of Justice. Michael Wills, the Minister of State for Constitutional Renewal (really), plans to telephone me at 5 pm. If convenient, could I ready myself for the call?

“Delighted,” I reply. I know ministers are cross about all the “national motto” stuff that The Times, Daniel Finkelstein's blog and this diary have been poking fun at.

At 5pm the minister calls. A pleasant and lucid person, Mr Wills wants me to know that this motto business is a red herring. What the Government seeks is a National Statement of British Values, he says.

As he explains, I realise the whole thing is even more dreadful than we thought. The statement could be as short as France's “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, he tells me, like a motto (“but we never used that word”) but it could be as long as a thousand words. A Citizens' Summit - a convocation of a thousand people - will deliberate on this and make proposals. Then Parliament will decide. Mr Wills is unable to promise me the vote will not be whipped along party lines, though he must know the very thought is preposterous.

How will these thousand citizens be chosen? Will they be paid (ghastly thought) or people selected because they have the spare time and enthusiasm to volunteer (even more ghastly thought)? How dare they frame what Britain means to you and me? Can MPs propose amendments? Will citizens have to learn it by heart?

I ask Michael Wills what a clever and thoughtful man like him is doing getting tangled up in all this nonsense. He laughs politely but declines to reply.

Graham Greene remarked that the mark of a really cruel man is that he cries in the cinema. Or so I think someone once told me, and I've quoted it often. A friend and fellow author who had misremembered and attributed it to Goebbels, called this week for clarification, and we tried a Google search. The quote's there all right - but only as quoted by people quoting me quoting Greene. Soon there will be disputes as to whether it was Greene or Goebbels. The awful thought occurs that it was neither, and I just imagined it. So can I have it back as my own?

Anyway, this you did read here first. The perfect national motto. It came to me while addressing a dinner given by the Birmingham Forward association of regional businesses. Birmingham is looking great these days, and I said how much nicer it was to encounter a city where people undersold themselves, than places (but let's leave Manchester out of this) that were up their own bottoms.

An MP and archetypal young thruster of a Government minister, Liam Byrne, had recently bewailed what he called the West Midlands' “malaise of modesty”. Modesty a malaise! How very new Labour. A pleasantly low-key attitude to themselves is one of the great assets of West Midlanders. So I suggested a new motto for Birmingham, which the audience seemed to like.

Philip Howard, the classicist of The Times, has helped me to translate it into Latin, and the five-word motto would be splendid, in fact, for Britain itself - except that it undermines the whole Brownite constitutional project.

Ne nostra in fundamenta subeamus: “Let us not climb up our own bottoms.”

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