Here’s a rather unpleasant joke: a woman comes home from work and her husband says to her, “Pack your suitcase, love, I’ve won five million quid on the lottery.” She gasps with pleasure and incredulity and says, “How wonderful! What shall I pack, darling? Swimwear? Stuff for a hot climate?” And he says: “I couldn’t give a monkey’s – just pack your suitcase and bugger off.”

Apologies if you’ve heard it but immediately felt some sort of kinship with the baleful sentiment it expresses. People who are offered the chance of a huge change of life usually want the entire slate wiped clean, the whole human edifice of their lives expunged – which is why I was rather cheered by the case of John Darwin, the Rogue Canoeist of Seaton Carew, whose life underwent what we might call a sea-change.

I wonder how many people would go to the bother of elaborately faking their own deaths by splashing about in the North Sea for a bit, successfully convince the entire world they’re a goner – and then proceed to tell the wife.

Darwin’s apparently uxorious behaviour rather restored my belief in human nature, regardless of the possible multiple insurance frauds and the strange deceit apparently perpetrated against the couple’s two sons. There is something rather affecting about the photograph of Darwin in Panama City, flanked not by some young blonde totty with breasts made of aluminium fibre, but by his smiling middle-aged wife, Anne. There was a rare whiff of true romance about it.

However, it was probably a bad idea to pose for the snap. Darwin used to work for the prison service – you’d have thought over the years he might have picked up one or two tips on evading capture. For example, if someone shouts at you “Say cheese!” – very quickly put a stocking over your head. Or run.

It is all a mysterious business, although Fleet Street’s puzzlement over why the couple found Panama City an attractive destination is, I suspect, simply a result of London journalists not getting up to Hartlepool very often. But beneath the mystery there is a degree of sympathy and even admiration for Darwin, I reckon.

As numerous people have pointed out over the past week, the disappearing act is something all of us have wanted to do at one time or another. For those with strictly limited ambition it is often simply a case of wishing the ground to swallow us up. Others, though, would like the ground to swallow them up and at the same time deposit half a million quid in their jacket pockets.

A survey recently suggested we have become more and more dissatisfied with our lives; that we are all, at times, yearning to break away.

This is especially the case when we are bombarded with television images showing people whose lives are more blessed and gilded than our own and we are left shaking our heads wondering: “Is this really all there is?” At which point we chuck in our jobs, or embark upon financially ruinous affairs.

We are, apparently, far less happy and satisfied with our lot than we were in the 1950s, when we had less money, never travelled further than Seaton Carew and died younger. The more we see of the world, the more we want. Which is why, in extremis, we sometimes reach for the canoe. Nice, though, that Darwin thought to take his missus along.

Wossy, all you’re worth is the chop

Here’s a way the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, could raise morale at the benighted corporation – sack Jonathan Ross. It would cheer the rest of us up, too – I’d hypothecate my licence fee towards the inevitable and obscene payoff. Already loathed by BBC staff for his £6m annual salary at a time of job cuts, the gurning sycophant with the speech impediment announced at the British Comedy Awards he was “worth 1,000 BBC journalists”.

Not according to the audience figures for his Radio 2 slot, from which listeners are fleeing in droves, nor his dismal Friday night BBC1 show, during which he burrows up the back passages of assorted nano-celebrity chums, pausing only to talk about himself. His contract, meanwhile, has caused the corporation more bad publicity, ill-feeling and political outrage than any number of coke-snorting Blue Peter presenters could ever hope to achieve. So Thompson should hold a ceremonial burning of Ross’s contract, live on the box just before the lottery draw.

He could do the same with the contract for that lard-arsed moronic inferno Chris Moyles, too. And keep going. Pretty soon the £2 billion the BBC needs would be safe.

Maybe the Tories aren’t so barking mad after all

More signs of a revival in Conservative fortunes. It has just been discovered that dogs are cleverer than we thought; they can think in abstract terms, conceptualise and apparently enjoy highbrow fiction (especially James Joyce, Kafka and Mikhail Bulgakov), according to a recent study. Dogs are notoriously right-of-centre creatures, of course; loyal, patriotic, implacably pro-hunting, wedded to the idea of the monogamous heterosexual middle-class family unit, deeply suspicious – to the point of violence – of all aliens.

Dogs – even the most stupid dalmatian or red setter – understand such half-forgotten terms as obedience, duty and discipline. Tell them to chase a stick and they will do so, without questioning why or contacting a lawyer and filing a complaint to a tribunal. Tell them to shut up and sit down and they will do so, with a chastened expression.

Until quite recently they were the country’s favourite pet – but about 10 years ago (oddly enough) they were usurped by the sinister and poisonous cats. There are now many more of these insinuating, manipulative, indolent left-liberal beasts in Britain: ask a cat to chase a stick and it will yawn, urinate on your carpet and then sit on the roof of the shed for the rest of the day in a catatonic stupor. Decadent and idle, they rub themselves up against your leg in a sexually incontinent manner. They are urban creatures, symbolic of an atomised and insular society which has lost its way.

The political debate in this country always lags behind cultural changes; the good news for David Cameron is that dogs are back.

How’s this for the most exquisite cheek imaginable? During the BBC’s documentary, The Blair Years, our former prime minister remarked that he wished Labour hadn’t “made so much” of all that Tory sleaze business. Incredible. It’s rather like Margaret Thatcher shaking her head sadly in 1990 and saying, “Y’know, between you and me, I wish we’d left the unions alone. And let the Argies keep the Falklands.”

“Tory sleaze” was the very bedrock of Labour’s 1997 victory; without the message being rammed home by Blair, Mandelson, Prescott et al every single day, without fail, there might not have been a Labour victory at all. This astonishing volte face seems to have been occasioned not by a reflection that it was grossly unfair on the Tories, but because Labour is now up to its collective neck in chicanery every bit as questionable and copping the flak for it. Except, of course, now it’s not sleaze, it’s regrettable administrative errors, forgetfulness, that sort of thing – whatever it is, please don’t question our integrity, etc.

Listen, you Jews and Palestinians – watch your backs and count your spoons. Give him a few weeks and Blair will have rewritten the Koran and the Talmud in order to accord with his expedient view of history.

The success of a friend should always bring us more pleasure than our own triumphs. So let me place on record my absolute delight for my friend John Humphrys, whose fine book In God We Doubt has just been afforded the accolade Book of the Week. And even greater delight in revealing that the institution which showed such excellent literary taste was the British National party. Enormous congratulations, John. It’s the sort of commendation which, when it comes out in paperback, you can shove on the front cover. “A cracking read – I couldn’t put it down” – Hitler. Or: “The best book I have read since Mein Kampf!” – Julius Streicher. Needless to say, the BBC is not amused. There have been agonised meetings, I have been told.

rod.liddle@sunday-times.co.uk

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