An estimated half of the eastern European immigrants who came here since 2004 have now returned home because they find Great Britain unremittingly ghastly. Some 200,000 packed their bags in despair having watched Des Browne and Polly Toynbee jabbering on the BBC’s Question Time last week. Thousands more booked their easyJet flights to Lodz and Bratislava when it was announced that another season of The Catherine Tate Show had been commissioned. The lousy weather, the stabbings, the congestion charge they could all put up with. But some things just drive you over the edge.

“Even 45 years of Soviet occupation and an unending diet of beetroot soup was better than this,” said Tomasz, jostling with cheerful suicide bombers at the security check at Heathrow.

The people leaving, you will recall, were those deemed indispensable to the British economy because of their readiness to do the sorts of jobs that our idle working classes are disinclined to do. Indeed, a large proportion of the 1m-plus who came here were employed directly by Toynbee herself, unblocking her many toilets with industrial strength water jets and carrying her to vital appointments upon a giant litter, all at 89p per hour. What will she do now? And what will happen to our economy?

You would expect that the government – who argued that without this mass influx of cheap, youthful, labour we would all end up in the poorhouse with nobody to pay our pensions – would now be bemoaning the great exodus. And perhaps pleading with them to stay. Not so. The value to our economy of this enormous migration, which the government ludicrously underestimated, was perhaps a little overstated. We don’t really need them after all.

Meanwhile, the right, which largely opposed the influx, is not particularly gladdened by the fact that half of them are leaving. The boss of Migrationwatch, Sir Andrew Green, said his organisation had never been terribly worried about all these Poles and Czechs, it was non-EU immigration he was worried about. You will note that Sir Andrew used the up-to-date term “non-EU” to describe these other migrants.

The truth, I reckon, lies somewhere between these poles, if you’ll excuse the pun. The government misjudged the number of migrant workers it expected to arrive from the former eastern bloc; it also misjudged their contribution to our economy, both in terms of its brevity and the social and economic costs occasioned by their arrival. Hence its ambivalence about the fact that half of them are leaving.

Our economy will do just fine without them, even if it means some middle-class people will henceforth have to pay the proper rate for those menial tasks that for a few years they got on the cheap.

* * * * *

They never learn. Four years ago it was The Guardian wot won the US election for George Bush by bombarding voters in the swing-state of Ohio with fantastically condescending injunctions from the likes of Lady Antonia Fraser telling them why they should vote for the Democrats. Advice from the “pansy-ass, tea-sipping” English, as one furious Ohio voter accurately put it, proved somewhat counter-productive and thus the free world was left in the hands of a gung-ho imbecile for four more years.

Last week, The Guardian tried the same trick again in gathering together a convocation of smug and self-righteous liberal Dlist nonentities, such as the ugly one from Mitchell and Webb, and a former drummer from Blur, to urge Londoners to vote against Boris Johnson in the mayoral election.

Perhaps they thought this was a legitimate counterbalance to the anti-Ken campaigning indulged in by London’s other local newspaper, the Evening Standard. Or maybe they thought it would really work and that having read the considered and valuable opinions of Vivienne Westwood and “hip-hop artist Ty”, people would suddenly decide that Livingstone was, after all, the right man for the job. Either way, before the article the polls showed a dead heat and afterwards . . . well, the rest is history.

Madeleine, the incidental onlooker

Come on, be honest. When Kate McCann appears before you on your television screen, do you sink your head low and remember poor Madeleine, somehow spirited out of that Praia da Luz apartment, or are you overwhelmed with a sense of irritation, annoyance and ennui?

Or like me, is it a little bit of both, callous pig that I am?

Madeleine went missing exactly a year ago. I very much hope she is found, but I very much doubt that she will be. And I’m absolutely certain that the latest anniversary publicity blitz will do nothing to help any of us - Kate, Gerry, the viewers - find anything about “Maddy”, one way or the other. Perhaps another dippy tourist will see some toddler in Chiang Mai or Torremolinos or Constanta and hysterically contact the media.

Kate and Gerry will be there to express hope and reiterate the point that they know they let her down by having a meal 100 metres away when they, or someone, should have been in rather closer contact.

The weird thing is the way the story has taken on a life of its own, with Madeleine as a terribly absent onlooker, almost incidental to the whole charade.

Workers of the world unite . . . in Ikea

Karl Marx looked forward to the day when, under communism, the working classes would have plenty of leisure time to do what they liked doing best, such as “reading Plato”. This may give you an inkling as to why Marxism offers a somewhat flawed analysis of society. On tomorrow’s May bank holiday, introduced to celebrate International Workers’ Day, Plato will be largely ignored as the entire population of the country heads for Ikea.

Bizarre though it might seem, we enjoy spending our statutory holidays traipsing, zombie-like, around this evil store and buying self-assembly furniture which, when unpacked back home, will result in smashed fingers, household pets being grievously assaulted with a bent Allen key and - in most cases - divorce.

I suppose Marx would have shaken his beard sadly and put this down to false consciousness. Which is probably why his missus, Jenny von Westphalen, never got that new flatpack sideboard unit and drinks cabinet she really wanted and which she’d seen at Mrs Engels’s house. Old Friedrich would have understood Ikea all too well, I reckon, and been able to put the furniture together without losing his temper.

* * * * *

A French doctor has urged his fellow countrymen to belch and pass wind more frequently, to stop them getting cancer. “Dare to fart!” Frédéric Saldmann has told a bemused nation.

I had always assumed that French people spent almost their entire time belching, farting or having sexual intercourse, often at the same time – and are subsidised under some EU scheme for so doing. But I was wrong, it seems; the French come somewhere in the middle of the EU league table for flatus, the top spot being held proudly by the Greeks, which is why Athens is such a pleasure to visit in high summer.

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