And now for something completely different, as John Cleese used to say, dressed in a dinner jacket as he sat at a desk by the sea for Monty Python.
Jamie Driscoll, co-chairman of the Newcastle branch of Momentum, the hard-left strand of the Labour Party, is not wearing a dinner jacket. But he has his desk on a bed of pebbles — set up by an aide in the Port of Blyth, a Northumberland dock, in an unconscious echo of Python — and is favourite to be elected the first mayor for the North of Tyne combined authority next month.
In a surreal race, he is up against a Tory businessman who planned to buy Newcastle United football club with public money before deciding it