Ten years ago I moved to Staines and my mate Kwasi Kwarteng took me on a pub crawl. Kwasi was then the local MP, and as we drank our way around town he taught me a useful political heuristic. ‘If you want to predict an election, don’t listen to the BBC,’ he said. ‘Go to your local and listen to real people.’ Say what you like about Kwasi, but he had that right. My local is a backstreet boozer called the Beehive, which in decor and ambience is a portal back to the later 20th century. I go there for conversation, drinking, to play crib, to do a quiz on a Friday night and for political intelligence. For any pollsters looking to know what England really thinks, it isn’t complicated. Fund the NHS, stop the boats, get the scroungers off the welfare. Andy Burnham’s an even bigger wanker than Keir Starmer. The only ones who seem to get it are Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. Like history, politics is mostly just the art of listening.

Staines is, of course, where the barons camped in 1215 before they went to squeeze Magna Carta out of King John. Now it’s about to become famous again, thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen, whose new film, Ali G: Who Iz I?, reprises the adventures of the titular would-be gangster, who claims membership of ‘Da West........

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