“If it’s yellow, let it mellow. if it’s brown, flush it down.” That was a water-preserving mantra from, if we remember correctly, California in the 1970s, which crossed the pond when summer droughts hit Britain later in the same decade.

We can only imagine that the United Kingdom Independence Party misheard this sound piece of advice, because their behaviour very much indicates a political lifestyle of “If it’s brown, double down.” The more crap-laden a UKIP policy, the more determined they seem to persist in pushing it – often adding more excreta with every repetition.

For example, last week we were about to yawn when we noticed that the Kippers were pushing out a slogan graphic about putting a barrier in the middle of the English Channel, to keep out the small boats. Good grief, we said to ourselves, that one has to be nearly a year old! It’s as whiskery as a dropped nubbin of Stilton that bounced under your sofa unnoticed at Christmas and you didn’t find it until spring cleaning week.

It was at the start of October 2023 that UKIP unveiled its master plan to install a floating barrier along the Channel, to almost universal derision. Apart from being simply a mad idea, when you looked at their graphic impression of the ‘barrier’, the very word seemed to be stretched to the limits of its potential definition by a line of floats barely any more imposing than the lane dividers at a swimming pool.

Some suspected that the idea had been copied from an entertaining fund-raiser by Men Behaving Dadly without the dimwit leadership of the floundering party realising that the whole thing was a spoof.

Anyway, here is the same party (though it has gone from floundering to foundering) back just 11 months later with the same daft idea. Or is it? A closer look at the latest purple pronouncement reveals that the plan has escalated to building a solid wall down the middle of the Channel. In case you might be in doubt as to their meaning, they background their silly sloganising with a photo of a stone harbour mole replete with lighthouse.

So basically the plan is, as best we can tell, to build the kind of barrier that Trump promised but couldn’t deliver, while upping the ante by proposing to build it where you would need to start with foundations on the sea bed and make the wall hundreds of feet tall just to reach the surface.

Though it seems likely that this nonsense has been resurrected at the behest of temporary UKIP leader Nick Tenconi, it doesn’t have Tinconman’s name on it in the small print but that of chairman ‘Barnacle’ Ben Walker. You might think that a man who can (and continually does) boast of six years’ experience in the Royal Navy might have thought about the impracticality of sticking a wall in the world’s busiest seaway – it is used by about 500 ships per day – but apparently not.

Walker’s actual maritime knowledge has been coming under increasing scrutiny of late, especially since Searchlight revealed that he never achieved a rank higher than leading seaman, and that his speciality was in ship’s stores. We wonder if the Barnacle’s immersion in the world of the ‘Dusty Jack’ – counting floggle-toggles and eking out the stocks of humgrummits – meant that he spent very little time familiarising himself with above-decks maritime concepts such as cross-Channel ferries finding stone walls difficult to pass through.

Looking again at that picture of a lighthouse on the mad slogan sheet, we are reminded of the bawdy old song ‘In Mobile’, which posited that the lighthouse was now a white house because of the use the seagulls made of it. Perhaps that’s why the Kippers’ lighthouse is so pale – it’s covered in the guano talked by the likes of Tenconi and Walker.