What happened was this: During the Napoleonic Wars between England and France in the early 19th century, great fear was whipped up in England about a possible French invasion.

Mothers used to scare their children to bed with warnings that "Boney" would get them, Boney being the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.

At the height of the panic, a French warship, the Chasse Marie, was wrecked off the northeast coast and a monkey wearing a sailor suit was washed ashore. Never having seen a Frenchman or a monkey, the honest burghers of Hartlepool assumed this was one of Boney's spies and promptly hung the poor creature from a gibbet on the foreshore – a warning to any other Frenchmen who might be thinking of invading their green and pleasant land.

Hartlepool has a thousand years of recorded history and there is little doubt that this is the one item most Hartlepudlians would like to see removed from the rolls.

During my time, if any visitor merrily inquired, "Who hung the monkey, then?" he might get a cool, "Why, is your dad missing?" Or more likely, he would find himself flying through the air towards the pub exit.

In later years the town seems to have taken a more sanguine view and as recently as 2002, the mascot for the local football club campaigned for mayor, wearing a monkey suit and calling himself Hangus. What's more, he won. Whether this was a reflection of the voters' contempt for established politicians or a move to make a virtue out of a disadvantage remains to be seen.

Certainly the mayor turned out to be a competent enough fellow and last week was seeking to negotiate a peaceful solution to problems at the port which had nothing to do with either Frenchmen or monkeys.

At the national level, politics has become bitter and vicious in a way Britons have not known for several years.

During his keynote speech at the Conservative Party's annual conference, party leader Iain Duncan Smith accused Prime Minister Tony Blair of being a liar; he also took a swipe at Liberal Democratic leader Charles Kennedy's well-known partiality to a glass of whisky.

What everybody knew was that IDS, as he is known, was fighting for his political life against plotters in his own party who want him removed from leadership.

After a weekend of glory following his tough-guy speech, IDS was under the cosh again. Allegations were raised that his wife Betsy was improperly paid £18,000 from public funds for secretarial work for IDS which she did not in fact do.

(Many MPs use their wives as office help, paid from public funds, on grounds that otherwise they would rarely see each other).

Duncan Smith blamed the plotters in his own party – "cowards in the shadows," he called them – for "going after my wife as a way of getting after me."

He and she immediately met with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner who investigates issues of MPs' ethics and behaviour. The Commissioner is considering documents containing the complaints and will adjudicate in due course.

Supporters of IDS accuse the plotters of failing to mount an honest challenge in the open – and they point out that the last time a "coup" forced out a leader, the deposition of Margaret Thatcher led to the party's inexorable decline. Independents make a further point – if Duncan Smith goes, is there anyone better to succeed him?

For its part, the Blair government is doing just as badly in terms of public approval. The Labour party has a leadership dispute, too, involving Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, between whom no love is lost. But pre-eminently, the government problem is Iraq. Quite simply most Britons feel the country should not have gone to war on this issue and Blair has failed to convince them otherwise.

The result is a sullen unco-operative electorate which considers other worthy government initiatives, in the areas of crime and health for instance, with suspicion and distrust.

One commentator put it like this: "This is the era of switching off, of abstention and cynicism and apathy. Young readers, it's said, have long since turned the page. Politics is over and out."

Risking a hernia to pick up my Sunday Observer, I lugged it home and examined the contents: Main news section, Review section, Sports section, Business section, Cash section, Travel section. Then, in a plastic bag: Colour magazine, TV listings, Music Monthly (sometimes this is Food, sometimes Sport), a bunch of unwanted flyers and a five-track CD by Blur, whoever he, she or they might be.

This is 320 pages in all of various sizes for £1 and 40 pence. Too much to handle say some, but certainly a bargain when compared to other products of the new technology.

Testers have discovered that inkjet cartridges for some colour printers cost £21 for just 12 millilitres of ink. This worked out as 14 times more expensive than vintage champagne.

More on the march of science: A friend who travels a lot says don't complain about everybody having mobile phones these days. One result is that they have stopped hotels charging sky-high rates for tourists wanting to phone home or businessmen calling the office.

The days when British families consisted of Dad at work, Mum at home, the kids at school and Granny in a corner by the fire have long gone.

Today Mum is likely to be at work, too, and Granny is probably at the Eventide Home for Aged Ladies, in sheltered accommodation or at best in a "granny flat" attached to her children's home.

Now a new idea has emerged: the Granny creche. A car plant in Coventry has arranged that if a worker has responsibility for an older person, he or she can bring her to the factory and leave her with professional carers.

At the end of the day, Granny climbs back into the car and goes off home again.

Er, well, yes. And then again, no.

From film director Woody Allen: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my works, I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

E-mail: gerryo69@hotmail.com

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