It's started. Having never accepted the result of the 2016 Referendum, the Remain lobby is trying to pull us back into the Brussels empire by stealth. The first stage was revealed this week in the Government's decision to rejoin the EU's Erasmus student exchange scheme, at a cost of £570million. This will soon be followed by an agreement on free movement of young people under 30 as a precursor to the return of open borders across the EU.

Then we will sign up to the Customs Union, and soon we will be enmeshed once more in the EU'S bureaucratic web. It is no coincidence that this is happening under Sir Keir Starmer, the arch Remainer-in-Chief. The fulfilment of his life's work - the subjugation into a federal Europe - now awaits.

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For England cricket fans like myself, this winter's tour of Australia has represented little more than embarrassment piled upon humiliation. All the high hopes for Ben Stokes' men have turned to dust. With its reliance on unceasing aggression, the strategy of Bazball - devised by the skipper in league with the England coach Brendon McCullum - proved disastrously flawed in the pressure cauldron Down Under.

It will now be confined to the dustbin of cricket history along with other doomed innovations like Bodyline Bowling, aluminium bats and tobacco sponsorship. At least the agony has not been prolonged. The series is barely ten days old and already the Ashes have been surrendered.

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With her toxic behaviour, the capricious Duchess of Sussex has squandered almost all the goodwill she received from the British public when she first began her relationship with Prince Harry. But she has plumbed new depths of selfish cruelty in her treatment of her own father Thomas Markle, who has been fighting for his life in a Philippines hospital after one of his legs was amputated because of a blood cot.

Despite his desperate predicament, she refused to visit him. Her only contact has been a typically self-serving, inappropriate letter in which she reportedly berated him for his past failings as a parent, despite the fact that Thomas largely brought her up during her childhood and paid for her education.

This week the Express reported that the Duchess might be willing to come to England "for the right price". That's good of her. Perhaps she might find a job at the British Medical Association. Her lack of compassion would make her feel right at home there.

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The Policy Exchange think-tank is calling for an "emergency census" because of the unprecedented change in the British population as a result of mass immigration. But such an exercise would be a colossal waste of time and money.

In this age of high-tech data collection a census based on door-to-door canvassing is a hopelessly outdated method. Moreover, the people that officialdom most needs to reach - such as the homeless or illegal migrants are likely to be the least responsive are the most likely to be unresponsive, I have a better idea.

Let us scrap the census, which costs almost £1 billion - and require the Government to strengthen our borders.

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The most enjoyable film I've seen this year was the third Downton movie, two hours of delicious escapism. We are told that this will be the last film in the series. But after this success, I am certain the cameras will soon be rolling again at the Abbey.