OK. The love affair, such as it was, is over. David Cameron’s insane decision to give a peerage to Julian Fellowes has at a stroke eliminated the respect I was starting to build up for the government he heads.

It beggars belief that such a nonentity should have been elevated to the House of Lords. What has he done to deserve it? After a career spent acting, rather badly, he has moved on to scriptwriting. The film Gosford Park was followed by another celebration of snobbery, the TV series Downton Abbey.

Watched it? Me neither. When I read in newspapers that it was packed with anachronisms and solecisms that almost almost did it for me. Almost? Yes. It had to wait for Fellowes’s absurd hissy fit following the exposure of his ignorance firmly to finish him for me.

You only need to look at the blighter (see above) to see what an abject person he is. The burgundy corduroy trousers and blazer mark him out as the sort of bounder you’d run a mile from if you saw him heading your way at the club bar.

Fellowes goes to the Lords in company with a bunch of blokes who paid for their promotion through donations to various of the political parties. It really stinks, doesn’t it?

Almost as big an annoyance for me was the inclusion among the 54 new peers (honestly — would you believe it?) of ‘Dame’ Joan Bakewell, long a figure of loathing for me for reasons I do not intend to enlarge upon. My only consolation is that the ermine-decorated Joan is going to find herself in the scarcely congenial company of the man who is often (wrongly, I think) credited with bestowing on her the soubriquet by which she was known for years — ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’.

I refer to that intellectual titan Lord [Melvyn] Bragg.

The pair deserve each other.