Teignmouth Central District Councillor Alison Eden makes her views known in her latest To The Point article: Four months after our wedding and my husband tells me he has enrolled on a degree in clinical psychology.

While some new wives might take that personally, I’m relieved. At the rate at which mental health services have and continue to be cut, an inhouse expert in the workings of the mind may come in handy.

In fact, I may ask him to explore if there’s a module he can pick about developing coping strategies for dealing with cowardly, lying, greedy, vain, smug, ignorant politicians. (I’m sure there are more adjectives I could include but I need to stop and breathe into a paper bag… )

Having a student in the house makes it feels like the 1980s again.

Back then, I sported a blue tweed ‘Granny’ coat from Oxfam which I covered in badges: ‘Ban the bomb,’ ‘Prefect’ ‘Solidarnosc’ and a Tufty Club pin.

For my husband’s first term therefore, in order to help him blend in with the other students, I source some sloganned T-shirts: ‘Radical Feminist’; ‘If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention, ‘Men of quality support Equality’ and ‘Girls just want to have FUNdamental rights’.

Thinking back, my 1980s CND campaigning uniform soon got replaced once I had to work in offices for a living. Drinking wine in bars on High Holborn and hanging out in Covent Garden required a more cosmopolitan, tailored and taxi-hailing look.

Here we are though, in 2021, and lots of us are going back to being walking political messages again. Perhaps the campaign for leaving/remaining in the EU has revived our comfort with wearing, carrying and waving our political views.

At a recent council meeting I wore two badges in the shape of ovaries made by Jess de Wahl, an artist whose activism and in some people’s eyes extremism is expressed through embroidery.

She was dumped from the shop at the Royal Academy after complaints that her portrayal of female reproductive parts was making people who want them and don’t have them feel unhappy. Her sales online shot up in consequence.

Having left school at 17 and never taken a degree, my husband qualifies for a government loan for tuition fees. It is highly unlikely, despite the Conservatives’ cynical lowering of the salary level at which graduates must start repayments, that he will ever need to start paying it back. I suspect being a recent psychology graduate aged 60 may prove a challenge on the jobs’ market. Clearly, what he actually should be doing to save the country is training as a butcher.

Training and retraining is much discussed on the airwaves this week. The government’s PR machine has been unable to stop anguished pig farmers telling of their financial ruin and the inevitable culling of healthy pigs thanks to a skills shortage.

So why have the Conservatives, the party of landowners, of hunting, shooting and fishing failed farmers? Industry leaders have been communicating with the government ever since the vote for Brexit about the need to replace the EU workers we voted to expel from the country. The vote was in 2016. This is now 2021. The Conservatives have had five full years to take action on work-force training. They didn’t bother. So the supermarket shelves are empty, petrol is not at the pumps, fuel prices are set to shoot up and pig farmers are having to incinerate healthy livestock because there are no staff trained at abattoirs to process the meat.

Let’s give some Conservative MPs the chance to redeem themselves shall we? If Boris Johnson for example, started to train now as a butcher, by the time he loses his seat in the next general election, he’ll be fit for a new career at the butcher’s slab. I’d certainly rather see Boris Johnson wielding a mighty meat cleaver in service of his community than fluffing up all our futures from the leathery comfort of his Westminster seat.