SO, David “Dodgy Dave” Cameron, ex-MP for Witney and star of a wonderful cover version of Pulp’s Common People (see bit.ly/CommonDave), is back — this time as “Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton.”

In 1851, the day after a French coup d’etat by which Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the Second Republic (and Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew), proclaimed himself emperor as Napoleon III, Engels declared in a letter to Marx: “It really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce.”

Marx followed by writing an account of the coup, his opening sentence also citing Hegel’s declaration that historic events and personages appear twice, continuing that Hegel forgot to add: “The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”