Scientists have worked out a way to teach spinach to send emails.

They now need to get it logged on pronto to send some urgent missives to the cabbages in Brussels.

Following on from the reverse-ferret spectaculaire of last week’s Article 16 miscue, the EU Commission has now withdrawn its border staff in Northern Ireland because of ‘escalating threats’.

Apparantly ‘graffiti has appeared in Belfast’, and somebody was seen close to the port jotting down some notes onto a pad.

Woah, scary stuff.

But in truth, it’s nothing that could not have been sorted by a power-wash, an ASBO, and a few meatheads in a security hut.

And quite something when such strategic maestros muster up a distraction tactic that is even more humiliating than the original gaffe itself. It’s all giving me ‘spin ache’.

The Commission is still toiling on mechanical-digger-sized chasms when they really should be putting their blooper behind them and moving on with some sort of recovery plan for their vacuous vaccine vainglory.

At this rate, they might need to re-invoke Article 16 just to deflect attention from this latest display of institutional limp-dickness that is arguably more deleterious than minusculely holing the border package below the waterline.

This week, Von der Liar threw her Trade Commissioner under a bus, which now seems to have established itself as an enduring Brexit leitmotif. As a metaphorical vehicle, it would have had nothing emblazoned on it apart from an implied ‘it wasn’t me, guv’. In the context of leadership and responsibility, that has slightly less credibility than its infamous red, Brexity forebearer.

Political crisis now appears to be the new UK-EU ‘level playing field’. On transfer deadline day, wouldn’t the EU now just love to squeeze a world-class number 9 into the Berlaymont line-up if they could?

A skulk of hardcore, bonkers grandees like Juncker and Verhofstadt are already sparking the kindlings of the Slursula funeral pyre, and paralysis on Russia and a sell-out trade tie-up with China are the focal points of the magnifier. It will unlikely lead to regicide but probably some extensive sidelining and an extended period of bedding in for the next candidates for the Commission mission, should they choose to accept it.

Brace! Brace!