“MPs should be like butterflies. Flitting from flower to flower cross-pollinating, but never getting bogged down in any one bloom.” So said, I think, Enoch Powell. I sometimes feel like that.

I was glad that a few comments to the press about Big Ben and the (needless) stopping of its ‘bongs’ for four years, which is, as I put it, ‘Bongkers’, led to an ever widening feeling of outrage amongst the general public, and a variety of experts coming forward to say it was totally unnecessary.

I was one of those asked to Chequers for a drink last week, and (among other things) had a chat to the PM about it.

I was very glad that she endorsed my view, eventually extracting an undertaking from Mr Speaker that the matter would be re-examined when the House is back in September. A small thing but mine own.

Similarly, my remarks in this column about the idiotic waste of money by Wiltshire Police examining the slender evidence against Sir Edward Heath sparked national comment, and a announcement by the Chief Constable that he would produce the Op Conifer report ‘in the autumn.’ He will not be allowed to slip it into the long grass by passing it to the Independent Investigation into Child Sexual Abuse under Professor Alexis Jay, who have made it plain that they will look at the report with interest, but that consideration of it is well beyond their remit.

That view was reiterated to me in an oral question to the Home Secretary before the House rose. The report must be public, and I will make sure that it is.

If Sir Edward did anything wrong then we must know about it; but if there is no evidence that he did so, then the nasty slur against this PM’s good name must be expunged for ever.

My heart was warmed by an email from a serving police officer, who, for obvious reasons will remain nameless. “I am a police officer with [] years of service, and your [column] has put a smile on my face and cheered me up no end on a damp and dreary Monday morning. The content was such that I agreed 100 per cent.

“It brought back many fond memories of policing gone by, a situation I fear we will never get back to. I just wanted to email to thank you for your views and the way they made me smile”

I am just back from a few days in the Arctic leading a little expedition to visit the British Antarctic Survey on Spitsbergen. The clear waters and warm days at this most northerly inhabited spot on the globe – just a few hundred miles from the North Pole itself – was more than enough to re-convince the 10 MPs and peers in the group of the reality and imminence of climate change and the retreat of the Arctic ice. We will not solve it ourselves, but visiting the distinguished British scientists spending year after year on retreating glaciers and spreading that word back in Westminster may be just doing a little useful cross-pollination.

A word here, a question there, some media comment, surgeries, voting, influencing Ministers. It is these small, almost invisible cross-fertilisations, flitting from topic to topic like a butterfly, which is the very business of politics.

And just from time to time, in the words of the late great Muhammad Ali, as well as “floating like a butterfly” we backbench MPs, should also “sting like a bee.”