Peter Rhodes: Resign as an MP? Pull the other one

HERE it is. Another bright, shiny and totally unspoiled New Year. So who's going to muck it up, then?

HOW many of the media organisations condemning Oliver Letwin for his views on black people in the 1985 riots have taken a long, hard look into their own archives? Letwin's assumptions and language may seem shocking today but they were common enough 30 years ago. A trawl through the 1985 output of newspapers, radio and TV might produce an interesting crop of red faces.

AFTER sticking faithfully with BBC1 through three episodes of And Then There Were None, the same old question about Agatha Christie's plots won't go away. How on earth did we make a national treasure out of a woman who peddled such implausible tosh?

THE New Year kicked off with a dark warning that "dozens of moderate Labour MPs" are prepared to quit Parliament rather than serve under Jeremy Corbyn? Oh, yeah? And do what? There are few jobs that pay £60,000 a year plus expenses, particularly if your only qualification is as a party activist and bag-carrier. If 50 Labour MPs quit tomorrow, 1,000 Corbyn-loyal candidates would instantly step forward. The truth, beyond the worst imaginings of many Labour politicians this time last year, is that Corbyn has not only won the party leadership but is not making a bad job of it.

IMAGINE this. You are a hard-working German. You have not had the best of years. It wasn't only that business with Angela Merkel announcing a come-as-you-are party for the entire population of Syria. There's still that unresolved issue with the Greeks who, having bankrupted their country, are now kept afloat by billions of euros from hard-working, bill-settling, tax-paying Germans like yourself. You do not entirely trust the Greeks. They are far too handsome, they don't wear ties and they turn up for conferences unshaven and winking at the ladies. And although they promised solemnly to spend your euros on sound, sensible, rather dull infrastructure projects to ensure long-term stability, they smirked in a roguish manner you found unsettling. And then, donner und blitzen, you open your Frankfurter Allgemeine this morning and see an artist's impression of the ultimate Hellenic folly, a 500-foot high Colossus of Rhodes, bigger than the ancient original, to be built at the entrance to the Greek island's harbour and costing £200 million. Bang go the euros. As Virgil almost put it, beware of Greeks bearing off your gifts.

AS the fighting rages on in Helmand province, the lesson of Afghanistan is that there are only two sensible approaches to intervening in such hell holes. The first is not to go anywhere near the place. The second is to stay for centuries, as the Romans did with their Empire. Anything in between is mere meddling.

I INVITED your suggestions for a name for The Line, the border on the weather maps which is becoming a fixture, separating the wet, cold North-West from the warm, dry South-East. My favourites so far are the Shower Curtain and the Hotline.

A READER offers a new social measure. If you're still proud of owning your own house and your own car, he says, then you're definitely working class.

PREDICTION for 2016. Having pledged untold millions for flood defences, David Cameron is landed with the worst drought since 1976.