Andrew Neil's week, as imagined by Brian Beacom

HOW do I feel about having left GB News? Well, I’ll tell you; like a theatre producer who stages a play, only to realise the director has hired his old pals from am-dram, a 16-year-old lighting director from B&Q and a sound engineer who wears a National Health hearing aid.

It’s been the worst eight months of my life. And to put that into context remember I grew up in Glenburn in Paisley. So, yes, I feel hurt. I’d hoped to be attached to a bright, new television channel that challenged and provoked thought.

It did, to be fair. It challenged the intelligence of viewers. And the thought it provoked most was, ‘Had Andrew Neil had a stroke when he agreed to be part of this asinine project?’

But I won’t gloat, just because GB News recently recorded substantially fewer viewers than the Welsh-language version of the children’s show Paw Patrol. And believe me, Paw Patrol isn’t any high shakes.

Yet, any television channel that brings on guests who argue for Jeffrey Epstein, panders to the extremists, concentrates on culture wars and hires the ever-grinning Muppethead Nigel Farage to interview Christopher Biggins – nothing against Biggins however, he looks great in a panto frock – deserves to go down the stank.

Now, you may say; ‘You were making decent coin, there, Brillo; why not stick with it? And it’s not that you’re unused to being associated with failure.’ And that point is well made. Past failures such as The European and The Business reveal that I am to business what Boris Johnson is to birth control.

But I am a journalist. I want to ask the searching questions of those in power. I want to ask why we handled leaving Afghanistan so badly. I want to ask Nicola Sturgeon why Ferguson can’t be trusted to build a boat that could cross Hogganfield Loch. I want to ask your Drugs Czar if Scotland’s Range Rover-driving drugs lords who are caught with heroin will be treated the same as a bloke who pees outside the takeaway on a night out.

And I want to ask Keir Starmer about direction plans – although I may as well ask where he’s going on his holidays, for all I can make of his new pamphlet. And there’s Boris. Does he really, as he claims, have green fingers, like Kermit, or is it down to emptying Wilfred’s nappies?

And what of my future? Will the BBC take me back? Will Rupert bear with me once again and team me up with Piers to front his new Fox Channel? Not a chance. I may have once backed Tony Blair over Iraq and believed Saddam had WMDs and the move into Afghanistan – but I’m not a fantasist.

Enoch Powell once said: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.”

Well, I haven’t been cut off midstream. And I don’t know what my next production will be yet, but I won’t be working with am-drams.