My mole hanging story unearthed some ideas...

WRITE about political themes like Brexit or Trump and the world ignores you.

Write about the animal kingdom and the world races for its keyboard with an opinion. Well, some do anyway.

The diary entry about moles on my allotment last week attracted two emails before breakfast.

I pondered why mole-catchers hang their furry little victims on barbed wire out in the fields – pointless as a warning because they’re blind. Charlie Whelan, spin doctor to Gordon Brown while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, who now lives in the remote Scottish Highlands, offers an explanation. “Our mole catcher hung the dead ones up on the fence,” he writes, “because he got paid £1 for every one he caught and that was the proof.”

Maybe that’s what they should do to moles in the Treasury, Charlie.

And from our own Jason Beattie, Mirror Head of Politics, came this epistle: “I think I can answer your question. The hanging of dead moles on farm fences is very common where my in-laws live in Reeth [Swaledale, North Yorkshire].

“I was told by the locals the farmers do it to show they keep a tidy farm. It’s a matter of pride, though it did strike a feather-footed southerner such as myself as rather macabre.”

I asked the internet and found this from a farm holiday owner in East Yorkshire: “The mole catcher tells me that hanging out corpses on a line went back to the days when gamekeepers and shepherds had to prove their job to ensure they would get paid.”

I didn’t want to keep you hanging on for an explanation, but there, I’m afraid, the matter will have to rest.