This week, on a break between standup tour dates, I am on holiday with the children in Nether Stowey, Somerset, from where I file the next of my election columns. As a north London Old Speckled Hen socialist I assumed there would be little political for my satirical pen to set about in Somerset, where the inhabitants live like lotus eaters in a bucolic haze of smoked eels and whortleberry jam.

Would Old Mother Leakey of Minehead curdle the local Liberal Democrats’ drinking chocolate again, I wondered? Or perhaps a Gilbert’s potoroo, escaped from the Tropiquaria attraction, would be mistaken for an immigrant, and chased around Watchet by the retailer with the commemorative Battle of Waterloo display in his shop window? But, deep in an ancient Exmoor woodland, I stumbled upon a scandal as explosive as Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP’s 2005 expenses claim for an actual entire lake.

Readers of the antiquary and wartime spy Hazel Eardley-Wilmot will already be aware of the Culbone Stone, an inscribed menhir hidden deep in woodland, west along the coastal path from Porlock Weir. I set out to find it last Wednesday afternoon, thrashing through dense brambles, the unhappy children, three and six, in tow, having been convinced they were upon a Narnian quest, but one which soon turned sour as it took on a very modern political dimension.

Once lepers were left to wander these woods, kindly allowed to view the consecration of the host in St Bueno’s church through a bespoke “leper window”, or hagioscope, and nourished only by donations of food abandoned by the villagers. It was the “big society” in miniature. And for those who don’t remember David Cameron’s big “big society” idea of five years ago, it was essentially the hope that simple human empathy would compensate for an ideologically driven programme of cuts, but named as if it were some kind of grand political theory. In the middle ages things were more prosaic. They called the same idea simply leaving bread out for lepers in the woods, who otherwise would just die.
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The birds were singing in the thickets as we pushed through the wild rhododendron bushes towards the ruined Barnardo’s orphanage, formerly Ashley Combe house, and I put my new free NHS hearing aids in to appreciate their calls. It was then, in the overgrown former garden of the estate, that I zeroed in, Steve Austin-style, on unmistakable voices in confidential conversation, and beckoned the children to hide with me behind some twigs, silencing their prattling with two jelly babies.

Three of the most rapidly downwardly mobile players of the current election, politicians so gaffe-prone that watching them explain themselves, even to sympathetic BBC Tory sleeper agents like Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil, seems cruel beyond reason, were in animated conversation around an Ordnance Survey map; culture secretary Sajid Javid, Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps, and education, women and equalities minister Nicky Morgan.

“… and Culbone woods will be a pilot scheme for the initiative that will save us the £8bn we have promised to find, and then Andrew Neil can stick his ‘magic money tree’ up his BBC socialist sporran,” concluded Shapps, spreading out the map on a tree stump and pounding it with his face, his essence having manifested itself for the day in its contemporary “Grant Shapps” identity.

“Would there be some way of monetising the lepers, Grant?” asked Javid. “Perhaps we could sell people tickets to ridicule the lepers in the wood, howsoever they thought finest, and then those tickets could be sold on at an even greater profit by entrepreneurial secondary ticketing agencies? Or maybe the leper pimps could pimp out any sexy lepers to leper fetishists, and we could take a cut?”

Nicky Morgan was infuriated by the culture secretary’s ideas. “Grant’s not saying we should fill British woodlands with actual lepers, Sajid,” she interrupted. “He’s just using how it used to work with the lepers as an example of something we could do to find that eight-billion figure some idiot let slip.” Javid, crestfallen, retreated, repeating “let the market decide” beneath his breath, over and over again, like an article of faith, like a Hail Mary.

“Nicky is right, Sajid,” continued Shapps, absentmindedly eating the cover of the map. “Imagine, acres of British woodland, all over these isles, filled with society’s most costly free spirits, cut loose from the ties of the nanny state, and left to fend for themselves, like symbolic figures in a medieval illuminated manuscript.”

I wish I could remember more, but as I sit here writing, two days later, my chain of thought has been irreparably broken. A person from Porlock has arrived, asking me who I am, and what I was doing in the woods on Wednesday.