A small part of me died when I read this incredible quote from Chelsea manager Maurizio Sarri after his team lost to Arsenal: “This group of players are extremely difficult to motivate.” The multimillionaire manager of a squad of overseas multimillionaire footballers saying that his charges lack motivation. It could be that Sarri is using some kind of psychology to rouse his players, by questioning their level of commitment to the football club. Or it could be that his players simply don’t give a toss?

Precious little about modern football, particularly at the top end, makes much sense to me. These days, I work part time in a world in which people have little. I see sick and disabled people struggling by on a pittance, in constant fear that they will be deemed fit to work, regardless of a permanent, debilitating condition and/or a terminal illness. And by and large, they are cared for by workers who earn the minimum wage. Just before Christmas, I met a couple of young women aged 20 who earned £5.90 an hour for providing basic domiciliary care. £5.90 an hour. That might buy you a pint of hipster-friendly craft beer but it won’t stretch much further than that. If that’s what you earned at Chelsea, that new Aston Martin could take a while to save up for. For all that, they were utterly committed to their jobs, regardless of the low value the Great British Public accords them. They were highly motivated.

I can’t understand why someone who earns, say, £300,000k a week cannot get motivated to give 100% at work, yet someone who earns less than £6 an hour is. Perhaps, it is all about hunger? The wealthy footballer does not struggle to put bread on the table, does not have to juggle a myriad of different responsibilities around the school run and rush to work, does not fear they will get the call tomorrow morning that there is no work for them.

I simply cannot imagine what it must be like to earn £30k in a year, never mind £300k in a week. Coming from a background where my mother would wait outside shops at the end of the working day to pick up the unsold offcuts of meat, the unsold and blemished vegetables and, if we were very lucky, fruit, I cannot conceive of not being grateful to getting through to bedtime without feeling hungry. My mother, I discovered many years later, frequently went hungry so I didn’t have to. In Sarri’s world, young men with more money than God struggle to be motivated. I’m not sure of the right word to use but it’s sick.

The astonishing statement by the Chelsea manager is hardly unique, is it? It wasn’t that long ago when the then Leicester City footballer Riyad Mahrez went on strike because he wanted to force a transfer for Manchester City. A care worker on poverty wages would face immediate dismissal if she (or he) went on strike. Mahrez’s tears later when Leicester’s owner was killed in a tragic helicopter accident – well, I won’t go there. He was probably sincere, just like he was sincere when he forced his transfer.

It is at times like these when I despair about the direction of football which is not the same game I grew up with. The people’s game is played by people who apparently need additional motivation in order to their jobs. If Sarri is right, maybe the game really has gone. I’m losing more interest in it by the day.

With the country still at war with itself – although hopefully not literally just yet – it is fashionable to criticise one’s fellow voters as being stupid, ignorant or worse. Given my academic and professional record, I can see why people describe me that way. I’m not going to call anyone stupid or ignorant in this blog. In fact, I suggest that some 41% of the electorate are the smartest ‘don’t knows’ in the land. They don’t know who the best PM is between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn.

I would suggest that the 41% represents quite a coalition of voters, not just the don’t knows. As a bit of a political anorak, I struggle to work out who out of May and Corbyn is the worst. Both have taken mediocrity to a new, miserable low level. I’m not sure I could put up a convincing argument to say which was best.

David Cameron unquestionably wins the award for worst PM ever. Forget his efforts at flinging austerity at the poorest people in the land – most Tory PMs do that – or making the lives of the sick and disabled even more miserable than they already were. Calling a referendum on our EU membership set the country on fire, a fire that is set to burn for years, possibly decades, to come. History will look poorly back at a man who inflicted massive division on the country in what was really a narrow, party political insight. As leaders, though, May and Corbyn sink to new levels of ineptitude.

Neither the PM or the leader of the opposition (LOTO) are great thinkers. They have no new ideas, always assuming they have any ideas at all. Neither can think on their feet, one – Corbyn – reflects the narrow far left of Labour politics (and beyond), including a long held desire for a hard Brexit, whereas May has no obvious political philosophy at all, other than sucking up to the basket case hard right Brexiters. They are the worst of the worst.

May languishes on 36% as best PM in the polls, presumably supported by those who think she is not as bad as Corbyn, rather than much better. The amazing aspect for me is that an amazing 20% of the electorate – that’s literally one in five voters – think Corbyn would make the best PM. Far be it for me to belittle the views of these voters – in which I include May’s supporters – but I ask this simple question: what are they thinking about?

Love or hate someone like Thatcher – and I still hate her as much as I did when she was still alive – no one can deny the impression she made as PM. Even though she single-handedly destroyed our manufacturing base, privatised most of the things we owned, ran down the NHS and schools and encouraged everyone to be greedy and sod everyone else, you would not compare the wretched Maybot to her. And whilst Tony Blair’s name is not perhaps what it was when he became the only Labour leader to win an election (three, actually) since I was first able to vote in 1975, can anyone see Corbyn, the Magic Grandpa himself, a man with a horrible history of meeting and indulging actual terrorists, as well as never having held a meaningful role in politics until he accidentally became Labour leader, running the country? The 41%, of whom I am one, have no doubt. No chance.

If anything shows the vacuum in British politics whereby we are devoid of leadership, direction, vision and actual policies at a time of cataclysmic change. An unprincipled Tory PM, who is a closet remainer but now campaigns for the hardest possible Brexit and an unprincipled accidental LOTO who pretends to support remain but is, and has always been, the hardest Brexiter imaginable, to all intents and purposes, in the words of Nick Cohen, a disaster socialist, someone who needs a societal and economic disaster to introduce his brand of socialism in one country.

I can’t vote for any of this lot and neither can at least 41% of voters. But things will become much clearer in the next few years.

Soon, the Tories will ditch May and if they are fortunate choose someone who can walk and chew gum at the same time, appears vaguely competent and has some idea of what he or she is doing. If Labour stick with Corbyn, prepare for electoral catastrophe for the people’s party, especially when Magic Grandpa’s cult following wakes up to the fact that he’s no good and that everything they saw in his bizarre assent to party leader was merely smoke and mirrors and a rehash of the failed far left politics that sank Labour for 18 long years from 1979.

May is terrible, Corbyn is even worse but the best of them all is don’t know. Or quite possibly no one at all.

Fair play to Ant McPartlin, the artist formerly known as Ant, for returning to ITV to help present the new series of Britain’s Got Talent. Although I have never actually seen him present anything on telly, I read that Ant and his partner Dec are the greatest presenters on the planet. As presenting is the new rock and roll – actual talent of something like singing , dancing or writing is no longer necessary – he’s a big star. Just present someone else’s talent and you can end up making more money than them. Nice work if you can get it.

To be fair to Ant, he’s had a few demons in his life, with various addiction problems and a drink-driving conviction. Not a good look for a TV presenter who I read is ‘loved by millions”, but he is getting better.

I do not begrudge him the privilege of going into rehab, something that is generally only available to the rich and privileged. I suppose if any of us were filthy rich and not feeling too good, we’d probably do the same. He’s also very lucky that he was able to go sick from work after his drink-driving conviction in April and, in August, decide to take the rest of the year off. For normal people, a couple of days on the sick brings about a disciplinary warning and a bit longer than that can mean dismissal. Happily, if you are an incredibly rich person who appears on telly, this is not likely to happen to you.

All I am really pointing out is that in modern day Britain, it’s one rule for one and quite another for everyone else. I am always pleased to hear that celebrities and the like come out with mental health issues, especially when they gain access to treatment to set them on the road to recovery. The story of Kate Middleton’s brother James moved me to tears. He knew he lived a life of privilege which did not prevent him descending into the depths of poor mental health. At least there was something to catch him when he fell.

The truth is that there is no one and nothing to catch everyman and woman when they fall, unless they are so bad they require sectioning.

Good luck Ant. I hope through his privileged access to the best treatment money can buy he can campaign so all people in his position can get help. My experience is that if your average punter falls as Ant’s did, there will almost certainly be nothing for them, unless they survive long enough to go on a waiting list.

A typical lowlight on Radio Five Live this morning – and believe me, there were many – was the caller who expressed the desire to end this Brexit farce by supporting Theresa May’s terrible deal. He was sick to the back teeth of Brexit this, Brexit that. He wanted to talk about something else. If May’s deal succeeds tonight in the House of Commons and the media will talk about nothing else for many years. You see, it’s all about cliff edges.

The first cliff edge is at the end of March 2019. If Britain does not secure a deal with the EU, we crash out. Contrary to the lies of the leavers, this will be hellishly painful and could collapse parts of the economy and it would certainly cost the country a lot of jobs. If we do agree a deal, the next cliff edge will be at the end of 2020 when the transition ends. But things won’t be ready by then, so we will ask for an extension which will almost certainly be the end of 2022. This is if things go well.

The other thing is that May’s terrible withdrawal bill is simply that: a bill that enables us to leave the EU. Everything that happens afterwards will be securing new trade deals with the EU and every country in the world with whom we currently have a trade deal outside the EU. And not just trade deals. Our entire relationship with Europe and everywhere else in the world will need to be renegotiated. Barely a single aspect of our lives will be unaffected by the trauma that is yet to come.

I have mixed feelings about a further referendum because in principle I am opposed to their use. I support a representative parliamentary democracy, not a combination of both. But I am coming to the conclusion that we cannot resolve this impossible conundrum any other way. 48% of the country in 2016 knew it wanted to remain, whereas 52% wanted to leave. But leavers have so many different visions of what leave means. Some want to stop foreign people coming to work here, others don’t like foreign people at all, especially those with dark skin. Some want to take back control of the borders we never lost control of, others want to return to parliament the sovereignty we never lost. Not a single leaver seems to be able to express a single positive the country will enjoy by leaving the EU and cannot come up with a single EU law or directive which has negatively affected their lives. Leave means leave, although we don’t quite no why.

Theresa May says history will not look fondly at those who oppose the immense self-harm Brexit actually is. Rubbish. History will not look kindly on the right wing bigots and chancers, like Johnson and Farage, who lied about what Brexit really meant and it will not forgive the current generation of politicians – and I include both Labour and Tory in this category – who are actively working to end the free movement of our own people. It is up to voters to explain to their children and grandchildren why they supported ending the free movement they themselves enjoyed. And please do not call it scaremongering. It is what Farage, May and Corbyn actually believe in. In terms of Corbyn, his immigration policies are to the right of Margaret Thatcher. Think about that for a moment.

No. This one will run and run. Hungry people will still visit food banks, over 100,000 children have nowhere to call home, thousands, including ex service personnel, sleep rough and have nowhere to go, the sick and disabled continue to suffer as the government attacks their standard of living. But all our time, money and effort will be spent on making ourselves poorer, following the English nationalism and small state hard right’s Brexit plans.

You can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig. Which is how you describe May’s deal. But don’t concentrate too hard. We’ve got many years of daily obsession with this stuff. I hope you were planning on doing anything.

The most uplifting story of last week, at least for me, was James Middleton’s admission in last week’s Daily Mail that he suffered from depression, something he described as a “cancer of the mind”. Middleton, if you don’t know (and I didn’t), is Kate Middleton’s brother, and Kate, as you may know, is married to Prince William. Along with Prince Harry, Kate and William are ambassadors to the mental health charity Heads Together. I think I may love them – I certainly have a lot of man love for Harry – but it was Kate’s brother’s story which moved me most.

You can find and read his story yourself but I found it profoundly moving. He described his life – if you can call it a life – with depression and the desperate impact it had on his life. Apart from the name and the status, his Black Dog was a close cousin of mine. His whole story brought more than one tear to my eyes, but I was in absolute bits when I read this:

“I know I’m richly blessed and live a privileged life. But it did not make me immune to depression. It is tricky to describe the condition. It is not merely sadness. It is an illness, a cancer of the mind.”

Well, I didn’t need to read that. I know he lives a privileged life, but then so do I, admittedly on a much smaller scale. To the eyes of many, my life should be perfect. I want for very little. I have a perfect partner and children, a place to live, within reason I can have what I like. But that has not prevented me from being down among the dead men. So, how could it prevented Mr Middleton becoming ill? Answer? It couldn’t.

I was about to write, ‘naturally, his story attracted the usual cynicism and indeed abuse on social networks’, but of course it unnaturally attracted the usual cynicism and abuse. That cynicism and abuse born of ignorance. Depression is an illness. Being rich does not cure cancer of the body and so it does not cure cancer of the mind. I’d like to say I never tire of pointing this out, but I do.

Every time someone goes public about their struggle with mental health, someone somewhere gains strength. If Kate Middleton’s brother can open up about his own struggles, why can’t I? That’s a bit more complicated. However, that’s not for now.

In the cycle of bonkers old mental health, I’m on the way down at the moment, but Mr Middleton’s story sort of stopped me in my tracks. The chances of he and I ever meeting are less than zero, but I’d love to buy him a pint, or perhaps a large Pimms, to tell him thank you and that the boy done great. And tell your sis, William and Harry to keep on fighting the good fight.