Peter Rhodes on bytes in your pipes, going Tonto and yet another hike in our insurance bills

It has been an interesting time for Native American names. The alpaca sentenced to death for testing positive for bovine TB was named after the great chief Geronimo. Boris Johnson was accused by aides of “going ****ing Tonto” in a row with Chancellor Rishi Sunak. I'm not sure how one goes Tonto, unless it involves wearing buckskin and calling your boss Kemosabe.

It's a strange thing but whenever Boris/Tonto faces some new and embarrassing crisis, his enemies rally round to help. At about the same time as the Tonto tale emerged, the Guardian reported that something called the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy is demanding changes to the party's rules. These would enable members to reinstate Jeremy Corbyn, still sitting as an independent MP in the Commons after the anti-semitism row, as a Labour MP. A Corbyn Resurgence? Boris's team must be thrilled.

My home-insurance renewal has just arrived and the premium has shot up by 21 per cent. I can find no explanation from the company. However, some online guru is banging on about the increased risks for insurers – wait for it – as people who were previously working from home return to the office and are therefore unable to keep a constant watch on their property. Here's another suggestion. The home insurers, having seen their colleagues in car insurance making a packet during lockdown, when no-one was driving anywhere, have decided they, too, deserve a big pay day.

The latest techno-ruse announced this week is a government-backed £4 million plan to route fibre-optic internet cables inside your mains water pipes, thus providing new high-speed connections without having to dig trenches in the roads. At least that's the official line.

But as any good conspiracy theorist will tell you, this is all about mind-control. All those billions of electronic words being pumped into your water are specifically designed to plant ideas in your brain. Unless, of course, the fluoride erases them first.

On a more practical level, I can understand how the internet cable could fit inside the water mains. But how do they get it out? At what point in the system does the cable emerge from the pipe? Or does it simply pop out of our taps? And what if you've got a water filter; will it remove all the capital letters? What bracing times we live in.