Has anybody here seen Heffer?

The press reports said he had resigned ‘to spend more time with his money’ (I made up that last bit); actually to do research and possibly a new book.

I had confidently anticipated that he would turn up almost immediately in the Daily Wail, where he came from, and I predict that he will eventually. He really has nowhere else to go in the mainstream print. Although he was getting a bit formulaic and Cameron-obsessed, we need a polemical columnist and there seem to be fewer and fewer. Quentin Letts in the Wail is pure joy, but otherwise it is beginning to look rather threadbare.

This is what Stephen Glover had to say in the Indy:

‘I shall miss him – not just because a remarkable character has, at least temporarily, been hauled from the stage, but also because he offered readers a service barely provided by any other right-wing journalist in Britain. It is not every columnist who is feared and loathed by a prime minister. He was feared and loathed because he was good at what he did – criticising Mr Cameron. I am sure he spoke to the hearts of many Telegraph readers.

My only advice to him, in the unlikely event of my being consulted, would have been not to peak so early in his campaign – a few hours into the Tory leader's tenure. Take it more slowly, I would have said – discharge a couple of small battlefield nuclear weapons before graduating judiciously to something more lethal, and then only finally, if you get no clear results, let fly with your largest intercontinental missile. Once he had immediately committed his heaviest weaponry there was no pulling back, and there was always a danger of tedium setting in. That said, no one could deny that under full propulsion he was a wonder to behold.

Now that he has gone I feel, if I may be allowed to change my image, as our human ancestors must have done when the last woolly mammoth stomped off over the horizon to extinction. They would have gazed out almost nostalgically across the bleak Siberian plains, where not long before, this wondrous beast had crashed around, flattening hapless victims under his fearsome feet’.