In all the excitement, I haven’t had a chance to upload my chopper gags.

‘Axe the Tax’ photos like this have lead to a whole series of ‘how big is your chopper’ gags. As you can see, Paul Holmes MP has a very big chopper indeed.

But not nearly so much as the problem of guillotining leaflets. Printing A5 leaflets on A4 or A3 paper means you need an awful lot of chopping done.

At work we don’t have as big a chopper as I would like. In fact, it’s old, blunt, the safety screen has long since broken off, and it can only handle about 10 sheets at a time, which isn’t much help when you have a constituency’s worth of leaflets to chop.

So, we spent a fair amount of time bombing down the M1 with a carload of leaflets to colleagues 60 miles away who have an industrial size chopper — one so big you need both hands to get it to work. So big, it has a label stuck to it saying ‘Einmanbedienung’ — for use by strictly one operator at a time. It can cut 500 sheets at a time.

Even when you factor in the time to take 40,000 sheets of paper downstairs, load them into a car, drive them 60 miles down the M1, unload them, and carry them upstairs to the chopper, it’s quicker to use the industrial chopper than the office one.