Do you remember that line towards the end of Tony Hancock’s classic sketch The Blood Donor  when Tony, having given a pint of his blood, keeps phoning the clinic to ask what’s happened to it: “Have you used it yet?”

I thought of this when Eastbourne Tory HQ rang me up for the second time and said, “You’ve received your postal vote. Have you used it yet?” It’s unusual, to say the least, to receive such attention from politicians. So what’s the cause of this sudden outbreak of solicitousness?.

Blind panic, that’s what.

For the Lenin lookalike Jeremy Corbyn is coming up fast on the blind side. Who would have thought it – that a leader who has produced an economic policy which would condemn the whole nation to the debtors’ prison is, with just over a week to polling day, being taken seriously by an increasing proportion of the electorate? Add to that the fact that he’s a Jew-baiter with friends in the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, a mourner at the memorial of the Palestinian mastermind of the lethal attack on the Munich Olympics of 1972. Not to forget that he invited leaders of the IRA to the House of Commons not long after they had bombed Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet in Brighton.

The truth is that Corbyn  sees Tories as bigger enemies than any of the terrorist organisations which want to kill us.

He is no friend of the armed forces whose activities he wishes severely to restrict. His policy on nuclear deterrence is straight out of the madhouse as he declares he will keep it but would never use it.

He is so deluded when it comes to the historical record that he thinks the 1400 years war which Islam has waged against Europe is all the fault of Tony Blair.

A Corbyn  cabinet would contain caricature loonies and apostles of the politics of envy such as Emily Thornberry and the comically incompetent Diane Abbott.

So why would any even moderately sane person toy with the idea of voting Labour next week?

Elementary, my dear voters: elementary.

There is no Tory alternative.

May has shifted her party light years to the left. More power to the unions. More intervention in the economy – well, she said clearly last week she doesn’t believe in “the untrammelled free market.” So she’s setting about trammelling it with even higher business taxes and ever-more regulation.

Theresa May has always been a preposterous attention seeker and control freak. Now, aged 60, she disports herself like a frisky teenage girl. Her long career at the home office was a disaster. Wholesale rape and abuse of underage schoolgirls by Muslim men? The answer. Do nothing. Infiltration of schools by militant Islamists in Birmingham? Nothing. Charged with bringing immigration down to “the tens of thousands”? Nothing again. Well, not quite nothing. She claimed she was powerless to reduce immigration, “Because I’m bound by the EU’s Shengen rules about the free movement of populations.” Having so said, she then voted Remain! How’s that for joined-up thinking? The best that can be said of Mrs May is that she’s rather dim.

Do you still think that Brexit is safe in the hands of such a serially incompetent woman?

Rank and file Tories are a merciful crowd and they could perhaps forgive her all her errors and make allowances for her inconsistencies. But what grass roots Tories cannot do is retain affection for a leader who has turned against the party’s natural constituency and its core supporters . Her most recent policy announcements make it very plain that she does not believe in the right to own one’s own home and to hand on the value of of this inheritance intact to one’s children. That’s the Tory political equivalent of an Archbishop of Canterbury saying he doesn’t believe in God.

Are we all fools? After all, none of Theresa May’s left wing policies should have come as a surprise. Years ago she gave us fair warning when she declared the Tories of Margaret Thatcher’s governments “the nasty party.”

She is fiercely ambitious. And her ambition is to be remembered as the opposite of Margaret Thatcher.

We Eastbourne Tories are a fairly docile and biddable lot. But this bloody difficult woman has got our dander up.