Thrice huzzah! Crack open the Veuve du Vernay and unwrap me a fresh graduate trainee! Arch-Inquistador Don Pedro Freeman has unsheathed his mighty lance and is about to tilt at the windmills of the wicked exploiters! And I will be there to back him to the hilt, practising the genuflections surely needed as his very own Sancho Pumsa lines himself up as Don Freeman's newest Hidalgo, the Baron of Ombudsman. Olé!

Apart from what is surely only a procedural hiccup in that neither My Lord Hutton nor his lackey-in-chief Brian Bendover have yet seen fit to break the happy news, there is just the one, tiny, tiny problem. Forgive me my stupidity born of generations of inbreeding, decades of boozing and months of ministerial responsibility, but was not the purpose of the whole exercise to look after the consumer?

Let's take a hypothetical situation. Downtrodden Farmer Giles feels Bigbastard Supermarkets Plc are not paying enough for his pork scratchings. So he saddles up his grey mare and clip-clops to London Town. "My liege," weeps Giles to Baron Pumsa. "Prince Terence payeth not more than a groat per pole, rod or perch of my scratchings and my 17 children have had to return their rightful patrimony of an iPhone, Nike trainers and Burberry Sky dish to the pawnbrokers. Intercede, I pray!"

So the good Baron intercedes, Prince Terence is humbled before his peers and there is merry-making across the land. Or at least across the landowners, for when the very peasants who till the soil next come to market next day to acquire their pop tarts, their wife-beater, aye, even their very pork scratchings, there is much wailing and gnashing of cheap jewel-set teeth!

For what is this?! Hath not Prince Terence passed on the higher cost to the peasantry? And hath not his fellow royalty, fearful of the wrath of Baron Pumsa, followed suit? As I say, huzzah.