THERE was a wonderful outbreak of mugwumpery yesterday, but what did all mean?

Boris Johnson, on his first outing of the election campaign, called Jeremy Corbyn a “mutton-headed mugwump” because he is concerned that people may think Mr Corbyn is a “benign Islingtonian herbivore” – Mr Johnson’s belief that Mr Corbyn’s defence policies actually make him a threat to Britain’s security.

Mr Johnson thought the funny-sounding word came from Roald Dahl, which is true: in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Willy Wonka refers to a “muddle-headed mugwump”.

And Mugwump is also the name of a curious shop in Saddler Street in Durham which bills itself as “a unique boutique since 1966”.

But the word really comes from the Massachusett language of the Algonquin people who were native to north America. To them, a “mummugquomp” or “mugquomp” was a chief or a war leader.

When European settlers heard the word, they thought, like Mr Johnson, that it sounded amusing and so from 1828, the Oxford English Dictionary says that it acquired humorous overtones.

However, in 1884, it acquired a specific meaning in American politics. The presidential race was between the Republican candidate, James G Blaine, who was nakedly corrupt, and the Democrat Grover Cleveland, who was so clean he was nicknamed “Grover the Good”.

Until a skeleton rattled in his closet and it was scandalously revealed that he had fathered an illegitimate child when a bachelor. He had even paid child support to the mother, which his supporters said showed what a good chap he was.

Some Republicans agreed that Blaine’s corruption was worse than Cleveland’s private affairs and so they backed the Democratic candidate. To some, this made them look principled, rising above party politics to support the best man; to other, this made them look like opportunistic fence-sitters, with their mug on one side of the fence and their wump on the other. These mugwumps were partly responsible for Cleveland’s victory.

So which of these thoughts were uppermost in Mr Johnson’s head when he chose the evocative phrase “mutton-headed mugwump”? Mr Corbyn is undoubtedly principled (whether those principles are suitable for the current decade is another debate) and he certainly put party politics aside when he voted more than 500 times against the New Labour government.

Or perhaps Mr Johnson was being even more nuanced. What with his talk of an attack on Syria and Donald Trump’s attitude towards North Korea, perhaps we will soon be needing a “mugwump” in the true Massachusett meaning of “war leader”.

MY thunder has been stolen by J Ashwood’s letter (right). On the A66 verge at the damp foot of Blackwell bank to the south of Darlington, there is a lovely lighty-lilac drift of cuckoo-flowers. I have not seen a better collection of them anywhere on my travels around Durham and the Tees Valley, and this year, they appear to be spreading.

Some know them as milkmaids; others as lady’s smocks, but most call them cuckooflowers because when they bloom, the first cuckoo isn’t far behind.

In Austria, they say that anyone who picks a cuckooflower will be bitten by an adder. In Germany, they say that anyone who brings a cuckooflower indoors will have his house struck by lightning. In this country, they say that the cuckooflower is sacred to the fairies so it is bad luck to pick it.

When I wrote about them in late April 2014, lots of people told me that they, too, had admired the presence of the cuckooflower, but a week later, a council mower went through them and reduced them to grass clippings. I hope J Ashwood is right and the cuckooflower is safe.