WHEN history looks back on this week, two contrasting images will stand out. Firstly, Theresa May alone at the wide table of the Cabinet office, triggering Article 50 with her pen and launching Britain into a new future, with a gold-framed portrait of Sir Robert Walpole staring down on her.

She looked impressively statesmanlike – the Conservative Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg referred to her as a 21st Century Gloriana, which was a nickname applied to Queen Elizabeth I in her Armada-defeating pomp – and you the eyes of history really were watching her.

The second image is the picture of Mrs May and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, frostily seated, discussing the post-EU future with their shapely stockinged pins in full view. “Never mind Brexit, who won legs-it?” asked the Daily Mail. There is a place for humour, and it is wrong to be pompously po-faced but, as my colleague Jo Morris argued in this space yesterday, it was an astonishing throwback to a sexist past.

So great was the astonishment about the Mail's misjudgement that another colleague said to me: “Never mind legs-it, are they pulling our legs with it?”

I sent him away to work on his gags, but this appealed to my trivial turn of mind. Why, I wondered is “leg-pulling” a joke – it is no more funny to have your leg pulled than it is to have a tooth pulled.

Most dictionaries suggest it comes from teasing someone by tripping them up from behind or hooking their legs with a walking stick. There is a sinister element to this joke-playing, as it is easier to rob a man when he’s on the ground.

However, there is also a bizarre theory concerning death by hanging, where people could swing from a gibbet with a rope around their neck for days until they were dead. To put them out of their misery, they would apparently pay to have their legs pulled – the extra weight speeding up their passing. The people who pulled the legs were those most despicable types, the hangers-on.

This is a great story, but there doesn’t seem to be any truth in it. The phrase is first recorded as being used in 1881, when the advent of the long drop on the gallows had caused rapid executions.

So let’s turn back to Sir Robert Walpole’s painting. He is regarded as not only the first but also the longest serving of British Prime Ministers. For 20 years from 1720, he dominated British politics in a way that few politicians have since – his period in power is known as the “Robinocracy”, due to his first name, and he was Cock Robin.

Having been imprisoned in the Tower of London for corruption in 1712, he went on to amass an immense personal fortune from his time as Prime Minister, with his close colleagues in the Robinocracy doing almost as well.

But his longevity was due to the skilful way he managed the politics of his day, rendering his opponents in the Tory party insignificant while establishing his House of Commons as the most powerful body in the land and making it acceptable to everyone: king, nobles, commoners and country alike.

Labour is fast becoming insignificant and Brexit may again establish the Commons as the most powerful body. Can Mrs May, though, make a country that is acceptable to everyone – even those who live in a sexist past?

WHAT if all the time, energy, money and thought that is being devoted to Brexit were to be devoted to the biggest crises that are immediately facing our cash-starved country – like the NHS, social care, education and even the proliferation of potholes, one of which at Hurworth has just expensively flung a stone through my windscreen?