Who needs a silly season when we have Boris all year round? – David Behrens

I recognised the signs on Thursday when it was declared that an electric ice cream van was now the fastest in the world, following a series of time trials at Elvington Airfield in York.

Evidently, the owner had forgotten what a Mr Whippy van is actually for. He won’t sell many ice creams going at that speed, as Eric Morecambe famously said.

It did not scale the same heights of silliness as the story of mine from around 40 years ago that always comes to mind, about a fair-haired family in Leeds who swore blind that their goldfish would not accept food from anyone who was not also blonde. This, they insisted, meant that before going on their summer holidays they had to issue their neighbours with light wigs so the thing wouldn’t starve. Goldfish Prefer Blondes, ran the headline.

Boris Johnson’s failings exposed by his bluster – Andrew Vine

Silliness today is no longer really seasonal – the Prime Minister seems to have appropriated it all year round. And we were reminded this week that even in recesses, Parliament is capable of rising to quite stunning heights of inanity.

I am thinking not of Gavin Williamson’s department but of the decision by the Restoration and Renewal Sponsor Body, the outfit responsible for renovating the Palace of Westminster, that it would not entertain Mr Johnson’s suggestion of moving the whole circus to York while they get the builders in. This was taken on the flimsiest of pretences: it was not within their remit, they decided.

It seemed really to have been based on a knee-jerk aversion to moving north, even temporarily. It sounded much the same as the outcry from within Broadcasting House a decade ago when the BBC asked its staff to relocate to Salford.

Gavin Williamson will never make the grade unlike our A-level and GCSE students – Jayne Dowle

It is a curious quango, this restoration authority. It has set out its stall on managing the repair of the Houses of Parliament in a way “similar to the 2012 London Olympics and other successful infrastructure projects”. There are two things wrong with this: first, Britain cannot point to any other successful infrastructure projects in the public sector; and second, Parliament is nothing like the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee is a paragon of propriety compared to the Commons.

It’s a shame York will not now be treated to the pantomime of Black Rod having the door slammed in his face at the annual opening – because just down the road from Clifford’s Tower there is the perfect setting for it. This is Fairfax House, the rather splendid and traditional Georgian gentleman’s residence, which has also had the builders in. Among the secrets they uncovered, conveniently in time for the silly season, was the fact that the only original feature in its elegant salon is a fake doorway which opens on to a solid wall, as if in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It was put there by the architects to make the room more symmetrical, and if Black Rod were to knock through it, he would plunge headlong down the grand staircase. It would be a Whitehall farce worthy of Brian Rix himself.

Reasons to celebrate the BBC’s great value and content – Yorkshire Post Letters

Fairfax House is on the small side for 650 MPs admittedly, but the pop-up Shakespearean theatre that stood next to Clifford’s Tower last summer and the one before would have accommodated them handsomely. And the configuration would have been perfect: the opposition shouting from the galleries and the public in the pits, throwing bread rolls. Shakespeare foresaw it 400 years ago: “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard,” declaimed Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

As it is, the two Houses of Parliament will likely relocate together, just around the corner and within firing distance of their civil servants.

The venue they will use has yet to be selected – but in the spirit of the season, may I suggest erecting a Big Top on College Green, populated by clowns in blonde wigs competing with Jacob Rees-Mogg for the most ridiculous costume, while outside the ice cream man from York flings out cornets as he whizzes past at 100mph.

It would fill some airtime, but it would probably still not be the silliest spectacle in Westminster.

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James Mitchinson