Digested week: now the miraculous white stag is dead, there are rats in our toilets

On top of a plague of pipe-climbing vermin, the country is facing Boris Johnson's battle to save Christmas

Hunters of old, as Robert Baden-Powell once noted, pursued the white stag - the miraculous stag" - not because they expected to kill it but because it led them in the joy of the chase to new and fresh adventures, and so to capture happiness".