ELON Musk’s company, Tesla, has built a humanoid robot, which he claims will transform civilisation. Hopefully this means an army of Muskanoids (as they’ll undoubtedly be called) will bring an end to intolerance, poverty and war. Possibly by bringing an end to humans first.

Before achieving those goals, the robots should do something even more important: writing journalists’ columns, thus enabling hacks to focus on more useful tasks, such as sloping off to the boozer.

Of course, the Muskanoids will have to be programmed to write dazzling prose. As a celebrated supplier of gallons of linguistic dazzle, I’ve decided to list the essential ingredients a triumphant newspaper opinion piece should contain, which can later be programmed into the memory circuits of the Muskanoids, thus turning them into an army of shimmering steel super-scribes…

1) Always hit your deadline. Time and tide wait for no man. Neither does a newspaper editor. And, unlike time and tide, an editor has a fiery temper, plus a rolled-up copy of The Herald to wallop you with.

2) If you don’t hit your deadline, learn how to cajole, bargain, snivel, blame others, build a case for plausible deniability and, most importantly, duck when a rolled-up Herald is hurtling towards your cranium.

3) Be calm, rational and moderate of temper in the copy you write. Only joking. Rage, rage, rage, like you’ve just stood on your son or daughter’s pet hedgehog. (&*%$ing hedgehogs, eh? Now you’re going to be limping for the rest of the day, plus you’ll have to get onto HedgehogsRUs and purchase a new best friend for little Peregrine or Jemima…) Oops, sorry. I seem to have digressed from the point I was making.

4) Never digress from the point you’re making.

5) Be balanced of opinion. Aye, right. Be as balanced as a seesaw that has a baby elephant on one side and Victoria Beckham on the other. Subtlety and nuance are like owning a grey sofa, or inviting Keir Starmer to a beach party. Exceedingly boring, and not to be countenanced. (NB: If you’re hellbent on inviting one of the above to a beach party, I’d suggest the grey sofa. At least you’ll have something to slouch on once you’ve finished splashing in the sea.)

6) Don’t be swayed by rumours or gossip. Stick to facts. Especially facts gleaned from the Twitter account of Righteous Boaby: he knows the score and has apocalyptic visions. Plus, he has a fetching T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Our Lizard Leaders Walk Amongst Us’.

7) To be a fully functioning media personality, you have to be a man or woman of the world. Schmooze politicians, police officers, judges, scholars and working people of all stripes. Though try not to listen to what they say, for that’s liable to make you open-minded and tolerant, which would never do. (See points 3 & 5.)

Okay, what are you waiting for, little robot? Time to write that first column, which I’m sure will be pithily titled: “Ten Fun Ways To Annihilate The Human Race…”