Is there any point in feeling anxious about matters over which you have no control? I ask on behalf of a man fretting on a ledge.

The cause of my present unease is the US election. Yet I don’t live in America. It’s nothing to do with me. Not my concern. So is this just an indulgence?

It doesn’t feel that way. Trump represents a clear danger to his own country and other countries. He’s a wannabe fascist. Strike that. He’s a fascist without power. Grant him that power and God knows what he’ll do.

Actually, forget about God.

The vain ungodly man has already said he’ll lock up opponents and shut down TV stations he dislikes (pretty much any broadcaster deemed not to have been sufficiently flattering).

And he’ll flog you a Trump-branded bible while he’s at it. How has this deeply unholy, unchristian man won over the pious people of America? A locked-room puzzle too difficult for me to solve.

Mostly, of course, Trump is desperate to win so he can overturn the many legal cases lined up against him.

In the last days of his campaign, Trump limps like a ragged old cockerel with a temper and a bad leg. He rages he is going to “win big” or whatever stupid words he uses. Yet he is also lining up the legal cases to challenge the result if he loses. If he’s that ‘brilliant’, why’s he so worried about losing?

Trump is also deeply, deeply weird. Unhinged and unsavoury. The idiot’s idiot. His speeches cough up violent language and misogyny.

Solipsistic to an insane degree, as if no-one else in the world exists. It’s. All. About. Him.

And then he makes strange swerves like this: “That beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I have the whitest skin because I never have time to go out in the sun. I have that beautiful white. It could’ve been beautiful tan…”

I thought he spent half his life playing golf in Florida. Where the sun is known to dazzle. Or maybe it doesn’t shine on crybaby Trump. Perhaps he’ll take the sun to court.

Whatever he does seems not to matter. Even, bizarrely and horribly, when he mimed an oral sex act at a recent rally. Yup, he simulated a blowjob with a microphone. You know, I hardly believe I just typed those words. Will nothing sink him?

More reasons than can be numbered here are there to hope the Democrat candidate Kamala Harris can win on Tuesday. It’s all so worryingly close, especially as Harris is lumbered by being from the incumbent side. But at least she’s a proper ordinary human being.

ELON Musk, the world’s richest man, has thrown his weight behind Trump with an oddball enthusiasm that makes both men look even stranger.

What does Musk want? Well, if you believe the conspiracy theorists – they may have a point here – Musk and other big tech oligarchs want to take over US politics and see Trump as just a means to that end.

The likes of Musk see themselves as bigger and more important than ‘mere’ countries. Trump has said he’ll appoint Musk to review (read slash) public spending. Musk would make even more money by denying funds to others. And he would rise to an official level where he could not be touched or regulated.

If that doesn’t worry you, you should probably get out more.

ONE malign oddity is that Musk now weighs in on British politics. About which he knows and understands nothing.

Saturday’s print copy of the Daily Telegraph – not so much a newspaper as a petulant howl from a crumbling mansion in the Conservative wasteland – splashed on what Elon Musk thinks about this week’s budget (“Musk: PM is wrong on farm tax raid”).

The Telegraph was once a respectable newspaper. Now it kowtows to the incomprehensible ranting of an American Tech Bro.

Much of the reporting on the change to inheritance tax affecting farms has had a political twist. Budgets are generally too complicated for my brain. But I think what Labour is trying to do here is prevent the wealthy from hoovering up huge estates to avoid paying tax. Sounds reasonable, especially as small farms are unaffected by this reform.

Whatever the matter, the Telegraph always rants and raves about foreign courts interfering in British life. Yet it seems happy here for a foreign billionaire to stick his oar into our political pond.

Incidentally, the Telegraph also has a column from Liz Truss under the headline: “The economic blob that brought me down is shielding a failing Chancellor.”

Dear me, Truss doesn’t know when to shut up, does she? I think I’d like to buy that economic blob a drink. Although, like the woke mob, it doesn’t even exist.

WHEN searching for a blog topic, sometimes an all-sorts approach seems just the thing. So here goes…

The political commentator Steve Richards makes a good point when he questions the sweeping claims made by some BBC presenters.

“How,” he asks in a tweet, “do Emma Barnett and Laura Kuenssberg know their listeners/viewers are furious?”

He is right to characterise this as “a form of populist arrogance”. As Richards puts it, presenters “read the screaming headlines in some papers… assume they speak for the entire electorate and elect themselves as their fantasy audience’s spokespersons”.

As grumbled about here endlessly, this is how the usual suspect newspapers influence the news agenda. Whatever unfounded flapdoodle is splurged across their pages is then parroted by the likes of Barnett and Kuenssberg. And made to look like a general truth.

The present anti-Labour mood has been stirred up by this unhealthy symbiosis between the newspapers and the BBC.

You might like Sir Keir Starmer, or you might not like him. But he has only been in power for about three months. It’s his turn now; his turn to live up to his promises or to make a mess of things. Fairness dictates he should be given a chance to succeed or to fail. Let him get on with the job. And let the Tories decide which of two right-wing nutcases they want as leader.

It might be nice if Starmer smiled occasionally, though.

And what about that stolen cheese? You’ll have to wait for the stolen cheese…

The man who isn’t really called Tommy Robinson is not a journalist. He’s not a “political prisoner” either, despite what some fools say on social media. He’s a race-baiting far-right activist who repeatedly, blatantly and intentionally ignores the law.

As a lifelong journalist, if now only an occasional operator, it pisses me off when Robinson pretends to be a journalist. You might admire journalists, or you might not. Whatever you think of the inky-fingered brigade, Robinson is not a journalist, but someone who hijacks journalism to his own sordid ends.

If the man really called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was a journalist, you’d think he might know about contempt of court. This refers to any attempt to interfere with the courts and the administration of justice. It’s a serious offence leading to large fines and prison.

Robinson is in prison because he defied a court order ten times by spreading unfounded, defamatory claims about a Syrian teenager. He even admitted to doing so. This isn’t about free speech or an imagined “two-Keir justice”. It’s a rabble rouser and shit stirrer running up against the law he intentionally flouted.

He is only the victim here in the manner that a man who repeatedly head-butts a brick wall is the victim of a rotten sore head.

But what about the stolen cheese? You really want to know about that cheddar, don’t you…

Sorry to criticise Emma Barnett again, but she got very prickly when a guest on the BBC Today programme questioned the usefulness of billionaires. She insisted that they were “wealth creators”. Nope, they are wealth vacuum cleaners. They hoover up most available wealth and make sure as little as possible is shared.

As a blog from last year by the charity Oxfam put it, the richest people in the world make six times more than the bottom 90% of humanity. And they generally pay a low tax rate of 3% while “most people with less money, like nurses and teachers, paid far more. If multi-millionaires paid a 2-3% wealth tax rate and billionaires paid a 5% wealth tax rate globally, it would raise $1.7 trillion a year.”

In short, the more they have, the less for everyone else, especially the poor and those who most need it.

And now for that cheese…

I hesitate to say that I like this story as it involves much heartache for hard-working businesses. But it’s about cheese and who doesn’t like cheese.

Neil’s Yard Dairy is a respected distributor and retailer of British artisan cheese. A long time ago, way before the Lidl years, I visited the shop in Covent Garden, where quite a large sum of money secured a small piece of cheese. I also patronised the Monmouth Street coffee company, exchanging a handful of coins for a big bag of coffee beans. The coins to beans ratio was good back then; less so now.

Neil’s Yard Dairy has just been hit by a scam whereby artisan cheese worth £300,000 – as supplied by three small cheesemakers – was reportedly spirted off by someone pretending to represent a French supermarket chain.

Despite being hit by the loss, the dairy has “paid the three artisan cheesemakers in full” (The Guardian, October 26). This was obviously the right thing to do, but don’t go telling those billionaires.

The police are now involved. Hopefully the cheese-nappers will be caught. I tried to insert a pun there, but it wasn’t very mature.

I love that a transatlantic spat between Donald Trump and the Labour Party was sparked by a post on LinkedIn, a site not know for causing excitement.

Trump is in a sulk because – well, when isn’t he taking umbrage about something or other. For a self-proclaimed ‘tough guy’ he’s not half a tantrum-turning crybaby.

This time the thin-skinned, orange-hued spinner of lies and urban myths, fascist asides and old man’s grudges and grumps claims “foreigners” are supporting his Democrat opponent Kamala Harris over him.

Then again, he also said people who don’t vote for him should have their “head examined” – when it’s those who do that require such cranial perusal.

Anyway, last week Labour’s head of operations Sofia Patel wrote in a LinkedIn post since deleted that she had “10 spots available for anyone available to head to the battleground state of North Carolina – we will sort your housing”.

Apparently ‘nearly 100’ Labour Party staff, current and former, will be heading to the US before the election in two weeks’ time.

This often happens during US elections, always a draw to British political geeks of various hues. Everything in the US seems bigger and more exciting than over here, including their elections.

What this is, of course, is Trump’s team causing a fuss about nothing as a distraction. Don’t look at those elephant-sized scandals following our dangerously unstable man with dyed spun candyfloss for hair.

Look at that squeaky little mouse over there.

Don’t look at loopy Elon Musk running a millionaire-making lottery to influence the vote in Trump’s favour; don’t look at what Musk wants from Trump.

Look at that squeaky little mouse over there

The BBC got in on the act too – of course they did. Turning squeaking mice into monsters is their speciality. They also sought the opinion of Reform UK leader Nigel. Of course they did, as they can’t help giving that man a platform.

Farage, who spends far more time in the US than in his Clacton constituency, said it was disgraceful for Labour people to do that – but it was nothing like all those times he has campaigned for Trump. You know, when he scooted after the former president like a toadying bridesmaid.

Oh, and the Daily Mirror reports that Farage “used nearly £33,000 of donor cash to help support Donald Trump in the US election” – months before he started complaining about Labour activists volunteering for Harris. A giraffe does not have a neck so long.

Lacking the desire to campaign for anyone here or in the US, I am still drawn to US politics, not least to the horror-show possibility that Trump could win.

I am not sure why this is. Perhaps it’s just that Trump is so appalling, so dangerous – and so clearly wants power to avoid punishment for his crimes, and to attack his enemies and anyone who opposes him.

What explains Trump’s terrible prominence?

Well, he is good news box office, endlessly pulling a braying crowd for his cruel and stupid utterances and dumb stunts like pretending to work at a McDonald’s – and all because Harris said she worked in one as a student. What a small man he is.

Trump fills pages and studio minutes; he is easy to write about, and journalism is sometimes a lazy art.

I can’t believe he will win, but I thought that first time round, so don’t go listening to me.

The most interesting Trump story of the moment takes the form of a late confession.

John D Miller, the former chief publicist to the US TV station NBC, begins by saying: “I want to apologize to America. I helped create a monster.”

He goes on to explain that the Donald Trump we know today was his creation. He led the team that marketed The Apprentice, the reality show that made Trump a household name outside of New York City, “where he was better known for overextending his empire and appearing in celebrity gossip columns”.

Miller adds: “To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.”

Give a liar a false throne and he will not wish ever to leave it.

That television programme has a lot to answer for.

As Miller says: “The image of Trump that we promoted was highly exaggerated. In its own way, it was ‘fake news’ that we spread over America like a heavy snowstorm. I never imagined that the picture we painted of Trump as a successful businessman would help catapult him to the White House.”

HERE are a few thoughts dangled together likes notes on a musical score.

Back in June, Sahra Halgan (above) featured on Later, the long-running BBC2 music show. Last night she appeared at the Crescent in York, billed as “an activist and singer from Somaliland” who sings about freedom. She was once also a “gun-toting nurse”.

This striking last fact was mentioned on Later. Sahra told Jools Holland she hadn’t really been a nurse during the civil war (still on-going) but had helped as best she could while singing to the people she treated.

Somaliland, and I did not know this before now, is an autonomous but unrecognised region that broke away from Somalia in East Africa in 1991. This explains why Sahra Halgan appeared on stage holding a Somaliland flag. She also spoke about her country in halting English with a sprinkling of French, having lived in Lyon after leaving her homeland.

All of which you either need to know or you don’t. What you do need to know is that she is a tremendous singer whose freedom songs have great power and charm, and roll around in barrel of banging rhythms. Her ear-punching three-piece band features a crazily good guitarist who mixes African soul and punky rock, plus a drummer and a keyboard player.

A powerful performer, and one of the best gigs in ages. We went with a friend from Leeds whose passion for live music has survived into his seventies, a dedication to be admired.

Smallish local venues such as the Crescent support musicians and without such places, local live music would dwindle and die.

Some York venues are even more compact, notably FortyFive Vinyl Café, a music-themed coffee bar that some nights turns into a lively venue. We’ve been to a few gigs there, mostly country as that’s the house special. Two weeks ago there was something different with the flamenco guitarist Samuel Moore, who conjured the shapes and spaces of Spain on one nylon string guitar.

Like everyone else who appears at this cherished little venue, Samuel ended by thanking the owners, Ian and Rebecca, for helping to sustain live music.

Not everyone can afford big venue prices. Last time I went to the Barbican in York it cost £55 to see Richard Thompson – and that’s not even expensive for nowadays.

Silly money seems to be involved in the reunion of those squabbling Mancunian brothers; even sillier money was splashed out on Taylor Swift tickets this year, although not by me. Her appeal remains a mystery, but ageing folk-loving jazz fans who dabble in classical music are not exactly her target market.

You may have noticed that certain newspapers and broadcasters have been getting in an absurd tizzy over whether the government intervened to give Taylor Swift a police escort when she performed in London.

All part of a mass attempt to throw mud at Sir Keir Starmer about anything and everything, including meeting Swift. In a sensible country, this wouldn’t even be a story, let alone a ‘scandal’.

Should you feel like indulging in political tit-for-tat, feel free to mention that Margaret Thatcher used to snuggle up to Jimmy Savile.

Still, there is always Have I Got News For You to cheer us up. I must have watched just about every edition of this now-aged TV news quiz. That now marks me as aged, too.

Last Friday’s programme took the unwise decision to feature the ejected Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns as a guest. She was dreadful, as could have been predicted by a one-eyed sparrow from Morley. Still, GBNews did its feeble best to stir up a row about BBC bias, even though Jenkyns stumbled lamely and wasn’t funny at all.

Politicians rarely amuse on that show; hosts Ian Hislop and Paul Merton nearly always do. Merton is a quirky wit to treasure, while Hislop is a journalist who turns his basilisk gaze on the players and fools in that week’s news pantomime.

Life would seem smaller without them.

If Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t want people to poke him with sharp sticks, perhaps he shouldn’t leave them lying about the place. If you don’t give them something to poke you with, it spoils the game.

Some of those jagging sticks think the Labour prime minister is too left wing.

Some think he’s a right-winger pretending to be a man of the left. Some think he just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Some are wounded, grumpy Tory MPs and their biased newspapers.

At least one of them is Rosie Duffield, the Starmer-hating Canterbury MP who won her seat for Labour and, having used her former party to secure her seat, quit weeks later to stand/sulk as an independent (shouldn’t she have to stand in a by-election to see if anyone wants her as their independent MP?).

All this chimes with the feeling that Starmer’s Labour party doesn’t exactly know what it stands for and what it wishes to do with its stonking majority.

Is that fair? Well, Starmer has not exactly been given time to prove himself, and the right-leaning newspapers attacking him have shocking memory holes when it comes to pointing out the sleaze, freebies and political chaos associated with Tories.

Even Boris Johnson, conjuror of untold political chaos and king of the freebie, securer of funds from rich friends and backers to pay for his wedding, holidays and so forth, has tried to claim the moral high ground.

These stumbles are a reminder that politics can easily run off downhill like a careening coach. That’s why the narrative needs shaping so potential cockups and queasy missteps (free spectacles, suits and so on) can be spotted and headed off.

Alastair Campbell, who was Tony Blair’s director of communications, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Labour must make sure a vacuum does not develop which is then filled with stories like the rows over Sue Gray.

What Starmer needs is his own Alastair Campbell, a sharp bruiser and media soothsayer who can read the next day’s headlines.

Sadly, what I didn’t need to read was this headline in the Guardian: “UK may approve bee-killing pesticide despite election promise to ban it.”

Neonicotinoids are banned in the EU because they are toxic to bees – so toxic that one teaspoon of the chemical is said to be enough to kill 1.25 billion honeybees. Yet they have been authorised for use every year in the UK since 2021, thanks to pressure from British Sugar and the National Farmers’ Union.

A spokesperson for Defra said the government had been clear it will change existing policies to ban the use of neonicotinoid pesticides that threaten bees and other vital pollinators. But here comes the qualifier: “Decisions on emergency authorisation applications for use of neonicotinoids on sugar beet for 2025 will be taken in line with legal requirements.”

So they’re going to ban it apart from when they don’t; is that it? As a honey lover this is not good enough for me. I have two jars on the go: a runny honey from a house round the corner, and a fudge-like set honey from a village two or three miles away.

All praise to those bees. We should look after our bees for honey-lovers such as myself. And, more importantly, because bees are one of the most important pollinators for food crops. Without bees, we’d be in a hungry, unsweetened mess.

Look after the bees, Sir Keir. It’s what you promised. Never mind sharp sticks. Watch out for those stings.

At least Starmer rose to the occasion in PMQs this week when a Tory MP asked why he had cancelled Boris Johnson’s 40 new hospital plan.

“Because the promise of 40 new hospitals didn’t involve 40, didn’t involve hospitals, they weren’t new and they weren’t funded.”

As we all know, those ‘hospitals’ existed only in the odd sock drawer of Johnson’s messy mind, where he stores all his worthless promises.

All this talk of how much money everyone earns makes me think I went wrong somewhere.

The BBC’s political editor Chris Mason, a man who always looks as if he’s just stepped in from a downpour, expended much damp energy on a non-story about how Sue Gray, Downing Street’s chief of staff, is paid slightly more than her boss, Sir Keir Starmer.

The figures are around £170,000 for her, set against £167,000 for him.

Top civil servants are often paid about the same or more than the prime minister. This only became a story in part because right-wing newspapers such as the Mail have it in for Gray. Cast into a deep political sulk by Labour’s election victory, they are after blood, hence the attacks on Gray – and all those stories about Starmer’s designer spectacles and suits being paid for by a donor.

True, this isn’t a great look for a Labour leader, and we’ll return to that in a moment.

But sticking with pay, always a tricky topic, one thing this story exposes is just how much those reporting about government pay are themselves paid.

The ever-interesting media sage David Yelland once led the right-wing media pack as editor of The Sun.

On Twitter/X, where he says many sensible things, Yelland posted this: “I was paid twice what Sue Gray is now paid as Editor of The Sun 20 YEARS AGO. The hypocrisy of the media here is laughable.”

So just to do the maths here, twenty years ago Yelland was paid £340,000 to edit The Sun; twenty years ago he earned more than twice what the prime minister now earns.

That laughable hypocrisy was evident as Chris Mason dripped all over the studio floor. The man doing the reporting is apparently paid £260,000 – while his predecessor, Laura Kuenssberg, is apparently paid £325,000. Oh, and Fiona Bruce is apparently paid £405,000.

Then again, the disgraced newsreader Huw Edwards, given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, for making indecent images of children, took home £440,000 in 2023 just for reading the news.

Mason is a perfectly decent reporter, if sodden in his delivery; Kuenssberg is many things to many people, from a decent reporter to an overblown commentator with supposed Tory inclinations. Why Bruce tops that list is a mystery to me, but then I am allergic to Question Time (although I like her art show, Fake Or Fortune?).

It’s late in the day now but all this makes me think I should have joined the BBC all those years ago.

Away from those dizzying BBC salaries, here is another good point from Mr Yelland: “And so…. the editor of the Mail on Sunday sits back and watches his front page mould the morning’s political shows… influence the BBC agenda… an institution he wants dead or damaged…. the irony…. This is the power of the press….”

Yup, that’s true. The right-wing newspapers set the news agenda, and the BBC’s reporters tamely follow that trail of poison biscuits.

Those noxious digestives – those in-digestives – were arranged in a way to make Starmer look as bad as possible. This was made possible by Boris Johnson no longer being an MP. When he was an MP, he always topped the Westminster freebie charts.

The tech investor Chrisopher Harborne, handed Johnson a donation of £1m for his personal office, set up after he left No 10. Oh, and didn’t Tory peer Lord Bamford bung him £23,853 to fund his wedding? Oh, and don’t forget the freebie holidays and that golden wallpaper.

If you ask me, no politician of whatever party should accept money from anyone. Keir Starmer should buy his own glasses. Nigel Farage should fund his own lavish lifestyle – and what gall he has to mock Starmer’s spectacles while insisting that £30,000 for free flights to the US doesn’t constitute a freebie.

My MP is Labour’s Rachael Maskell – the only politician, incidentally, to knock on our door during the election.

She tweeted the other day: “I have been sickened by revelations of ‘donations’. It grates against the values of the Labour Party, created to fight for the needs of others, not self. Meanwhile pensioners are having their Winter Fuel Payments taken, risking going cold…”

She was pleasant on our doorstep, in her serious-minded way, but I don’t really agree with her on the winter fuel payments – even though I qualified and could do with the money.

Many pensioners who received the allowance were perfectly capable of heating their homes without it – and saw it as a nice little bonus.

True, the timing was dreadful, and quite took the shine off the election victory. As did those rather handsome glasses. But to suggest that Labour in three months has been anything like as dreadful as the Tories were for 14 years, as some usual suspect commentators wish to do (we’re looking at you, Andrew Neil), is just ridiculous.

SLIPPING in where we left off, Keir Starmer removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher at No 10. He was then criticised by the usual suspect sources, with Telegraph condemning his ‘act of spite’, while the Mail said he was a ‘political minnow’ when set against a woman of ‘vision, courage and moral clarity’.

Starmer said it’s not about Thatcher, he just doesn’t like ‘pictures of people staring down at him’.

An oddity here is that the painting was commissioned by Gordon Brown after he invited Thatcher to tea at Downing Street.

Whatever the reasons for that commission, it’s best to turn that portrait to the wall, as it were, as Thatcher’s monetarist policies have had many bad consequences.

For starters, her belief in the sanctity of privatised monopolies has given us the crisis at Thames Water, and left us with shit in our rivers and seas.

Oh, and privatised rail services cadging a lift from the state. Oh, and private companies earning a guaranteed fortune off the state, whether or not they do a decent job.

Oh, and as Transparency UK has just reported, £4.1 billion worth of Covid contracts going to those with known connections to the Tory party. And £15 billion in contracts said to have ‘raised corruption red flags’.

And then there is our crazy housing market, created in part by Thatcher’s desire to sell off council homes and turn voters into grateful Tories, and then not replacing those sold-off homes. Added to which around 40% of former council homes are now said to be owned by private landlords.

This, in turn, created a precarious rental market that offers little protection or certainty for tenants (yup, another Thatcher benefit).

George Clarke, architect, writer and broadcaster, said on the Today programme last week that governments over the past 40 years have failed to provide affordable rent for social housing and instead been ‘obsessed with home ownership’, leading to a ‘collapse in the entire system’ (yup, another one).

Here’s an idea. Instead of the state paying housing benefit to people on low incomes – money which in many cases will go straight to private landlords – why not build them social housing?

Another Thatcherite belief, still persistent among many, is that cutting red tape and allowing business to do as it wishes will always bring benefits. What is might also bring, along with other considerations, is the making of avoidable tragedies such as Grenfell.

Not sure where that leaves Thatcher’s ‘moral clarity’, but there you go. Obsessively disliking Thatcher after all these years might not be healthy; but neither is obsessively venerating her while overlooking inconvenient truths.

Having started with art, let’s return there, by shaking a head at the Thatcherite rabble known as the Taxpayers’ Alliance. This obscurely funded organisation was given top billing in a lamentable report on the BBC website.

Birmingham City Council owns an artwork collection valued at almost half a billion pounds, which you might think was good for the people of Birmingham. We have been to the city twice in the past year or so, and each time the art gallery has still been shut for renovation, although the reopening is due to begin next month.

As the council is said to be bankrupt, the Taxpayers’ Alliance says it should sell off its art collection, proving again the worth of that Oscar Wilde quip about a cynic being some who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

According to this thin logic, art has only a financial value and should be flogged off when money is tight. What about art having an intrinsic value to our wellbeing, lifting our spirits and broadening our minds. And what, too, about the fact that such paintings were often given to councils in trust.

As the art historian Dr Bendor Grosvenor said on X/Twitter: “The Taxpayer’s Alliance used to push this daft story every year, as if councils should sell off their museum collections. Bizarrely, the BBC is now pushing the same story, and of course quotes the Taxpayer’s Alliance.”

Art galleries are spaces of joy and marvel that should be treasured and preserved. Doing the alliance’s tawdry bidding would strip Birmingham of its art while solving almost nothing.

But nothing for something is what you get for following Thatcher with your eyes closed.

According to GB News, Nigel Farage sent a ‘brilliant’ response to Sir Keir Starmer over banning smoking outside pubs. Since this struck me as highly unlikely, I had a peep on the website, only to be kept out by the paywall, and needy pleading, “Don’t Let Them Silence You – Support GB News…”

Oh, I’d rather support anything else you might care to mention, so the ‘brilliance’ of Nigel Farage will remain a mystery to me, much as it always has done.

But I’ll tell you this, if GB News is short of money, they should stop bunging so much of it to old sulky-pants. His entry in the Parliamentary Register of Interests records that GB News paid him £97,928.40 for what amounts to 32 hours work a month.

After this story blew up, Farage told the BBC the amount was paid not to him but to his company, “which has significant expenses…sorry to disappoint the media”.

Whatever, it’s a lot of money. But I am not significantly interested to pursue this further. All you need to know is Farage has made himself extremely wealthy by bellowing far-right slogans and pretending to be a man of the people.

Also, as if you need telling, he is a shameless self-publicist and hypocrite, a man happy to spout pious asides such as “sorry to disappoint the media” while at the same time stuffing his pockets with media money.

There’s enough brass in that neck to fashion a whole bed.

True, he’s generally only paid by the right-wing media, with an extra £4,000 a month from the Daily Telegraph for so-called columns, but either he’s part of the media or he’s not.

And as he’s now the almost entirely absent MP for Clacton, he shouldn’t be in the media at all.

Anyway, it was smoking outside pubs that brought us to this juncture. In one of his Telegraph columns – the collective noun for which should surely be ‘argy-bargies’ or ‘spittle-spats’ – Farage said: “I’ll never go to the pub again if outdoor smoking is banned.”

Thank heavens for that. No more fag-ash fascism from the nicotine nasty; no more tarry disagreements. In one sulk he’d be demoted from number one pub bore to plain old bore.

One challenge in such matters is that the personal gets in the way of the general.

For Farage, the personal amounts to the ‘right’ to stage photo-shoots in pubs with compliant press photographers. And the ‘general’ is just to blow this into a bigger matter than it really is.

For me, the personal is a desire to avoid loathsome smoke outside pubs (alongside an undying antipathy to one smoker). It’s not a massive problem, to be honest, as pubs are so much nicer without indoor-smoking. For all that, it’s unsettling as a non-smoker to sit clouded in smoke.

The Express, rumoured to be a newspaper, splashed with: “Pubs warn of smoking ban violence”. That seems a bit strong, unless Farage is about to kick-off at his local, or we are about to see another of those riots that were nothing to do with him.

The stuffy silliness of right-wing newspapers has been heightened by their side no longer being in power. And by their insistence all wrongs are down to Labour, and nothing to do with the previous 14 years.

Further evidence of this was found over at the Mail, where Starmer’s reported removal of a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from what had once been her Downing Street study led to claims of ‘outrage’.

Nope, nobody was outraged by that apart from the permanently wrathful Mail.

Whatever you think of Starmer, it seems fair enough that he might wish to remove a painting of Thatcher. Would you want that on your walls? According to one unnamed former Tory minister, the eyes follow you around the room, which would certainly give one the creeps.

Still, a problem with Starmer’s leadership is that everything comes across as a downer. Banning smoking outside pubs seems fair enough on health grounds and is a much smaller step towards than banning indoor smoking was.

But, blimey, Starmer doesn’t go out of his way to bring joy, does he? Those of us who were thrilled at his election victory need to be given something cheerful to clutch.

Not caring for someone in the news can be down to personal prejudice.

Take me and Kirstie Allsopp. Perhaps you are in the dark about who she might be. If so, feel free to put your feet up on the sofa of blissful ignorance.

Those of us not in that position know Allsopp as a presenter of property programmes such as Location, Location, Location, along with assorted spin-offs. Oh, and a terrible Christmas decoration affair at which I may have slung non-festive barbs.

Why the antipathy? Oh, Allsopp oozes entitlement and class privilege, or she does to me, and she’s always sounding off about things, usually without first checking the irony Geiger counter.

A search of her name of the BBC website reveals the following selection…

Kirstie Allsopp: Parenting ‘isn’t rocket science’…

Kirstie Allsopp’s parenting tips: ‘I smashed my kids’ iPads’…

Kirstie Allsopp leaves Twitter over iPad smashing backlash…

Oh, and don’t forget that time she said young people could afford a home if only they gave up coffee, gym and Netflix – seemingly forgetting her family are said to have helped buy her first property.

These are reasons to be irritated by Allsopp, or my reasons. Perhaps this is unfair, as plenty of people seem to like her, including my wife, who enjoys the property shows and even willingly watches that baubles programme.

So why has Allsopp, who never shies from attention, fallen again from the over-stuffed cupboard of news? She has been contacted by social services after allowing her 15-year-old son to go interrailing around Europe for three weeks with a teenage friend.

All this, or the way it happened, was partly her own fault. When her son returned from his jaunt, Allsopp mentioned his homecoming on X, formerly Twitter (yes, she flounced off but must have flounced back).

Someone then seems to have referred her to social services at Kensington and Chelsea Council, who said they were obliged to act.

Some people on the site were gleeful about Allsopp being shopped, while it was also pointed out that social services intervene far more often in the lives of those far less privileged.

As for those who cry ‘Leave Kirstie alone’, they are likely the same people who complain loudly if social services don’t intervene when they should have.

But against my better sour judgment, I sympathise with Kirstie Allsopp here. Yes, she’s privileged and annoying, and a less advantaged parent might not have sent their child off on an interrailing trip around Europe.

But isn’t she’s right to suggest no harm was done, that her son has learned from the experience (even if her saying all that is still irksome).

Now, I’m afraid, you will now have to put up with another of those probably pointless anecdotes where an ageing columnist plucks something they once did from the drawer of dim distance. Does this help or add anything – who knows, but here goes.

In 1970, aged 14, I travelled alone from suburban Manchester to Brussels to stay with a family who’d been our neighbours in the cul-de-sac. Little about the journey has stayed in my mind, but as this was long before the Channel Tunnell opened in 1994, I must have caught the train to London, then another to the coast, then crossed the sea, then caught another train to Brussels.

It is possible these arrangements are not as remembered, but it was eons ago. However I got there, nothing about that trip now seems remarkable. There and back, no harm done. Not as adventurous as the Allsopp boy, but a shaping experience.

It is still possible to wonder at the lack of something more important to report. But as I’ve managed around 600 words on this so far, the sin of giving Kirstie too much attention has been committed here, too.

But just because someone is maddening doesn’t mean they aren’t right sometimes.

NOT much politics here today – we all need a rest – but it has been interesting to see the row-about-nothing-much concerning the Labour peer and party donor Waheed Alli.

Depending on who you believe, Alli either has or temporarily had a pass to Downing Street. This bit of no-news prompts the Daily Flail to wring its hands about ‘Sleaze rotting our politics to the core.’

Perhaps that was a headline left over from the Boris Johnson days of gold wallpaper, Tory backers or mates being given lucrative Covid contracts and boozy lockdown parties in Downing Street. Except, of course, the Mail – and the Telegraph – forgot to report much about any of that.

No reason why there won’t been a Labour scandal sometime or other, but this one’s surely a non-starter.

THE newsprint is yellowing, dating as it does to August 25, 1990. There are two photographs of squash players on that old paper, or one proper squash player and one bumbler.

The kosher hitter of the small round ball is Simon Parke, then 18, who would go on to be number 3 in the world. He would also survive testicular cancer five years later and is now a squash commentator.

The other man is me, qualified only to commentate on a lifetime of not being much cop at hitting that uncooperative rubber sphere around an airless room.

Rackets have occasionally been tossed on to the floor in exasperation, but that’s how it goes when you used to be the third best player in the world. Sorry, that’s how it goes when mostly you’re the third worst player in any gathering of three hitters of the small round ball.

The rediscovered feature is from my old newspaper and was called Have A Go! – the headline was ‘Sporting ambitions are soon squashed!’

That’s two exclamation marks on one page, probably two too many.

Keith Waterhouse, that great newspaper columnist and purveyor of good style, used to disparage this over-enthusiastic bit of punctuation, saying: ‘A sentence that falls flat without an exclamation mark is a flat sentence. The exclamation mark will not inject drama into it. It must be re-cast.’

Something else that should have been re-cast a long time ago is my pretence to being any good at squash. But the thing is, I like the game, and it’s kept me fairly fit (and sometimes furious) for decades now.

At the time of writing that feature, I was 33 years old. In the pictures I look youthful and still have a decent amount of dark curly hair; not so much on either count in the mirror today, with a few lines and any remaining hair turning grey.

It’s not comfortable to confront such evidence of how one has aged, but then none of us escape that. What’s more interesting is how this one average player has kept on for so long.

Simon Parke, who thrashed me 9-0, 9-0, 9-1 in our trial game, had his health struggles with cancer at a young age, while I suffered a heart attack six months ago.

The recovery advice given to me at first was to avoid squash. Too much explosive running around. Not when I’m playing, I said. Eventually I was told it would be OK to carry on, as I’d played for so long.

In that feature Parke said squash was “a simple game, really, very simple”. He advised hitting the ball while aiming for a certain position on the wall, adding that this would help me to know where the ball was going to end up. Where I don’t want it to be is often the answer to that.

It is surprising in life how often you can be told things you find difficult are really quite simple. Hitting a squash ball properly, keeping time while playing the guitar, writing novels that people might want to read. Oh, and baking sourdough bread that rises in fluffy magnificence, rather than struggling to summon the necessary whoosh.

Still, keeping doing things is better than not doing them.

At the time of that feature, Parke was about to begin his third season as a professional and his world ranking had risen to 24. At the time of writing this, I played yesterday and lost again, but did win one game, so here’s to the amplification of small victories.

On the wall before me in the study is a framed copy of the mock-up page presented to me when I left the paper nine years ago. This has a strap teasing what’s ‘inside’ the rest of the paper: ‘Eight-page souvenir supplement on Julian’s rare squash win.’

My squash playing is a long-running joke, you see. But against the odds, I’m still at it.