Picture: Rafael Albaladejo (Pixabay)

MAKING marmalade is a simple, if sticky, pleasure. There’s shredding of peel to be done. Much as there is shredding of truth to be done when boiling up an anti-Labour story about marmalade and the EU.

I’ve been meaning to make another batch for a while. Other things keep getting in the way, including writing about not getting round to making marmalade.

Having once followed the traditional recipe, toiling over the pot in January after the bitter fruit arrives from Spain, I now buy a tin of prepared Seville oranges, to which water and sugar are added.

My version also contains whisky, as should all good things, including once a week the writer of these words.

What with everything going on in the world – and, no, I don’t wish to mention the marmalade-hued mad man-baby at the moment, as thinking about that irredeemably awful man too often is harmful to one’s health – you might have thought marmalade would be relegated to a tittle-tattle paragraph.

That would be to reckon without the mad right-wingers and their backers in the usual suspect newspapers. That crew like nothing more than bashing Keir Starmer while supposedly sticking up for great British traditions.

Yet marmalade, you will not be surprised to learn, originated elsewhere, with most sources pointing to the Portuguese word Marmelos, a quince paste popular long before marmalade became commercial in the late 18th century.

Personally, I wouldn’t recognise a quince if one hit me on the head. But I can spot a story heated up way beyond boiling point.

The BBC first gave this agglutinative pot a mischievous stir, reporting on its website that as part of a planned food deal with the EU, the UK was considering aligning with the bloc’s naming rules.

These allow all conserves to be marketed as marmalades – as long as the type of fruit is specified. For example, citrus-based conserves being labelled “citrus marmalade”.

Or orange marmalade being labelled as, er, orange marmalade, as it always has been.

Never mind that, there was a backlash to be lashed. Reform UK’s Richard Tice said: “Hands off our marmalade!”, possibly while having breakfast in Dubai, where he spends much of his time. For the Tories, Dame Priti Patel had a breakfast burp: “Labour is now attacking the great British marmalade!”

Warning: marmalade may also contain exclamation marks. And be sold to you by nuts.

So the people who flogged us the non-existent benefits of Brexit are now furious about marmalade. Except they’re not, not really. What they are cross about is almost nobody now thinks Brexit was a good idea. According to a recent YouGov poll, 56 per cent of voters believe Britain should not have voted to leave the EU.

All sensible people should surely now be happy to see stronger ties with Europe being reestablished. Whatever marmalade is called. Especially if it’s still being called marmalade.

With sticky-pawed predictability, the Daily Mail dragged Paddington Bear into the non-story about marmalade. While forgetting that the bear from Peru was a refugee who benefited from the kindness of strangers and stands as a symbol of humanity.

The author Michael Bond drew on his wartime memories of evacuees and refugees to create Paddington, saying: “We took in some Jewish children who often sat in front of the fire every evening, quietly crying because they had no idea what had happened to their parents, and neither did we at the time. It’s the reason why Paddington arrived with the label around his neck”.

So the story about marmalade was fake – and calling on the lover of marmalade sandwiches as a witness was typically shoddy.

As the ursine one himself has been heard to say: “Things are always happening to me. I’m that sort of bear.”

The Observer is my Sunday newspaper of choice. Decades ago, before the paper was owned and then ditched by The Guardian, I went into the office on a Saturday to do subbing shifts.

Other papers are fatter and fuller, but The Observer holds my loyalty, even though the paper betrayed its staff during the Guardian stitch-up sale to Tortoise Media.

Last Sunday’s front page buoyed my occasionally wavering fealty. It wasn’t the photograph of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump that did it, you’ll not be surprised to learn. It was the headline beneath: The unpopulists.

It is rare to read intelligent criticism of those awful men. And yet scrutiny is what they deserve.

Trump has tamed the US media through bullying, bribery and the fostering of naked partisanship.

In the UK Farage has seemingly struck a devilish pact with the media that lets him off scot-free. That common old phrase, by the way, means to “escape payment or punishment”. And, yeah, that’s how it seems to work with Farage, with the usual suspect newspapers parroting his every word, echoed by the Reform-friendly BBC.

Questions and criticism hardly ever arise – and when they do, Farage suddenly loses his cheery bloke persona and shows himself to be tetchy and thin-skinned. That man does not like sharp questions, especially from a smart woman journalist (witness his appalling treatment of ace interviewer Mishal Husain – “Listen love… you’re trying very hard”).

I honestly don’t understand this. I do not get it at all. It’s a head-meet-wall situation, and one that understandably gives me headaches.

But lately there have been stirrings, whispers on the wind, a flurry of hope raised by slippage in the polls.

Inside last Sunday’s Observer, an analysis piece by Sam Freedman carried another headline to cheer: Farage’s No 10 dream is fading as Reform pulls itself apart.

Towards the end of the report – a heartening read, by the way – Freedman reminds us that Reform UK relies “on a handful of donors who have to be kept happy, most notably Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto billionaire who has given it £12m…”

The government has just announced emergency measures to overhaul such political donations.

According to a report in The Guardian on Wednesday, “Labour MPs are absolutely delighted that No 10 is at last bringing in changes that will hobble Reform’s ability to raise money from its Thailand-based mega-donor, Christopher Harborne, at the same time as making the electoral system fairer in the eyes of the public.”

Farage, naturally, has stamped his feet and threatened to sue. He also, as you may have heard, flounced out during PMQs, taking his MPs with him, like a petulant school bully pulling his gang behind.

All the new recommendations, including a ban on crypto donations and a cap on overseas donations, are aimed at reducing the risk of foreign interference in UK elections, and were suggested by an independent report from Philip Rycroft.

Sound and long overdue, as this excellent letter in the Metro argues (Julians are a fine tribe).

Farage wants to subvert everything to his own advantage – he has even been gifted his own TV station in the shape of GB News, basically a Reform UK TV station. This breaks all past behaviour and rules about politics and news, but Farage gets away with it.

We need to know who is giving money to our political parties. That way we have a chance of finding out what donors want. This is especially so at a time when the FT has reported that Trump’s State Department is building up a ‘slush fund’ to bankroll pro-MAGA groups in the UK and across Europe.

Reform UK solicits donations in cryptocurrency precisely because it’s easy to hide the origins of such money. For a man who bored on for years about sovereignty and the EU interfering in our way of life, Farage seems very relaxed when right-wing Americans and oil companies shove their spanners in our political works.

I really do hope that Farage and his on-off buddy Trump (relations have cooled, reportedly) are becoming The Unpopulists.

Trump’s popularity in the US seems to be slipping alarmingly (or very pleasingly), while Farage risks wearing everyone down, including himself, by constantly and boringly campaigning all the time. As a political song and dance routine, his act is remarkable for its longevity. But you have to remember that it’s an act, a cynical bit of fakery, a foot-shuffle to fool the people.

To close, I will repeat something I put up on Threads a while back:

“Farage says he wants to be PM but can’t even be arsed to be an MP.”

Surprisingly, that has now been viewed by 1,849 people. Quite an achievement for my low-flying account. And true, too, even if I say so myself.

“Hell is – other people!” is an infamous quote from Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and novelist. Mind you, I think Sartre missed something there. The full quote should be: “Hell is – other people at the cinema!”

I am at City Screen in York to see Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. Cillian Murphy, star of the TV series, again plays Tommy Shelby in Steve Knight’s Brummie gangster saga.

It’s mid-afternoon and the previous screening is finishing. I wait with the River Ouse behind me. The cinema is where the newspaper was when I came to York in 1988, with the features department just down the corridor, next to leaky windows through which the wind blew.

I think about those days for a while. Then the audience starts to leave, seeming cheerful enough and chatty, a good omen perhaps. One of those departing says in a booming voice: “Well, I knew that…”

He spurts out a giant spoiler.

This is ironic as before the film starts, there is a short preface from Murphy asking us not to give any spoilers. Perhaps that man hadn’t been watching.

What he said can be filed under accidental verbal spillages. It’s what happens next that raises that Sartre quote, taken from a one-act play called No Exit that I cannot pretend to have seen. It features three characters newly arrived in hell who have to interact with each other.

Funnily enough, it is three characters newly arrived in the cinema who almost ruin this screening. The cinema is about a third full. During the adverts and trailers, there is talking from the three. Sadly, infuriatingly, they keep up the chat when the film starts. They appear to be drunk.

Various members of the audience make shooshing noises, one or two walk over and ask them to be quiet. Instead, they keep on talking, one loudly. A member of staff arrives and asks them to behave, but they take no notice. Some people, in hell or elsewhere, have unstoppable gobs.

This continues and a few people leave the auditorium in disgust. After a while, the film is stopped, leaving Tommy Shelby frozen on the screen. The lights go up and more cinema staff arrive. The disruptive crew are told they must leave. The woman, middle aged or probably older, shouts and complains. She has trouble standing and her slurred complaints can be heard as she stumbles up the stairs.

‘I’ll be wanting my money back,’ she grumbles, or words to that effect. The rest of us just want our film back. And that’s what we get, although the first ten or 15 minutes have been ruined.

On the way out, I ask if this happens often, and two members of say that it doesn’t, not really.

As for the film, it’s worth seeing if you’re a Peaky fan. Non-fans will find little to win them round, and strictly speaking the film did not need to be made, but it is made well. The tone is elegiac, the pacing almost slow, interrupted by outbursts of violent rumpus. Cillian Murphy is an older, sadder Shelby, hiding away in his crumbling mansion, writing his memoir, called The Immortal Man.

The Second World War is in explosive flow, causing Shelby to be haunted by images of his time in underground tunnels in the first war. His unravelling mind is peopled by the ghosts of loved ones, another sort of hell.

In Birmingham, his estranged son Duke (Barry Keoghan), now boss of the Peaky Blinders, is terrorising the streets of Small Heath. A bloodied reunion beckons when Tommy leaves his mansion.

The music is occasionally very loud, as is the Peaky way, but a sublime moment near the end is sustained by Hunting the Wren, a wraithlike tune from Lankum and Grian Chatten.

There is a prominent role for Tim Roth as a sneering Nazi-sympathiser who plots to engineer a German victory (only Tommy can stop him, naturally). This took me back.

A few years before moving to York, I worked in south east London on a newspaper now long gone, like so many others. Roth had one of his first stage roles in a play at the Albany Empire in Deptford. I was there with my pen and notepad. I’ve been there, on and off, although far less than once, ever since.

The name of the play escaped me for a while, then it came back. It was Happy Lies by CP Taylor.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man can be seen on Netflix from Friday, hopefully without any disruption from drunk people in your front room. Unless you have rowdy visitors.

Should we believe this warlike headline in the Telegraph?

Sometimes, as in 1940, war is unavoidable. But to engage in war can also be a choice, a political decision, a whim even. And what war does is bring more war.

The first casualties of the Iran war are said to have been around 170 girls killed when a Tomahawk missile hit their school. Donald Trump mumbled a semi-coherent response to those deaths, saying the Iranians must be to blame as it was the sort of thing they did.

All kudos, then, to the US reporter Shawn McCreesh who asked the president: “You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war… but why are you the only person saying this?”

We need more reporters like that. Trump won’t answer or will spit out an insult. That’s if he can concentrate long enough. But such questions need asking.

We also need more leaders like Sir Keir Starmer. His lawyerly hesitancy might not tickle everyone’s political fancy, but it does put us at one remove from Trump and his unnecessary war against Iran.

A war illegal by most international definitions, apart from those written out in capital letters in Trump’s Big Book of Artful and Awful Lies.

The orange-hued man baby dislikes Starmer’s lawyerly caution , telling reporters that he was “no Winston Churchill” – that from a man with less gravitas than the Churchill dog in the TV adverts.

On the BBC website, Chris Mason twittered: “After Trump’s ‘no Churchill’ jibe can the special relationship recover?” Yet another of his attacks on Starmer. These are as frequent as his flabby puff pieces on Nigel Farage.

The Churchill of the Battle of Britain was heroic – far more so than Trump will ever be. For there is nothing heroic about his Iran war, a joint US/Israel enterprise with the equally morally dubious Benjamin Netanyahu.

To many on the British right, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and all the usual suspect newspapers, Starmer’s unwillingness to instantly do Trump’s bidding was a national disgrace.

Tony Blair, that spectre of ill-advised wars past, looking these days almost like his own ghost, chipped in too, chiding Starmer for declining to take part in Trump’s war.

The Mail and the Telegraph in particular have frothed with disdain about Starmer. So much, so normal. Yet their front pages no longer fit the mood of the country.

True, even writing the words ‘mood of the country’ makes me uneasy. How do we determine that national disposition – and do we trust those asking the questions?

If you believe the pollster YouGov, 67% of Britons describe themselves as anti-Trump, while only 24% of Reform UK voters do so. And 70% of Britons see Reform UK as pro-Trump.

So good on Starmer. It might, ironically, improve his popularity.

Nigel Farage, meanwhile, has been spinning like a weather vane, originally shouting that we should support Trump’s war, then changing his mind as opinion blows the other way.

Eventually people will see through Farage, the nation’s biggest sneak, always running off to the US to whisper poison about his own country. Always filling his pockets with money from abroad. And always blowing with the wind.

The FT reported that Farage went all the way to Mar-a-Lago to bend Trump’s miraculous ear about Starmer. In the event, Trump stayed away, leaving Farage to make his speech to a roomful of nonplussed diners who looked very bored as they waited to eat their over-done steaks.

Pete Hegseth (Picture: BBC)

Let’s close, shudders at the ready, with Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary who insists on being called the Secretary of War. With a self-chosen job title like that, there is a man who loves a war, even if most of his battles have been as a presenter on Fox News, a sort of gruesome playschool for US government ministers.

Strutting into a press briefing on the Iran war, Hegseth bragged about raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long”.  With a smile, he said we were “punching them while they’re down,” and that’s “exactly how it should be.”

And then he quoted a Bible verse.

The above is borrowed from the vitally readable US commentator Heather Delaney Reese (do seek her out, she’s indefatigable). She said that Hegseth “weaponized Psalm 144”, saying: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Then he asked God for “total victory over those who seek to harm our military”.

Do we really want to rush in support of people like that?

Green MP Hannah Spencer (BBC)

NOW I’d like to tell you about the man who taught his dog to fly-tip, but that will have to wait for a few paragraphs. Let’s address the Gorton and Denton byelection first.

The Manchester constituency has a new Green MP in the personable-seeming shape of Hannah Spencer. That description, by the way, is not intended to be snide or slighting. It’s just that we don’t yet know much about Hannah, aside from her being a local plumber with a good line in social empathy. She fought a highly visible campaign, winning by a healthy margin.

Her victory gave Sir Keir Starmer even less to smile about than usual. And he wasn’t exactly grinning from ear to ear to start with (it’s not his way).

Does all this indicate the end of the world – the end of Starmer – the end of the old politics? It can mean whatever the shouty-mouthed beholder wishes it to mean, including the shouty-mouthed beholder quietly typing these words.

That’s the thing about byelection upsets. The result can be used to reinforce whatever it was you believed beforehand.

Something I’d ask is how much of the Green win was down to tactical voting, with potential Labour supporters switching to see off Reform UK. I’d certainly vote like that if necessary. And voters who do so may not necessarily repeat that at a general election.

Most of the mainstream comment has been about Starmer being doomed (again). Much less time has been spent wondering how Reform UK were beaten by the Greens. Instead the microphone was again handed to Nigel Farage, who was vile cockiness personified during a campaign he clearly thought he could win. Once that didn’t happen, he shouted about cheating and said the Greens had “emboldened the radical left”.

At least his candidate Matt Goodwin, former academic turned GB News host, accepted defeat with quiet good grace. Oh, hang on a second. He didn’t. Instead he sulked and said: “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain…”

To save Britain from what – being a mostly moderate and decent country, and a pleasant place to live?

In the Daily Telegraph, columnist Jake Wallis Simons was in a similar funk: “The Greens’ extremist victory pushes Britain one step closer to the abyss.”

And there was me thinking the abyss was where Nigel Farage wants to take us, right next to the one his pal Trump is creating in the US. An abyss, Mr Trump, in case you are wondering, is a bit like a bunker on a golf course. Only it’s much deeper and goes down for ever.

The biggest hole anyone has ever seen, as you might say, while boasting that you know more about big deep holes that anybody else.

Oh, and that moral abyss you are creating is deeper still and there isn’t a light switch at the bottom.

What about Tory leader Kemi Badenoch? I’d almost forgotten about Kemi. How did she respond to her party suffering its worst ever result and losing its deposit? She posted online that Starmer had no choice but to resign. Shortly afterwards she tripped and fell down the irony abyss.

As for Starmer, he must feel that life is a bit abyss-shaped. He is denigrated by almost all the media and hated by leftwing MPs in his party who speak against him at every opportunity and encourage union leaders to do the same.

Do they all want Nigel Farage as prime minister instead? Almost certainly not. But if that happens they’ll be sure to blame Starmer. Thankfully, the Greens winning in Gorton and Denton does show that Reform UK being certain winners, a scenario endlessly pushed by the BBC, is far from inevitable.

NOW on to that dog. A small story on the foreign pages of the Guardian concerned a man in Catania, Sicily, who is reported to have trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish.

The small dog carries a bag of rubbish in its mouth, before “dropping it neatly at the roadside”, thus evading cameras installed to combat fly-tipping.

What a clever misled dog. This quirky story struck a chord. A lane near us runs between neatly clipped hedges, with fields to either side, and a village at the end.

If that sounds rural, the rush of traffic can be heard from the ring road nearby.

Rubbish is always being fly-tipped down there. Not by dogs but by lazy inconsiderate people. The other day someone had dumped what appeared to be a baby’s wooden cot and mattress.

As I often point out absurd Telegraph headlines, let’s end with the Allister Heath Headline Generator, as created by The New World magazine. Heath has been responsible for some real culture war clangers, and now you can generate your own. I just made this one…

 Why fly-tipping dog is the most toxic ideology ever inflicted on the British people

Allister Heath

The Telegraph

Picture: BBC/Reuters

Here are three dictionary definitions of the adjective unprecedented:

Never done or known before…

Never having happened or existed in the past…

If something is unprecedented, it has never happened before…

You don’t have to be Susie Dent to know that the first definition is the only one you need. Shorter is always better.

It is fair to say that the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor led to unprecedented use of the word unprecedented.

This is understandable up to a point, but something happens whenever I hear the same word repeated in the headlines. First, I think, oh, here they go again. Then, I think, oh stop that now, please. Has a memo has gone round or something?

Now it may be true that arresting demoted princes is something hardly ever known. But too many reporters and journalists were masticating on that unchewable word.

Anyway, as you might have spotted, Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested last week in Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office. This dates to his time as a trade envoy, a roll that collapsed under a pile of tabloid headlines.

He denies all wrongdoing and, in common with anyone else, should be presumed to be innocent unless or until facts determine otherwise.

Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on his 66th birthday. All the sixes, clickety click, as they say in bingo. The relegated prince probably knows nothing about bingo, but then neither do I.

What I do know is that taking pleasure in the misfortune of others isn’t always kind or nice. Then again, you’d have to be the most ardent, the most myopic, royalist to feel much sympathy for Andew Mountbatten-Windsor; wouldn’t you?

When younger I always thought we should not have a Royal Family. Then I gave up worrying about that, having concluded that we were stuck with them, for better or worse. And Mountbatten-Windsor certainly ticks the box marked ‘worse’.

Whatever now happens, he illustrates the perils of entitlement – and also the opacity of royal wealth.

Both are captured in the £12 million the late Queen Elizabeth is believed to have shelled out to settle a civil suit brought by Virginia Giuffre, who said that at 17 she’d been forced to sexually service certain men, and also alleged that she’d been trafficked to Mountbatten-Windsor. He has always denied any wrongdoing. The suit was still settled. This might strike you as odd. Or just as what is done by people with vast amounts of money at their fingertips (or their mother’s fingertips).

The most striking aspect of this story lies in a picture taken by the Reuters photo-journalist Phil Noble. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor could have been taken to any one of 20 police stations in Norfolk, but Noble had a tip-off about the one thought most likely, which was in the market town of Aylsham. He is said to have waited for hours, headed pictureless to his hotel, then dashed back when informed the car was coming.

He told the Guardian newspaper that he took six images. Two were blank, two just showed police in the front seats. One was out of focus. But the final frame went around the world in an instant.

The former prince, once so often seen giving off an oddly meaty sort of matiness, slumps in the back seat, as if wishing to disappear into his double chin. His eyes are red from the flashlight. His fingers are threaded. He looks haunted.

Such snatched images used sometimes to suggest illicit glamour, a Hollywood star whisked away in a limousine with someone unexpected. Also, such grabbed images sometimes show suspects arriving at court in police vans. Capturing anything clear or coherent under such conditions is a game of photographic chance.

“The photo gods were on my side,” Phil Noble said.

His picture is worth a thousand words. Especially if any of them are ‘unprecedented’.

As for the dethroned prince, perhaps the way he turned out is what happens when royals are feted and treated as special and above ordinary humanity and yet given nothing much useful to do, then given a pointless playboy role.

To fill a vacuum with entitlement, money and arrogance is only asking for trouble. And that’s what King Charles now has. But then the trouble with Andy has been with him for life.

“They have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation,” the King said of the police after the arrest of his brother.

Sibling rivalry on an upper level.

A post from the journalist David Aaronovitch

If you compile a list of British prime ministers, Sir Keir Starmer is dated 2024 to blank. Plenty of people are predicting that date could be filled in any day soon.

What is it with us and prime ministers? We’ve had six in ten years. Rishi Sunak (2023-24), Liz Truss (2022-22), Boris Johnson (2018-22), Theresa May (2016-19) and David Cameron (2010-16). Is this country now ungovernable?

The booby prize goes Truss, who became PM in a Tory game of Who’s Turn Is It This Week Anyway? Then resigned 45 days later. Ever since she has peddled her own conspiracy theory about having been undermined by mysterious establishment forces.

Pull the other one, Liz, it’s got a fake moon landing on it.

When prime ministers go before their time, the fault often lies within. Johnson was undone by being Johnson, and because the man he paraded in public was a disguise, an inflatable confection, a blow-up suit of fake jollity hiding an insecure creature of deep selfishness.

But if all that applies to those departed Conservative prime ministers, questions must stick to Starmer, too. His weakness is that he’s never found a story to tell, politics being in part a narrative art.

Now I don’t particularly enjoy writing this. I take the mostly now unfashionable view that Starmer is starting to do much good. Business confidence is rising, inflation is falling, wages are rising, interest rates are down, NHS waiting lists are down, new breakfast clubs are opening in primary schools.

Starmer has also been successful at something I’d rather he’d not taken on so assiduously, and that’s curbing the arrival of small boats across the Channel.

The government is claiming to have stopped 40,000 crossing attempts since coming into office, and also to have removed or deported almost 60,000 people who were here illegally.

But here’s the shabby thing. No matter how ‘well’ the government does on small boat crossings, it makes no difference. Nigel Farage and Reform UK will still be light-blue sharks making a bloody frenzy in the water. And Starmer will get no credit.

All Labour prime ministers face media hostility. Starmer has been constantly attacked and belittled by the Mail, the Telegraph and so on, as is only to be expected.

But that hostility has been loudly amplified by the BBC, which also endlessly promotes Nigel Farage, letting him get anyway with anything and everything, even the other day bestowing an hour-long puff-piece by Laura Kuenssberg.

Starmer has also been unlucky in Trump. He’s faced an impossible task in trying to befriend the  US President, a man who has few if any friends and harms all in his vicinity.

It’s a pointless ‘if’, but if Trump hadn’t been elected for a second term, Starmer would almost certainly not have chosen Peter Mandelson to be our ambassador to the US.

That was a badly unwise decision. But the newspapers were quiet at the time; nothing was said in Parliament. Now everyone is busy blowing retrospective Westminster bubbles.

Everything here links and stinks in a most depressing way. Brexit, Trump, Steve Bannon, the inexorable rise of the greedy Tech Bros who want power without responsibility, billionaires owning and diverting the news, the cruel malign influence of Jeffrey Epstein, who was among those on the US right trying to overwhelm politics in Europe and the UK.

Trump knew Epstein well and is mentioned many times in the files. Starmer never met the sex offender tycoon, but his premiership could be ended by Epstein, thanks to that vile man’s links to Peter Mandelson.

What should never be forgotten here though is that the true story of the Epstein files lies in the girls and women who were abused, traded, passed around.

That is a topic better suited to a woman writer. I’d recommend Amelia Gentleman’s Saturday read in the Guardian:

“The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.”

If Starmer steps aside, Labour will look just as inconstant and unserious as the Tories were. And the party’s chances won’t improve. Those on Labour’s left who like to moan about their own governments always forget that the chance of electing a truly socialist government is just about nil.

Oh, and if we have had six prime minister’s in ten years, six is also the grand total for Labour, starting in 1924 with Ramsay MacDonald.

I’ve only ever voted Labour, or occasionally Green in local elections. But you know what? I’m not falling for Zack Polanski, the showy leader of the Green Party. His opportunistic calls for Starmer to go make him sound too much like Nigel Farage.

And remember this. Farage always pretends to be what he is not, even down to all those visits to the pub.

I find comfort in a pint as much as the next man who likes occasionally to sup. For Nigel Farage a pint is a prop, a piece of misdirection in an ever-rolling montage of con-trickery. His new piece of economic illiteracy concerns knocking five pence off the price of a pint at the cost of reintroducing the two-child benefit cap.

Yeah, let’s raise a glass to Reform UK pushing thousands of children back into poverty. Cheers, Nigel.

As for Starmer, it’s a long hill but he should keep walking.

Are you suffering from patchy memory? Do you conveniently forget terrible things you once did? Is there a 14-year lacuna in your mind? Is everything now mostly just a blank? Do you enter a room at your club and forget what you went in there for?

If you answered yes to any of the above, it is likely that you are a Tory thinking of jumping ship to Reform UK.

Whatever the case, help is at hand. That renowned quacksalver Nigel Farage will sign your sicknote and dispense quick-capitulation tablets that will make you denounce your former party in a shameless second. What’s more, those magic memory pills will erase everything you believed in until five minutes ago.

And you will then reel off flagrantly hypocritical speeches about how your old party should never be allowed near power again.

In that one particular you will be right. But everything else you spout should be ignored by all sensible people.

In the latest people smuggling news, Suella Braverman has followed Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi in leaving the Conservatives for Reform UK.

And in case you’ve forgotten, that’s the former Home Secretary who was forced to resign by Liz Truss and later sacked by Rishi Sunak.

Forced to resign by Liz Truss, the worst prime minister in political history, now reduced to shouting out conspiracy theories on her own YouTube show. Or perhaps it’s only available to view on Oh-Not-You-Tube.

“Britain is suffering, she is not well,” Braverman said as she hopped barges. “Our nation stands weak and humiliated on the world stage.”

Those pills must have really kicked in. She seems to have quite forgotten that she served as part of the Tory government for nine years. Perhaps she was being held hostage or something, waiting to be rescued by the People’s Army of Nigel.

It’s all very well slagging off broken Britain. Just wait till someone tells her who broke it.

And there is something else in those pills. A malign ingredient that makes you see things that are not there. Swallow one of Farage’s Magic Pills and the great city of London becomes a crime-swamped hellhole in which no-one is safe.

He’s always going around the world telling that lie. So just remember this. London isn’t broken. Britain isn’t broke. Farage just wants people to think it is. He only knows how to break things. That’s why he spills poison into the world’s ear. Only it isn’t Hamlet’s father who will be done for on this occasion. It’s the rest of us, poisoned by his vial of lies.

No-one was that surprised when Robert Jenrick skipped over to Reform, as he’d been trying out nasty far-right lines for ages, like a man pulling faces in a hall of fascist mirrors. As for Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor eventually paid HMCR just under £5m after making what he called a “careless mistake” over his tax. Oh, and don’t forget he was the one who claimed expenses for heating his horses.

These shapeshifting Tories are like that unfortunate museum visitor whose tumble down a staircase smashed three priceless Chinese vases.

Nick Flynn later blamed his fall at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge on a “Norman Wisdom moment” and a loose shoelace.

If any departing Tory tries to pull that one, you’ll know that they’ve overdosed on Nigel’s pills.

And there is something else in Farage patent medicine. What else can explain the hold that fake man of the people has over everyone. He’s hypnotised the lot of you with his shouty open mouth, rotten teeth – so rich and yet no time for the dentist – and endless lies and scheming, his tireless begging of US billionaire bucks, his pursuit of power without doing any actual politics.

And here’s the really odd thing. Something so obvious it hardly needs saying. But let’s spell it out anyway. If Reform UK is stuffed full of disgraced ex-Tories, then it’s just the Conservative Party with a different lanyard. Not rebellious. Not different. Not outsiders. Old kids, same block.

Time to beware yet again of quack doctor Farage and his tincture of Thatcherism. At the last election everyone was so sick of the Tories that Labour was handed an unexpected landslide. It would be mad if the follow-on from that was to then elect an even worse sort of Tory party.

I am sitting on the train, doom scrolling.

In the US a slavery exhibit is being removed from an historic site in Philadelphia. This is to please Donald Trump who thinks remembering slavery is ‘anti-American’.

As the train rattles towards Leeds, I remember how slave trader Edward Colston was dunked in Bristol docks during an anti-racism protest in 2020. The toppling of his statue was seen at the time by right-leaning historians as a disgraceful rewriting of history.

And now an extremely right-wing, autocratic US president is removing reminders of slavery from US history. One irony in this is that Trump would surely have been a slave owner had he been around back then.

Thinking about all this is depressing. As is doom scrolling the latest slipperiness from his British acolyte, Nigel Farage. A man who lies and shouts and evades and blusters. All so that he can dodge whatever question is sent his way and in so doing fool enough idiots into casting a vote for his party.

A man whose every political sin or omission is forgiven or ignored by the media (financial ‘irregularities’, past or present racism, spending half his time in the US toadying to Big Oil).

Not him again, you may well say. Not that shameless man again. Not that indefatigable stirrer of shit.

You may well have a point.

I stop to consider what is going on in this train. A toddler in the seat ahead leans to kiss the window. She looks round at me, then turns away. That window is clearly more interesting than an old man in a cap.

Normally the train goes straight to Halifax but today you have to change at Leeds. A longer trip but I have done too much driving lately.

At Leeds station the train to Chester is leaving soon, stopping at Halifax. Boarding with a minute to spare, I sit at one of those tables for four people.

A woman diagonally over the way is having one of those phone conversations better suited to somewhere less public. She is discussing, it gradually transpires, her divorce. She shares various details about the man she wants rid of, his unkindness, the things he has done or said. She mentions mental health problems she has had in the past.

Matter of fact and unself-pitying, she even laughs at times. But still, it’s not a phone call I’d conduct in public, on a train, across from an old man with listening ears under his cap.

As the train pulls into Halifax, I stand to leave and she continues discussing her divorce. I miss the rest of her story. Often I sit with headphones on, doom scrolling. Leaving your ears open has advantages, and disadvantages. Doom scrolling mostly just has disadvantages; if you stop doing it, nothing in the world changes but your mood does lift a little.

I am in Halifax to interview a potter in his studio. We chat surrounded by drying pots and mugs, like something off The Great Pottery Throw Down.

Later I am back on the slow train. I glance at my phone. Trump has said that Nato allies did not properly fight alongside the US in Afghanistan, where as in fact 457 of our troops died. This statement from Trump is so outrageously wrong even Keir Starmer is getting cross.

I put down my phone. Behind me a young woman is listening to music on her phone without headphones. How generous of her to share. I put on my headphones to listen to the new album from the American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, who had a stroke five years ago but has made a significant recovery. She is sounding good. She is also sounding mightily angry about the US.

The man in front has something up on his laptop. He is using headphones, so that’s a mercy. After a while I realise he is watching Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a new Netflix drama. We are going to give that a try. But not tonight because it is the final of The Traitors on BBC1. Once snotty about that sort of thing, I have enjoyed this series.

Don’t tell anyone or whatever credibility I have left will be gone.

Headlines in the Telegraph and the Sun

This one will address pubs and beer, but first a gulp or two of less appealing liquids.

Here are things that aren’t happening, never mind what certain people say.

The Labour government isn’t cancelling local elections, never mind how often Nigel Farage hisses like a Siamese cat with its head stuck in a tin. It is true that elections for nine councils in England have been postponed from May 2025 to May 2026, so that the councils can take part in local government reorganisation.

All other local elections will go ahead as planned in May, not that the government is looking forward to them.

Nothing has been cancelled, although the people saying that things have been should be.

PS: the Government also did not cancel Christmas; despite what you might have read online, the season went ahead as normal, for good or ill.

Sir Keir Starmer does not wish to cancel the social media site X never mind what Elon Musk, the site’s 54-year-old multi-billionaire owner, says. Musk always carries on like a whiny14-year-old.

What government ministers have said, reasonably enough, is that people should not be able to use X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to create sexualised images of women without their knowledge or consent. Some of these altered images are also said to have been of children. Why would that even be a thing?

Musk has agreed, mid massive sulk, that only people who pay him to use X can now do that awful thing.

Nothing to do with suppressing free speech. It’s about decency and not behaving like a dick. Or a 14-year-old who can only see the world through his. And, no, I would not like to change ‘dick’ to ‘duck’, as suggested just now by Word’s artificial intelligence interference monitor.

And, no, this does not make Britain a police state, Mr Musk.

For clarification, a police state is a country where an innocent 37-year-old woman is shot dead in her car by a government ICE agent, as happened earlier this week.

Her name was Renee Nicole Good (above). She was a mother and a Christian, or so it is reported. It is also reported that the man who shot her is a Christian, although where does that get us?

Before anyone knew what had happened, Trump and his gruesome acolytes went on television to say without evidence that it had been her own fault. They put on their fibbing faces, the only ones that fit, and said Good ran over the agent who then shot her in self-defence. Yet assorted film clips from different angles appear to show that the agent remained quite uninjured.

This is what happens when everyone lies to back up the lies of the man who lied before they all did. A sorry game of liars’ leapfrog.

Also, back on our own shores, London is not a crime-ridden hellhole, never mind what assorted right-wingers here and in the US say. Go for a weekend and find out for yourself. You’ll have a good time.

Trump does have his fans over here who nuzzle up to that old orange face and sing his praises.

Among Brits lurking in that squeamish vicinity are two former Tory prime ministers. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are seemingly in competition to see who can crawl the most to Trump. I don’t care who wins as they are both, to quote their unworthy hero, losers.

And, no, never mind what you might have read in the Telegraph or the Mail, the government isn’t waging war on country pubs by wanting to reduce the drink-drive limit.

As this was going to be my original starting point, let’s put in an item break and go for a drink.

I STARTED swallowing beer as a slightly under-aged drinker in the 1970s and continue now as a slightly over-aged drinker. A decent hand-pulled pint is one of the sainted glories of British life.

And, yes, pubs have faced difficult times, so news that the government may relent on its plan to raise business rates for pubs is a good thing.

No less a York authority that John Pybus, landlord of the splendidly eccentric Blue Bell pub in Fossgate, told the BBC website: “I think a lot of businesses are going to be squeezed into non-existence in the next financial year.”

But drink-driving is a different matter. Years ago I used to have the odd glass of wine at lunch and drive home later. But now if I’m behind the wheel, I don’t drink.

And why should reducing the drink-drive limit hurt country pubs when there is so much alcohol-free beer available nowadays?

Our local bar always has one alcohol-free beer on tap. Not a patch on the real stuff but perfectly OK. It won’t spoil lunch or a night out.

Still the usual suspects spout on, even though this is about road safety, keeping people whole.

As we know, Nigel Farage, the brag and moan man of politics, complains about everything all the time. He says that lowering the drink drive limit would be “absolutely ridiculous and wholly unnecessary”. He also claims the proposals were the work of the “Islington, north London bicycling classes” who “hate” rural Britain.

Ah, there he goes, wheeling out those stale cliches again. What a load of beer-dribbling twaddle.

Should you yearn for more, here’s Stanley Johnson burbling in the Telegraph over the froth of his pint – “We must be allowed to have a pint and still drive. It is an essential freedom.”

Ah, yes, the essential freedom to get pissed and run someone over. What a twerp.

Full disclosure: I have been known to have two pints – or even two-and-a-half very occasionally, look at me go – and to then cycle home, although not all the way to Islington.

Perhaps that is not something to boast about. Anyway mostly now I am carried home by my bus pass, which is almost certainly safer.

As today is Sunday, I shall be going for a pint or two later. A short walk away so need for the alcohol free.