TV presenter Gregg Wallace makes another online statement… according to Have I Got News For You

MasterChef is a favourite programme in our house. Just about every edition ever made has been watched, laughed at, abused royally and yet found to be oddly engaging.

To explain, this only refers to the ‘proper’ MasterChef where ordinary contestants cook off against each other. The professional chefs and the celebrity amateurs hold little appeal.

MasterChef is enjoyable despite rather than because of Gregg Wallace. Rarely has a presenter seemed so very pleased with himself, grinning from lughole to lughole like a man possessed, his bald head gleaming in celebration of his own marvellousness.

It’s enough to give us baldies a bad name.

Now allegations about Wallace being a sexual nuisance are piling up like greasy plates in a sink.

Should anyone feel sorry for this much put-upon man? Well, a certain bald-headed correspondent called Gregg felt emboldened to speak up for him.

In a video rebuttal Wallace said the complaints against him came from “a handful of middle-class women of a certain age”. The same age as himself, as was widely pointed out.

That gleam you could see was the top of his head sinking into the hole he had just dug.

Wallace then apologised for what hadn’t been much of an apology, but has thankfully been silent since, apart from issuing denials through his solicitors (God, who’d have that job?).

What is it about older men? If only I knew one to ask.

Here’s a workable theory. Older men are aware of younger women because they have been noticing them since they were themselves young. A wary glance in a mirror should remind an older man how he looks now, and further remind him to grow up, behave nicely and stay away from the sleazeball stew.

Sadly, such self-assessment seems beyond some men on television. It is right that Wallace should be subject to scrutiny, especially as his ill-timed video statement seemed designed to stir up culture warriors shouting on his behalf about the world turning woke. And thus transforming the alleged aggressor into the ‘victim’.

But why has this story garnered quite so much attention? Partly it’s just media laziness, with everyone spinning out the same lines. At such times a sort of madness descends, as if nothing else is happening in the world.

This story has prominence for another reason, too. The usual suspect newspapers love to bash the BBC. Any negative story about the corporation is pushed to be top of the news agenda. And then the BBC turns up the heat on itself in a weird orgy of self-harm.

At the time of typing, a bit of corporate jiggery-pokery has seen the pulling of two MasterChef celebrity specials, while MasterChef: The Professionals will contain its run.

Fair enough – it has started and needs to finish.

OTHER sorts of slipperiness are available. Other annoyances can be arranged. Tomorrow night, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage will be a guest on Question Time for what is said to be the 38^th time. Does no other guest exist; is no other undying irritant available?

The BBC has long fallen over itself to promote Nigel Farage. Question Time should be open to anyone, but instead seems designed to give platform after platform to a man who needs no introduction, and who clearly hates the BBC anyway.

Just last January, Farage said he would boycott Question Time as it was ‘biased’. Yeah, too right – biased towards shoving his ugly mug on the television.

Interviewed on Sky News recently, Farage was asked why Reform MP James McMurdock remained a candidate when he’d been jailed for assault. Farage went a funny colour, muttered something about ‘you’ve had your fun and games’, and stormed off saying: “I’ve got a million followers on TikTok, you know”.

And this is the thin-skinned, pathetic stirrer of shit to whom Elon Musk apparently wants to donate $100m (£78m) to upend British politics. That doesn’t sound healthy at all to me.

Asked about this donation by the BBC, Farage did his oily who-me act, pausing only to say that Musk had done wonders for free speech since buying X/Twitter.

Ah, yes – all that work to boost right-wing rant merchants at the expense of liberals and helping to elect Donald Trump.

That sort of free speech ends up costing you dear.

ONE man’s petition demanding a general election has garnered more than 2.5m signatures. What a batshit stupid thing that is.

The petition is on the government website, where motions receiving more than 100,000 votes are ‘considered’ for debate in parliament.

Well, debate this. What this petition illustrates is how tirelessly sections of the right and far-right squirrel away on social media to grub up attention and create a distracting barney.

And yet again it shows how that bonkers billionaire and Trump fanboy Elon Musk uses his platform Twitter/X to support politicians he favours, and to attack those he dislikes.

Debate this, too. Our democracy takes place in Parliament. It’s slow, grinding and often disappoints. But we all take part. Sorry, Elon, we’re not having an election anytime soon because we had one months ago, when Labour won a massive majority.

All governments end up being unpopular, even if this one has been in a hurry to hit the disappointment spot. Keir Starmer seemed to be dusted in disillusion from the off. He should lighten up and go for an inspiring jog or something.

But never mind who is prime minister right now. If we did have democracy by petition, most governments would last only for a few weeks. As soon as we tired of one lot, we’d ask for another.

What’s brought this about? I’ve been thinking about this for a while and believe the answer lies simply in opportunity. This isn’t a surprising or smart observation, but sometimes we forget how the internet and social media have, to use a technical term, kicked politics in the bollocks.

For the right nowadays, a degree of truthfulness or playing by the old rules is mostly gone. Welcome instead to a social media free-for-all fuelled by lies. A cynical game that suits them more than it does the left.

That must surely be one reason Donald Trump won the US election. He took all the anger and refracted it back at his audience. They were angry, he was angry, all angry together. And anger won.

It’s not healthy if anger wins all the time. Those who benefit, like Trump and, to a lesser extent, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, grow strong through other people’s anger. To them fury is like blood to a vampire.

Farage is an old hand at splashing in this shallow, mean pool.  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he blabbered about the petition. At which point everyone chucked out reminders of the petition signed by 6.2 million people calling for for the revocation of Article 50 and for the UK to remain in the EU.

This election petition won’t lead to a general election, but it has been debated seriously on television, sometimes without any cautionary words explaining how Musk jumped in to stir this up, sending in battalions of bots.

How Musk loves to hate our government. He tolerated the last lot as they were right wing, and Rishi Sunak even ‘interviewed’ him about AI. What a squirmer that was.

It’s all so unhealthy and weird. Having inserted himself into American politics, Elon Musk now fancies himself a visiting expert on British politics. He laid into Starmer over the summer riots and chucks out eccentric opinions on contempt of court and hate speech. Now he has nudged along this specious election petition.

How many of those who signed are real, you know, flesh and blood people. How many live in this country? And how many of us think a numpty billionaire who knows nothing about British politics should just pipe down.

Perhaps there should be a petition about that.

JOB centres are “not fit for purpose”, according to the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall.

I’ll tell you what else is not fit for purpose. Politicians saying things are not fit for purpose.

If something is fit for purpose, it does the job required, I guess. But what a deathly phrase, sucking the oxygen from any sentence in which it lands with a thud.

An old BBC page aimed at keeping your English up to date (from November 2010) had this to say about “fit for purpose”.

“This rather prim phrase began life in the field of consumer protection law, characterizing a manufactured product that does what it was designed to do. The implication for the consumer is that if something isn’t fit for purpose, you can take it back and get a refund or a replacement.”

If you managed to read that without nodding off, well done.

Job centres may well not be good at what they are supposed to do. But hearing that leaden phrase didn’t fill me with confidence that things would change.

It’s not always helpful to pull in personal experiences from a while ago, but here goes anyway.

My only experience of job centres was a month on Job Seekers’ Allowance in 2016, post redundancy. That did nothing for what was left of my self-esteem.

But one day I dashed from a meeting at the job centre to interview Jesus, so that was something. To elaborate, it was the actor Philip McGinley rather than the man himself. He was cast in the York Mystery Plays, a purpose he fitted very well.

Here I am after finishing Couch To 5k

It is nine months since my heart attack. Surviving something like that leaves you in a contradictory state. Here’s an example of what I mean by this. I hardly ever think about my heart attack, and yet I think about it all the time.

I try not to talk about it anymore. That heart attack happened to me and most people don’t need to hear about it now. Enough sweat has been squeezed from that sponge.

I might have died, and that is enough to know. We’re not here for ever, but that’s hardly a spoiler. A brush with mortality is a useful jolt of perspective. As the song puts it, Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think). It’s always later than you think, something we don’t like to think about.

Savouring life can be about the big things, but mostly it’s the quotidian, the everyday (such as stubbornly finding complicated words to usurp simple ones).

Here are good things. A long relationship, family and friends. Three grown-up children and one blossoming grandchild. Having a couple of pints in a local bar. Or a Friday night whisky at home. Making bread, sitting down to write. Cycling and playing the guitar.

And reading, there is and always has been reading. My present book is the new Jackson Brodie novel by Kate Atkinson. Like many people who write a bit or even a lot, I have great admiration for Atkinson. Second best to being her is to read her novels.

How glad I am still to be around to read that book.

Loved ones still ask how I am, and the only answer is I am fine. Doing what I did before, or as much as is possible or sensible.

Define ‘sensible’, please. Well, I drink and eat much as before, although with modifications. Exercise is taken as before, although with modifications. Life is lived as before, although with modifications.

I was sensible before I had a heart attack and look where it got me. Now I am sensible again, only a little more so.

There are limits. I will never join my wife in willingly entering a cold pond in the name of health and exercise. Cold water swimming is not recommended for a heart that has stuttered.

What a relief to have an excuse not to dip in freezing water, not that I would have gone anyway. Besides in our circle it’s mostly the women who go; they love that cold water and are welcome to it.

Something I have taken up again is running, to go along with the low-level squash and retired persons’ badminton.

Some months ago I asked the physio at the cardiology gym if running again was possible or even a good idea. She had a look in her eyes, a flicker of recognition: ah, one of those, a runner who just had a heart attack and wants to run again.

Her advice was sensible, if not exactly welcome: do Couch to 5k.

This is a programme devised by the NHS and the BBC to get people active. If you used to run half marathons, you might turn your nose up at that suggestion. Isn’t that for people who can’t even run three yards down the street?

Well, yes, it is, and it’s brilliant. For unfit people who want to run. And for runners who’ve had a heart attack.

There’s an app, there’s always an app nowadays. You begin by walking, interrupted with light jogging.

Over nine weeks you go from shuffle-walk-jog to running three miles. I used to run much further than that, but the achievement of running three miles – and three times in the final week – made me giddier than all those long runs in the past.

Laura, a friend in your ear

You can chose your guide for these runs. I went with Laura, the original voice of Couch To 5k. She is the perfect motivational mate, lovely and encouraging, jollying you along through your headphones with each step. You can go with celebrity voices, but honestly Laura is all you need.

As a ‘graduate’ runner, I have moved on and now Jo Whiley is the voice in my ear. Famous, but no Laura.

It strikes me that we could all do with a Laura in our lives. A friendly voice in the ear to guide you along. To offer encouragement and praise.

To make you write that book or even to get you outside and in the garden sometimes. To remind you to put your phone down or to stop scattering crumbs on the sofa. And not to drink that extra glass of red wine.

Ah, I may have one of those already.

I’ve learnt a lot from my heart attack, and I’ve learnt nothing at all. Mostly just that it’s glorious still to be around.

It was like a horror film. Don’t enter that dark alley. Don’t for heaven’s sake touch that door above those dark falling stairs. But they bowled into that alley and pushed open the door above those steeply dropping steps.

Many are the takes on why Donald Trump won the US election.

He was lucky in his opponents: Joe Biden was doddery and unpopular, while as his replacement Kamala Harris had only three months to prove herself. And sadly, after a flourish of hope, she was not up to the task.

Voters wanted a hard man, a tough guy to take on the world. Trump may be soft pretending to be hard, but enough voters liked the set of his sagging jaw, the self-regarding jut of his crumbling chin.

Liberal American was too complacent, too hoity-toity, disdainful of the worries of ordinary Americans.

Maybe there are just more secret fascist sympathisers in the US than we had previously thought.

Take your pick from the above.

And pause to remember to that Trump was relentlessly thuggish in his use of lawyers. The legal cases against him were pushed until after the election and now, as predicted, they will disappear. The law, like taxes, applies only to the little people. For all that, he should remain a convicted felon in our eyes.

Something must explain how US voters behaved. Why did they do that thing?

They were wrong to elect Trump for many reasons. His character, his moral failings, his appalling past behaviour, his total self-absorption, his sheer nastiness during the election, the thumping aggression of his speech, the mad ramblings, the trailing off into nothing, the whole hellish mess of everything, the endless lies, and trying to overturn the result of the last election.

They were wrong because his economic plans are mad, based on a handful of magic bean tariffs, and more tax cuts for his rich pals. They were wrong because Trump, a wannabe tyrant who admires bigger tyrants, seems unhealthy close to Putin.

Does throwing such words make any difference? Trying to be clever with your ABCs is futile when simple words are so easily turned into cudgel slogans.

This time as last, Trump partly won because of four simple words: Make America Great Again. Bizarre, but there you go. That slogan offers false hope to those who despair about the world as it is, wanting something different.

Trump didn’t make America great again last time round, but his cynical catchphrase worked again in the social media vortex that has replaced the old legacy press. This election was shaped by social media, to which Trump, with his showman shallows, his craving for attention, his aggressive showiness, is perfectly suited.

As for Horror on Trump Street (Part II), we can’t move on without talking about Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion – an absurd fact. When did little bits of nothing become more valuable than proper hard industries?

Musk snapped up Twitter because he thought it was too left wing, and he promptly removed everything good about it – and Twitter was good at first – and turned it mostly into a right-wing hangout, lifting previous bans on the far-right, twisting the algorithms so that his own tweets were massively boosted.

And he used Twitter to help Trump win the election, while also donating a reported $118 million. And now he may be given a government role.

The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr is a long-time watcher of the ways in which the American tech bros threaten democracy in this post-truth world.

In an essay last weekend, she writes:

“Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.”

What’s to be done? It’s always unsettling when the world spins in a direction you dislike. Do you hide away, and ignore the news? It took me three days to pay attention again. Do you sink into despondency? Or perhaps instead you think this is a phase, a moment, this is now but it isn’t forever.

Trump isn’t right in what he says, and he is fallible and flaky. He will make mistakes, and like his Brit mini-me Boris Johnson his decline may lie in his character.

Wait and see time. But it won’t be pretty.

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.