Let’s dip into the dusty drawer, more of an email file to be honest, where blog-worthy scraps of news accumulate.

First up is Neil Oliver. Yes, that beardy bloke who once harmlessly wandered the coast for the BBC, but who now explores the imaginary coastlines of a same-but-different country for GB News.

And, no, my unstinting research doesn’t extend to watching him in full spout, as there are limits. A tweet will suffice.

Oliver has picked a favourite bauble from the shabby tree of right-wing moans, using his GB News sermon to bemoan the “relentless erosion of Christmas”, claiming this is “essential to those whose mission it is to unmake Britain”.

Oh, yes, Christmas is being cancelled – again! Funny how people like Oliver say that every year, and yet Christmas still rolls around. For something so prone to being cancelled, Christmas seems quite resilient.

From what I can see Oliver believes ‘they’ and ‘them’ are to blame, those handy anonymous stalwarts of urban myth. As for the rest, oh let’s leave him hanging on that tree with his beard tangled in the branches.

Another window on the world is to be found in the column pages of the Telegraph. A glance at the headlines yesterday revealed a “rising tide of anti-Britishness”, the “woke left declaring war on history”, Britain needing “more private schools, not fewer”, and Nigel Farage being “a real threat” to the survival of the Conservative Party.

Oh, what an assortment tin of absurdities, each one as unchewable as the last.

As for the supposed deadliness of Farage, the ONS has disparaged his mangling of the Census 2021 results to proclaim that “London, Birmingham and Manchester are all now minority white cities”.

For the capital, 53.8% of Londoners said they were white in 2021, so that is a white majority, if a slightly smaller one than ten years previously (59.8%).

Another reminder, should you need such a prompt, that Farage and his ilk are grifters who can only survive by jabbing a finger and promulgating untruths. But you knew that already.

Next up is the Conservative chairman Nadhim Zahawi doing the rounds yesterday and saying nurses shouldn’t go on strike at Christmas as this is just what Vladimir Putin wants to see.

There is always an enemy, and now Zahawi is casting striking nurses as the enemy for demanding a decent pay rise.

Oh, come off it. Didn’t you once claim taxpayers’ cash to heat your stables, later claiming this was “a genuine mistake” as you hadn’t realised your heating and that of your horses was on the same bill.

Well, yes, I make that mistake all the time.

You will have seen plenty of dubious statistics brandished by ministers and their allies about how much nurses are paid, but however much that is, years of falling pay have reduced what they earn. Along with the pay of everyone else going on strike to threatening to do so.

Perhaps, and it’s only a guess, but perhaps workers are going on strike because the state is falling apart and all those who’ve made this mess can do is blame other people (nurses, migrants, postal workers, railway staff, Jeremy Corbyn, Christmas being cancelled, etc).

All praise to Private Eye for reporting on just how much public money goes into propping up private industry, with support for the bust energy supplier Bulb having reportedly now reached £6.2 billion. Funny how private industry is so much more efficient that publicly owned industry, until the state has to step in to prop it up.

Anyway, let’s end with Brexit, the mistake that never owns up – even Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is still insisting he will make it work.

Yeah, right. Your opponents cock everything up while trying to settle their endless internal rows about Europe. And instead of pointing out what a terrible idea Brexit had turned out to be, all you do is say more or less the same thing as they do.

Here is Starmer on the Today programme this morning: “…there’s no case for going back to the EU or going back into the single market”.

As everyone struggles along, and as LSE researchers reckon Brexit added nearly £6 billion to UK food bills in two years, Sir Keir insists there is no going back.

I wish him well, really I do, but that doesn’t add up, does it?