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.