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.