SO I am out for my Sunday run. Imagine there is a camera attached to my head showing the scenery passing in a blur or possibly not. Imagine another piece of equipment recording what is going on in my head.

Running is something I have done for too many years to remember, thirty at the very least. And I’ll let you into a secret: you don’t get any faster.

My ears are occupied with music from my iPod, providing a random soundtrack to this weekly outing. Music shuffling, feet shuffling. I go out towards the ring-road then sweep round the edge of York and head up towards Bishopthorpe. Through the jolting camera of my eyes, everything looks remarkably fresh and green. York has a number of verdant entrances, and this one is lovely, with trees and open spaces, a bit of height – not a lot because this is York, after all.

The other side of the city boasts another green corridor on the way in from New Earswick, and it is easy to forget how lucky York is to have these leafy gateways.

Anyway, puffing and panting, sweating and aching, on I go. Running is when I have my good ideas and my bad ones too. I think up plots for my books, spend a long while writing up these thoughts, then spend a lot longer waiting for a publisher to take any interest.

It’s been a year now since I thought it was a good idea to make a living from being a freelance supplier of words. I love being a word worrier. Leave me and a pile of words together and happiness follows; happiness but very little money. One word I hadn’t intended to see so much of was ‘worry’, but there you go.

So now as I reach up to the bridge over the A64, with the racecourse stretching away to the left, my head is full of doubts. Have I been an idiot; when will I stop being an idiot?

Just then the random soundtrack throws up When You’re Smiling. This is neither the Louis Armstrong version nor Morecambe and Wise . Instead it is Doctor John’s tribute to Armstrong, and a fine and optimistic thing it is too, as cheerful as an uplifted trumpet. So now I don’t feel so bad.

Sometime later, a few too many miles later, and I am heading up the slopes of the Acomb alps (an in-joke for fellow inhabitants of York). My legs are turning to concrete. This is the longest run I’ve done in months. Every bit of self-doubting me is aching now.

I don’t time myself properly and I am not linked up to my computer or anything, as some runners are. But a glance at the clock on the cooker tells me I have been out for one hour and 40 minutes. No wonder my knees are complaining.

After a stiff-backed stretch, it is time to sit down and worry some more words.

I REMEMBER a day when you didn’t have to wake up every morning worrying about Europe. I remember a day when I didn’t have to type the word ‘Europe’ quite so often, and when ‘leave’ was what you did when you wanted to head home, and ‘remain’ was what you did when you made your excuses and chose not go out.

This topic is inescapable because the vote in inescapable. On this morning in two weeks’ time, we will know how the vote has gone; whether we will know what the result means is a different matter altogether.

So here are a few Euro post-it notes touching on David Cameron spoiling my tea, Andy Burnham’s sensible concern, the immigrant question, and that Boris whopper (which one, you may well ask).

BBC Look North is on the whole a friendly affair. However glum the headlines, there is an intimate matiness to this regional news programme. On more nights that we should, we watch while eating our meal on the sofa, in clear defiance of the EU directive that meals should only be taken at horizontal surfaces away from television screens.

So it was a shock to find David Cameron looming large on Look North. There wasn’t even a warning beforehand or anything. You know the sort of thing: the following programme contains scenes of an upsetting nature that might put you off your tea.

Cameron didn’t look comfortable on that sofa. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept properly in weeks, even though he denied this when asked the question. He looked like a man stuck on autocue, a man who had said everything that could possibly be said on why we should remain in Europe. And had then said it all over again a hundred times more. And mostly what he says is: “The economy will be buggered if we leave”, or words to that effect.

Now I don’t like David Cameron one little bit and I don’t appreciate him winning elections. But I think he is right on Europe and hope he secures that particular vote.

The thought of leaving Europe genuinely scares me. So I will be voting to remain. I’ve thought that all the way along and nothing anybody has said, for or against, has made any difference.

I think the Leave lot offer a ragbag collection of tatty aspirations and dodgy assumptions; and I think too many of them believe that leaving would somehow turn the clock back to a glorious past, a past that never existed in the first place. And I think that leaving could give us a legal and contractual headline that would thump away for the next ten years.

Labour’s Andy Burnham had a good line on Newsnight last night. What he said was this: “We have definitely been far too much Hampstead and not enough Hull in recent times and we need to change that. Here we are two weeks away from the very real prospect that Britain will vote for isolation.”

Too much Hampstead and not enough Hull… yes, I like that. It captures the idea that the people who live in perhaps overlooked parts of the country might well decide this vote – and many of them are Labour voters who haven’t been convinced of the party’s official case for remaining in Europe.

Far too many, sadly, may well be influenced by the endless talk of immigrants and immigration. This has been the nastiest aspect of the campaign from the Leave lobby: they know that banging on about foreigners, about open borders, and the possibility of many more to come, plays well with people who somehow feel resentful about having been left behind in modern Britain.

Myths about immigrants taking all the jobs or jumping housing queues are added to the debate like spoonful after spoonful of populist poison.

The Daily Express has a headline in that vein this morning, but I am not sure it works. “MIGRANT SEIZED EVERY 6 MINUTES” the headline shouts. And if you ask me, that is one very unlucky migrant. Fancy being caught that often.

Of course what the headline intends to say that migrants have been caught trying to enter the country at a rate of one every six minutes, a figure conjured from a freedom of information request. Or more properly a freedom to make mischief with information request. Does that statistic mean anything at all? Doesn’t really matter. It’s been put out there to cause unease and alarm, and bolster the Leave case.

Much the same applies to Boris Johnson and that whopper of a figure he has painted on the Leave battle-bus about Britain sending £350m a week to Brussels. Never mind how fully that figure is discredited, it sticks in the public mind because it is being mentioned so often. And if people hear something enough times, they believe it must be true.

Even Boris knows it isn’t true, but if you tell a lie often enough the truth shrugs and walks off.

In last night’s ITV debate, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon defended the benefits of immigration for the UK and ticked Boris off about that misleading graffiti, and good on her for that.

Yes, hopefully one day soon we won’t have to go on about Europe all the bloody time. And that’s because we will have sensibly voted to remain in the EU. That’s certainly where my vote is going.

TO call someone a tree-hugger is usually a term of disparagement. I can’t recall ever hugging a tree but perhaps it is time to cuddle that bark.

You see trees seem to be having a hard time in parts of Yorkshire. Sheffield is the most notorious case, where a council project bearing the typically jaunty, and misleading, title Streets Ahead seems to be mostly concerned with removing mature trees and planting saplings.

As part of this project, a privatised team from the company Amey has been tasked by the city council to manage the 36,000 trees on the roads network across the city.

Now one way to manage trees is to ensure that regular maintenance keeps them healthy. Another way to manage trees is to fell the troublesome things and plant a weedy new tree instead. Saplings grow into mature trees, given time, but in Sheffield campaigners fear that mature trees are in effect being sacrificed in order to save money.

As the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust points out, “removal of a tree should always be the last resort and not seen as an opportunity to save on future maintenance costs”.

The trust makes many good points about the benefits trees bring, too many to list here in full, although the following sums up what trees give us: “clean air, noise reduction, flood alleviation, carbon storage”.

The trust also says that mature trees are fantastic wildlife habitats for bats and other protected wildlife, and insists that a proper ecological assessment should be undertaken to fully understand the city’s tree stock.

Alarmingly, mature trees have been coming down in Sheffield as part of what are termed engineering solutions to ‘improve’ the streets. And how you improve anything or anywhere by felling a fine old tree is a mystery Orwellian in its doublespeak slipperiness.

Perhaps I am sensitive about this because we live on a tree-lined road in York. It’s not a suburban Eden or anything and I can hear the cars driving past as I write, but the trees are mature and soften the street beautifully. Stand in the middle of the road on a summer evening and the leafy avenue of trees leads out of the city towards the beginnings of the countryside (and the ring-road, so don’t get bucolically carried away).

One of the streets in Sheffield where trees have been removed was shown on BBC Look North the other night, and it looked similar to our road, where semis and trees have lived in harmony since the 1920s.

A challenge provided by trees comes when the roots push up the pavement, and this has been mentioned in Sheffield. That happens round here, as I discovered to my cost when we moved to the area, and a bulge in the pavement tripped me up on a run. But sore knees are one thing; ‘executing’ a tree for causing the trip quite another.

There has as yet been no mention in York of a Sheffield-style programme to weed out troublesome trees, although there has been an alarming planning application from the owners of a shopping park.

The bosses of Clifton Moor, which lies just inside the ring-road, wish to remove 103 trees, saying they are hiding the shops and hindering sales. Yes, trees are stopping people going shopping. I had to read that a few times before it sank in.

Business people will blame all sorts for their problems or low sales, but pointing the finger at trees is a first as far as I can recall. Here are some weasel words from Mike Hopkins, director of Jones Lang LaSalle Ltd, which represents the retail park’s owners. “It is important that visibility of the retail park is maximised in order to maintain customer visits and maximise viability.

“The trees within the landscape buffer have been identified as a reason for the Retail Park’s poor performance; the proposed works will improve visibility into the site and improve the site’s footfall.”

He adds that the original design was for low-level landscaping “so customers could enjoy views of the shops”.

I am not convinced I have ever enjoyed a view of a shop in all my life, but I have enjoyed being in the presence of trees. Mr Hopkins wishes to remove 16 poplars, 11 alders, seven oaks, 25 ash trees, 11 birch trees, one sycamore, three Lombardy poplars and 17 trees of unspecified origin. As the trees are protected, he needs permission from the council.

The leader of York’s Greens, Andy D’Agorne, is rightly horrified, and all power to his ecological elbow. The idea is just ridiculous. I know we need shops and I recognise that businesses are difficult to run (the word business isn’t exactly a pushover). But blaming trees for poor sales is just nonsense – and nasty nonsense at that.

The ring-road at the point in question has many mature trees and bushes, all of which beautify a functional area: we need roads but we need trees too to soften their impact.

Perhaps the owners of the Coppergate shopping centre will be following suit. After all a perfectly good adjacent car park has a castle plonked in its middle. And Clifford’s Tower is clearly obstructing views of the shops and deterring business. It will have to go.

HERE is an unlikely piece of advice: if you want some sense about Europe, have a look at the front page of a newspaper.

Not any paper mind, as a fair few are splattered with prejudice and nonsense. No, direct your gaze at the i newspaper. I confess to only looking online but it’s early and I haven’t left the house yet. Beneath a montage of front pages from other newspapers, the headline says: “The media won’t decide this vote.” Below are two small words: “You decide.”

Inside the newspaper’s editor, Oliver Duff, introduces the first in a promised series of editions encouraging its readers to think for themselves.

Here is some of what he says…

“Whatever happens on 23 June, it won’t be the i wot won it.

Some media like the sound of their own voice before a big vote, trying to claim afterwards that they swung the result.

Here at i we have a rather shocking opinion: the public are capable of making up their own minds…”

How shocking: straight-forward and sensible words on a debate that has been riddled with unpleasantness, exaggeration and twisted thought. You pays your money and all that. But anyone who chooses to base their vote on shouty advice from the Express or Mail only has themselves to blame.

I think the problem can be boiled down to one word: politics. We let politicians decide how to conduct the debate. And that was a big mistake.

Admittedly there wasn’t any other way. But politics isn’t well suited to allowing people to form a sensible and informed view of a situation. No, politics is confrontational and argumentative. This is a good thing at times. But not this time.

We are being asked to make a hugely important decision by watching politicians (mostly male, mostly white) going red in the face as they trade insults.

Anyone still undecided this late in the day is likely to be confused. Truths are hard to find on this matter, but here is one: no one knows anything for sure. Both sides are so resolute in their absolute rightness; so certain their scenario is what will happen. Yet how do they know? They don’t.

It’s too late now to wonder if there might have been another way: an unbiased sort of accountancy of the available facts and possible outcomes. If you vote Leave these might be the consequences; if you vote Remain this is what will probably happen.

Okay it’s not lively and it’s not fun and it’s not how we do things in this country. But is all this shouting getting us anywhere?

Last night’s TV event was a non-debating debate between David Cameron and Nigel Farage on ITV. Cameron has declined any face-to-face encounters so far, partly because as he doesn’t want voters to see Tories shouting at each other.

I didn’t see the debate as I was watching a play on an allotment. Perhaps more of us should sit in the sunshine and watch plays. It was certainly a nice way to spend the evening.

Instead I watched a BBC news report on their website. This revealed nothing unsurprising. Farage did his usual prickly act, laying into everyone around him. For a man who dishes it out, Farage soon plays the wounded victim card, saying it’s all the fault of the Establishment (quite something from a public school investment banker).

He had a hard time from members of the audience for his unpleasant views on race and told one such woman to “calm down there” when she criticised comments he’d made about the possibility of Cologne-style sex attacks in Britain.

He said that was “a tiddly issue” in the EU referendum campaign. It happens that Nigel is right here. What he does, what he always does, is take something small or hardly relevant and inflate it into something huge. His whole political machinery is based round building a wall from tiddly issues, brick by unpleasant brick.

Sadly, I have just destroyed my own argument for a calm debate here. But really – how can anyone remain unruffled in the presence of that man?

Cameron faced hostility from an audience member who complained that immigration had left him without a GP and unable to climb the housing ladder, and finding the place where he had grown up had turned into a “no-go zone”.

Was that true or just a typical spot of blaming the others among us? You decide, as the i newspaper would have it.

Cameron replied that there were good and bad ways of controlling immigration (has he worked out which one he’s opting for yet?). And he got in a pre-prepared jab at Farage: “We don’t want to be little England, we want to be Great Britain.”

A predictable jibe, but not a bad one.

NOW I liked the story in The Times this morning about Yorkshire’s vegan cricket coach saying his sport should change the balls for good, but sadly Rupert Murdoch will only let me read a bit without handing over some money.

Fortunately, The Times seems to have found the story in the Yorkshire Post, where you can pop online and read the details in full and for free (Yorkshire’s favourite price, they do say).

Jason Gillespie, the coach of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, was in his day an Australian fast bowler who terrified batsmen with his 90mph deliveries, so he dispels any unkind jokes about vegans barely having the energy to tie the laces on their plastic shoes.

Gillespie tells the Post that he hopes the dairy industry will be shut down, calling it “disgusting and wrong on so many levels”. And as a vegan who spurns leather, he’d like to see the balls made of something else.

In a traditional place like Yorkshire, and in a sport where much is sometimes made of the sound of leather on willow, that is quite a statement. And a tad uncomfortable as the club is sponsored by the Wensleydale Creamery, maker of good Yorkshire cheese.

Gillespie talks of speciesism – the notion that humans have greater moral rights than animals – and slams the cruelty of “these slaughterhouses, dairies and piggeries, zoos”, saying that he doesn’t “want to be part of it”.

As for spurning the well-known creamery, he admits there is a clash, saying: “Yes, they are a sponsor. But it doesn’t mean I agree with what they do. It’s out of my control. There’s nothing wrong with standing up for what you believe in.”

This is true, but Gillespie is a more principled man than I on this score. Or maybe it’s just what I believe is that cheese in its many wondrous forms is just about the loveliest food around. I am sure there can be no acceptable vegan alternative to cheese on toast, which is the food of the gods; and a favourite too of this man on a ledge, although only once a week, as you have to tread carefully with toasted cheese. It’s a slippery dietary slope, placing cheese and toast under a hot grill.

Now this may be the first time I have ever written about cricket, or hung about at the edge of the field at least. Among many in Yorkshire following cricket is a religion more or less, and I have sometimes felt I am missing out as others around me follow the game with such passion, and sometimes such despair.

As for that non-vegan leather hitting willow, I have always assumed it comes from a poem, and perhaps it does, but not one I can find anywhere. Maybe it’s just a common, vaguely poetic phrase.

An old tradition of cricket, known to fans and unbelievers alike, lies in the commentary. It is almost the law in this country to mention Brian Johnston in this context, and his companion in the commentary box, John Arlott. Both are now long gone to the pavilion in the sky, with tea and Victoria sponge always to hand.

Their occasional gaffes, talk of cake and general playfulness are fondly remembered. Here is one example, gleaned from Eugene Byrne, writing in the BBC History Magazine.

“Ward bowls to Glenn Turner, short, ooh! And it catches him high up on the, er, thigh. That really must have hurt as he’s doubled over in pain.” At this point there was a break in play for a couple of minutes before the game resumed. “Well, he’s bravely going to carry on… but he doesn’t look too good… One ball left.”

So there you have it: you can even manage a game of cricket on this narrow ledge.

TWO strangers sit on a ledge, or somewhere high up at least. They arrived a few moments ago and only a few inches separate them from this lofty perch and the ground hundreds of feet below.

“So what brings up you here?” the first man says. “Was it the Trump thing?”

The other man nods. “Finished me off that did. I mean how could they…”

“Be so stupid?”

“Yeah – I mean there’s stupid, and then there’s that.”

“I never thought, you know…”

“Me neither. It all seemed like a bad joke at first. All that xenophobic stuff, all that ignorance, all that vainglorious stupidity and…”

“The wall?”

“Yeah, the wall. I reckon the Mexicans will build the wall themselves now, just to keep their country safe. I mean, but can the US recover from this? Can the world recover from this?”

The men are silent for a moment. One of them inches forward to look down, then shuffles back again. The wind is blowing, warm for now but with a sniff of cold to come.

“I understand,” the first man says, “that the prime minister has sent his congratulations and already invited that vile man over here for a game of photo-opportunity golf.”

“Really crazy golf! Yeah, I heard that too. And who’d have thought it on that score, too. Boris Johnson as prime minister – I mean, really. Giving that great pretender London to play with was bad enough but now he’s got his cheating hands on the whole country.”

“Yeah, to be honest this whole Brexit thing was already getting me down, and then the Americans went and voted for the most vacuous, egotistical and dangerous president in memory. I fear for the world, I really do.”

“How did you vote?”

“Me? I’m not American so I didn’t get a vote, did I?”

“Sorry, I mean on Europe.”

“I voted to remain. I wobbled a bit but it was something Sir John Major said. Funny, I know, as I didn’t have much time for him when he was around, but his words hit home.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, back in June he said that the NHS would be as safe as a pet hamster in the presence of a hungry python, if Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith rose to power following Brexit. Pretty extraordinary stuff really. He called the Vote Leave campaign deceitful, untrue, depressing, awful and ‘verging on the squalid’.”

“And yet here we are with Boorish Johnson as prime minister and Donald Turnip Head as President of the US. That really is squalid. It’s like the world just took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the asylum of rampant egos. I mean to say, Trump made all sorts of wild promises about making America great again – and Johnson and that lot made up all sorts of shit and nonsense about Europe and people went and voted out, the idiots.”

“The chancellor hasn’t stopped grinning yet.”

“Osborne?”

“No, Chancellor Gove. Osborne had to go, remember, along with David Cameron on the Night of Blue Murder, at least that’s what the Mail called it. The pair of them brought it on themselves and the country, holding an unnecessary plebiscite. We shouldn’t have had a referendum at all. Cameron only came up with the stupid idea as a way of shutting up Nigel Farage and all the other Ukippers with their one-track Little England minds and their overheated visions of Britain’s lost greatness.”

“And now that man is home secretary – Farage in the Cabinet, whatever next?”

“The whole Europe Vote ended up as a sort of nasty fantasy, with both sides pelting each other with vile exaggerations along with the rotten vegetables. I mean, how was anyone to know what to make of it all in the end? It was like a pantomime without jokes…”

“Or one where all the jokes ended up being horribly hollow.”

“Shall we?”

“Go on then…”

The two strangers hold hands and jump…

Ah, just woke up from that rotten nightmare. It couldn’t possibly happen, could it? President Trump and Prime Minister Johnson? And Britain voting for Brexit? Perhaps we will all come to our senses before it is too late.

I RETURN from my run as an overnight guest is preparing to leave. My wife is showing him out and there is a bit of an atmosphere in the hall. She mutters as she shuts the door. Her attempts at being friendly while she served breakfast had fallen on stony ground. No eye contact and no conversation at all.

Opening up your house to strangers is a gamble and you get all sorts through the door. Most are friendly and make for interesting company, while some can be odd.

Sometimes you spot the difficult customers in the emails you exchange through Airbnb. One recent guest was a little prickly as he asked about the house. On arrival he just muttered his name on the doorstep without adding hello or anything. He stayed a couple of nights so I persisted and found out quite a bit about him; unusually, he asked nothing about me at all.

He was quite a presumptuous guest, wanting generous use of the facilities, whereas many guests merely stay in their room, after an introductory chat.

As a host you have a post a review of your guest online, and they then do the same for you. In a mood to think the best of people, I wrote up something fairly generous about this guest. A few days later, he had his say, and his comments were eccentric, badly spelled and a little rude, observing that we were clearly ‘newbies’ at Airbnb, although he did sort of wish us luck and said something nice about the garden.

I did wonder if I had been too kind in my comments.

As for the guest who just left, I have no idea what to say about him: He came, he went and in the interim he left little impression other than of unfriendliness. It’s certainly tempting.

It’s been a busy week and the two guests beforehand had been lovely, a young Chinese man who liked the house and said he felt as if he was in his own home; and a man of the theatre who was hardly here during his two-day stay, but was very friendly and charming when we did see him. He parked his big van outside with a whole show in the back, something to do with CBeebies.

Mostly having people to stay is a positive experience, with no horror stories as such, just one or two odd types or people who expect a lot for their £25 a night. What they all get is a clean, tidy and pleasant room in a friendly home; our home where we lay our hats and put up our feet; where we watch television and listen to music; where we garden and read the newspaper; and where one of us makes bread and sometimes drinks a bit too much wine at the weekends.

People passing through get to share in a little of that. Or they do if they are friendly, as most are. They even get to eat the bread in the morning.

It’s a transaction too, of course: money for a room and breakfast, with conversation included if desired.  And, yes, we are doing this in extremis, needing whatever extra money we can earn.

We have a guest arriving on Tuesday who is staying for a week, as long a stay as we’ve yet had. The vibrations from the emails so far seem like good ones. I am sure she’ll be one of the friendly ones, as most are. One of the nicest guests even befriended me on Facebook and is a reader of this blog (hello Maggie).

IMAGINE if this worked the other way round. The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg is trying to ask a question of David Cameron and her words are drowned out by a bunch of posh-boy yobbos shouting. What would we think of that?

Not a lot, I would say. Yet this is what happened yesterday – with the only difference being that Labour supporters at a pro-Europe speech by Jeremy Corbyn started booing and hissing when Kuenssberg was invited to ask a question. The Labour leader reportedly had to shush the crowd before the Beeb’s political editor could speak.

Why did this happen? Many Corbyn supporters are obsessed with bias and believe that Kuenssberg has it in for their man. A little like followers of a religion, they react with holy anger whenever they feel their sainted hero is being treated unfairly.

There are a number of possible explanations. The first is that the criticism is true (I don’t believe it myself, by the way); the second is the role of social media; the third is the strong support Corbyn enjoys from new supporters who came from outside of the old-style Labour party.

Add those three strands together and you get a big knot of a conspiracy theory.

So is Kuenssberg biased? Well, this is partly a matter of taste and interpretation. I’d say some of the criticism was a misunderstanding of how a political journalist works, perhaps how any reporter works. By its nature the job involves asking sometimes confrontational questions of political leaders. Kuenssberg took on the role when Corbyn was newish to his role, and so he was a big political story. And whenever she asked anything considered ‘unfriendly’ by the Corbynistas, they reacted angrily, and then took to social media to complain.

Social media platforms sometimes act as an echo chamber for the like-minded: people gather in a dispersed mob, moan and shout, and then assume they must be right in their beliefs because everyone around them is making the same point.

Then you add to that left-wing websites such as The Canary, where many of the complaints about the BBC originate. This site says of the latest row: “The mainstream media has closed ranks to protect the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, but the public aren’t falling for it.”

And by ‘the public’ they mean all those people who think the same as they do. Nothing wrong with that as such; nothing wrong with such websites adding to the political variety of life. Except that they are as biased as everyone else, and more openly so than the BBC ever is; biased in the way that, say, the Daily Mail or the Telegraph are, but from the other perspective.

Interestingly, the phrase ‘mainstream media’ is used pejoratively to embrace just about everyone else apart from websites such as The Canary. The Guardian and the Observer, newspapers of choice to many an old leftie, are often swept up in the general contempt felt by this alternative media. And in my world, if those two newspapers aren’t to be trusted, then who is?

In the end all this hating of Laura Kuenssberg and the BBC is an unhelpful distraction for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. Instead of complaining all the time, Labour needs to make better efforts to use television and other media to put across its messages. It’s a game that has to be played in this country, and standing on the touchline saying “It’s not fair” won’t get you very far.

And imagine if the Kuenssberg-haters got their way: a BBC political editor would have been removed by pressure from a political party or its supporters. What a frightening precedent that would set.

Incidentally, another possible explanation for all this is that David Cameron mostly favours stage-managed occasions at which he is asked no difficult questions. And that’s why it was good to see him pushed on the defensive yesterday on Sky News during the first major TV event of the EU referendum campaign.

If the BBC is failing somewhere in its political coverage, the problem lies in not asking enough questions of the prime minister, I’d say.

OTHER art forms don’t suffer the indignities heaped on music. You don’t see actors standing around mumbling in lifts as they perform background plays. Comedians don’t follow you round a shop whispering background punchlines. Authors don’t mutter chapters from background novels while you are trying on clothes.

So why is this inflicted on music? Heaven only knows, but well done to M&S for saying it plans to stop piping music through its stores, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Good thing too, I’d say – or I would if the report hadn’t mentioned that the music-free move is “thought to be designed to please Marks and Spencer’s ageing customer base”.

Oh, well – turn that music loud then and let me feign youthfulness for a little longer. I love those banging tunes when I am buying socks or peering at the labels on bottles of wine.

I have never liked music in shops, and this is because I love music when it’s not in shops. Sometimes I recognise the song being played and feel affronted. This happened in my local Morrison’s the other day when I realised the store was piping Melody Gardot: Mira, I think, from her fine album The Absence.

Gardot has had enough to put up with in life after a serious cycling accident in Philadelphia in 2003, when a driver jumped a red light and knocked her off her bicycle. So she doesn’t need to suffer her tunes being piped over the freezer cabinets and tins of baked beans.

Piped music in an insult to the music being piped, as well as being a general nuisance. Since when did someone decide we couldn’t shop or go up and down in a lift without listening to music?

Properly listening to music is one of life’s great pleasures, either on the CD player at home or when driving in the car, or when out for a run. Or when doing a fairly unaccustomed spot of painting.

The other day I painted a door lying flat on a workmate (the door was flat, not me; and the workmate wasn’t a colleague but a foldable table). As I ran the brush up and down, I was listening to music on my iPod: Forgotten Kingdom Jim Causley, one of the best new folk albums I’ve heard in years. The iPod, by the way, is nearly ten years old and still works, unless I’ve just gone and jinxed it.

M&S is reported to have responded to experts who say that elderly people with hearing problems and dementia can find background music disorientating. I guess this is because such music is more unnecessary noise in a world already full of aural distractions.

The store will save money with the move too, thanks to no longer having to pay performance rights on the music, although the company’s new chief executive, Steve Rowe, is said to have insisted that he is not pressing the mute button to reduce costs.

Rowe was on the BBC news last week as he announced plans to attract younger buyers into M&S – while at the same time appealing to the older woman who now found the store’s clothes too boring. I watched with half an eye and rather less brain, but even then I could sense that Rowe had succumbed to boss babble. This is the sound made when a boss can’t stop themselves talking rubbish and therefore end up spouting even more rubbish.

“Babble-babble, lovely outfit…” on and on he went, piping claptrap.

I wondered if the disgruntled middle-aged women shoppers had been listening to the words of the songs: “These boots are made for walking straight out of this store and never coming back again.”

But top marks for stopping the annoying background music.

Fairness footnote: My favourite jacket comes from M&S, a tweedy affair woven from Moon fabric. Thankfully, the piped music didn’t follow the jacket home.