THE role of the BBC sometimes joins me on this ledge and was mentioned in passing on Saturday. I only return to this topic so soon thanks to last night’s TV Baftas.

I didn’t watch the ceremony but saw ripples of excitement on social media, and then caught the headlines on the news. The ceremony was notable for a series of attacks on the government’s intentions for the BBC and Channel 4 from leading actors, directors and TV personalities.

As the event went out with an hour’s delay, some of the criticism was edited out by the BBC, which was caught in the tricky position of having to mute some of the speeches made in its defence.

Such affairs are usually glitzy and shallow; this one was glitzy and deep. The reaction to this depends on where one stands, and is reflected in the coverage the ceremony receives in this morning’s newspapers.

In my own attempt at balance, let’s begin with the Sun, which is perpetually hostile to the BBC, although happy to plunder the Corporation wardrobe to dress its pages with stories about Strictly, Bake Off, Top Gear and more.

Mr Murdoch’s tabloid sprinkles on the glamour with shots of the gowns, and then uses an editorial to say that the ceremony was “hijacked” by “luvvies” for wanting their “meal ticket preserved” and adding that such pleas should not “obscure the need to get a grip on the BBC’s out-of-control website and dodgy scheduling”.

As always, the Sun is dutifully doing its owner’s bidding: those speaking up were not preserving their meal ticket but defending the importance of an independent BBC in the face of a hostile government; the website is only out of control to newspaper owners as it is actually very good and useful; “dodgy scheduling” is code for “the BBC shouldn’t be allowed to make programmes people want to watch”.

Let’s move on to those luvvies.

The most headline-grabbing speech came from Peter Kosminsky, the director of Wolf Hall, well deserved winner of two awards, best drama series and best leading actor.

When he received his award, Kosminsky accused the government of trying to “eviscerate” the BBC and Channel 4 – ahead of culture secretary John Whittingdale’s white paper on the future of the BBC, due this week.

He said that proposals to appoint a majority of members on a new BBC board threatened its independence and would turn it into a state broadcaster “a bit like… those bastions of democracy Russian and North Korea”.

This reference did not make the programme – but did rather make the point: presumably the BBC was nervous of being seen as too critical of the government.

In a key part of his speech, Kosminsky said: “It’s not their BBC, it’s your BBC. In many ways, the BBC and Channel 4, which they are also attempting to eviscerate, are the envy of the world and we should stand up and fight for it, not let it go by default.

“If we don’t, blink and it will be gone. No more Wolf Halls, no more groundbreaking Dispatches [on Channel 4], just a broadcasting landscape where the only determinate of whether it gets made is whether it lines the pockets of shareholders.”

Important stuff – and Kosminsky was given a standing ovation.

Rylance, a deserved winner if ever there was one, later chipped in with his own criticism, saying: “Woe to any government or corporation that tries to get between the British people and their love of a good joke, a true story, a good song, a fact or fiction, good sports commentating, newscasters who can hold themselves together as they tell stories about terrible tragedies in Paris, people who can help you bake cakes.”

All praise to those luvvies.

In the wake of the government’s general bossiness and fumbling, we should worry about what it intends for the BBC. More and more, certain policies are dragged out and flourished, such as forcing all schools in England to become academies, only to then be dropped.

Exactly what the government plans for the BBC and Channel 4 remains a mystery for now – possibly to the government itself, which may well say one thing then change its mind when everyone starts booing.

The BBC should be beyond the reach and interference of any government – as should the NHS and education. Without the constant battering of ideological change, everyone could just get on with doing a good job.

On a TV note, well done to the BBC for Wolf Hall, one of the best dramas in years; and to Peter Kay for his low-key delight, Car Share.

I HAD a job interview two weeks ago and yesterday learned that it had come to naught, something guessed at long before then.

Being interviewed for a job was strange on three counts: one, it’s been a while; two, in my old job I sometimes interviewed candidates (one of whom still has a job on the paper where I no longer work); three, I have spent many hours interviewing people for stories and features, and consequently feel more comfortable asking questions than answering them.

As I sat in the sunshine earlier wondering what to write, a thought occurred to me, and when those things arise you have to grab hold of them. Here it is: in what way is a job interview like a political election? Well, the candidate in both instances has to make a good impression in the hope of being the chosen one.

It then struck me that for the parallel to work, the candidate for a job would have to prepare by slagging off all the other candidates, casting them in poor light by spreading rumour, innuendo and half-truths – or even fully grown whoppers.

So it was cheering this morning to learn that Sadiq Khan had won the London mayoral election. The capital is quite a distance from where I live, but this was still good news, partly because it gave Labour a lift after a local election night that was at best a case of hanging on (as Jeremy Corbyn put it).

But the main reason for being cheered by Khan’s success is that Zac Goldsmith fought what is generally regarded as a dirty and nasty campaign that was washed in racism and shamelessly exploited anti-Muslim prejudices. Writing in the Daily Mail, Goldsmith said that Khan had “repeatedly legitimised those with extremist views”. Thankfully, multiracial, mixed-up London turned against such views and instead chosen the Labour MP and human rights lawyer, a Muslim who grew up on a council estate.

The odd thing about this is that Goldsmith had always seemed a reasonable sort of billionaire wealthy twerp of Tory – properly tinged with green long before David Cameron traipsed through a green mist and hugged a husky, and generally considered as decent. But he deserved to lose – and his defeat should cheer us up, whatever our politics or wherever we live.

Defence secretary Michael Fallon was hauled on to the BBC Today programme this morning to defend Goldsmith’s shoddy and nasty campaign. Fallon always has been the go-to guy for a spot of nastiness, and he it was who helped sink Ed Miliband at the last election, with an astonishing assault on the then Labour leader for stabbing his own brother in the back.

Today Fallon tried to say that Goldsmith’s campaign was all part of the rough and tumble of a political campaign, but we shouldn’t listen to him. Tory politics has become nastier in recent years, and the party’s campaigns too often call on the vicious strategies espoused by Linton Crosby. Oh, apologies – it’s Sir Linton Crosby now, as the Australian election strategist has just been knighted for services to politics. Disserves to politics, more like.

His fingerprints were all over Goldsmith’s unpleasant, and thankfully unsuccessful, campaign. Perhaps now we will see a shift away from nasty and negative campaigning.

Incidentally, and in the interests of balance, those taking to Facebook and elsewhere to insist that the BBC is biased against the Labour Party have such a furious bee in their bonnet they cannot see a thing. For Labour to come third in the Scottish elections, pushed back by the once-hated Tories, is a remarkable turnaround – and a good political story.

Various examples of senior BBC staff being closet Tories are always trundled out at such moments. As a long-time bit of an old lefty, I’d say there are examples on the other side, too: such as Ian Katz, a former deputy editor of the Guardian who is now editor of Newsnight.

Nothing wrong with that at all, but to pick and choose while seeking evidence of bias is in itself biased – as too are some of the generally left-wing websites that expend much energy berating the BBC.

I’d say the BBC does an okay job, especially on the radio, with the biggest danger being not Tory ‘insiders’ but the threat to the BBC from the Tories hanging around outside. Many Conservatives really don’t like the BBC at all, and those on the left who join in the name-calling only risk further weakening what remains in general a good and important part of British life.

Well, there we go – that’s where an hour in the sunshine gets you.

SOME politicians don’t really belong to any official grouping but are members of the Party Of Me. And yes, Boris, Ken and Donald – we are looking at you.

At the time of writing, the result of the London mayoral elections remains unknown, but one thing is certain: Boris won’t be Mayor of London any more.

This is probably just as well, because he is also the Conservative MP for Uxbridge and a leading figure in the so-called Brexit movement, on top of spending all that time on just being Boris. Johnson is now campaigning for Britain to leave Europe, in which capacity he made a tit of himself recently by saying that Barack Obama had no rights to express an opinion on Britain’s membership of the European Union as he was “part-Kenyan”.

Well, I suppose at least it can be said that Boris is all Boris. But the thing with Boris Johnson is that his charm, if that’s what it is, is all artifice; all that faux-bumbler stuff, all that lovable incompetence – it’s all a put-up job. And almost everything he does is all about Boris and the betterment of Boris (and getting one over on his old rival David Cameron).

Labour doesn’t exactly have a Boris equivalent, although Ken Livingstone comes close, in that almost anything he says or does is all about Ken. Perhaps it comes with having been Mayor of London or something.

Livingstone is the embarrassing old friend the Labour Party doesn’t need, and his eccentric interventions last week in support of the suspended Bradford MP Naz Shah were wildly unhelpful to his party – especially as Shah herself had already apologised for having once shared on Facebook an inappropriate post that was interpreted as an example of her party’s supposed antisemitism.

And just as the heat had been turned down under that pan of boiling milk, up pops Ken with an insane intervention when he argued that Hitler had been “supporting Zionism” in 1932 “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”.

As Alan Johnson once remarked, there is no crisis in the Labour Party that an intervention by Ken Livingstone cannot make worse.

One aspect of this that seems not to have drawn comment is that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was responsible for the resurrection of Ken – and look where it’s got him.

But anything we can do the Americans can do ten times better, especially when it comes to monstrous egos. Donald Trump, the man with airliners and luxury tower blocks cast in his own image, is the ultimate member of the Party of Me; so much so that in his bid to be president of the US, he has hijacked a whole party. The orange-haired billionaire and gushing spout of virulent nonsense is now almost certain to be the Republican candidate (and almost equally certain to be going up against Hillary Clinton).

This is quite an achievement as many in the Republican Party cannot stand the sight of him. Trump has basically executed a hostile takeover of the Republicans, which must be the ultimate triumph for Me Politics.

So American’s grand old right-wing party now has as its presidential figurehead a maverick egotist whose flamboyant brand of me-politics is capturing the imagination of millions of Americans who are weary of all the other politicians. And God help them.

Incidentally, Trump thinks Britain should leave Europe, so perhaps he could form a Me-Me collation with Boris.

HERE begins another account in the life and times of an Airbnb host. This episode concerns the guest who almost wasn’t there…

I can tell you very little about the visitor who left first thing this morning. I don’t even know his name. He came and went and remains a mystery more or less. He arrived last night and when we got up this morning, he had gone.

So let’s go back to yesterday. I spend a couple of hours preparing for his arrival, including driving into York to pick up a new vacuum cleaner, the old one having given up the ghost with a flash and a smell of burning.

That Miele vac was 17 years old, the same antiquity as our Volvo: we keep things going in this family. The new vac is also a Miele, as is our fairly ancient washing machine.

The house hasn’t been vacuumed for days, so I set to and then sort out the bathrooms. House clean and tidy, I resume my laptop labours. In the afternoon the first in a series of emails arrives from our guest. It is in Chinese which is Greek to me, as it were. I scratch my head and decide not to answer.

Another one arrives with a queue of Chinese characters. I Google ‘Chinese to English translation’ and drop the sentence into the box. “I sat at the National Railway Museum a few bus station can go to?”

This process continues throughout the afternoon and I manage to offer advice on the buses and work out that our guest is going to stay a little later in York.

Midway through our evening meal, the phone rings. A man starts talking in Chinese and I fail to understand a word, but something must have got through because I open the door. And there our guest is, talking on his mobile. He steps into the house and we shake hands and smile at each other.

“He doesn’t speak a word of English, not a squeak,” I say to myself.

Our visitor points to his shoes and we come to a nodding agreement that he should take them off before going upstairs. We pad upstairs and I show him his room, then the bathroom. He points at his feet and asks me something I don’t understand. Then he speaks into his mobile and waits for the translation. “Slippers,” he says. I think he wants to know if we have any spare slippers, so I shake my head. The only slippers we own come with feet attached. Do Chinese people keep spare slippers in their homes? I haven’t a clue.

When we come downstairs a little after 6.30pm, our guest has vanished. We wonder if he has gone for a walk, but no he has just gone full stop. He found the spare key and let himself out.

The mystery is solved by the arrival of another email. This one translates as: “The landlord, I go, thank you!”

I think it is only polite to wish him good morning, so I write something and pop it into an English to Chinese translator. His reply, when decoded, is: “Your house is very good, thank you!”

We have had a fair few Chinese guests now, including the young man who took photographs of everything to send to his mother. He’d never stayed in a western home before and was thrilled by all the mundane details of our life. He even wanted to be shown round the garden in the rain.

But this was the first Chinese guest who spoke no English at all. In our glancing acquaintance he seemed very friendly. Part of the enjoyment in having guests is getting to know them a little, so this visitor was different. I did not get to know him at all, although perhaps in a way I did. You can communicate something without language. And in a long line of visitors, he is one we will not forget. Even though we never even knew his name.

BOSSY is one word for the way this government conducts itself. Other words are available, some of them of the four-letter variety, but let’s stick with the informal adjective for domineering.

Looking for examples of this behaviour is like scooping through a pond in search of tadpoles: examples of officiousness will soon be wriggling across your palm, along possibly with a big fat tyrannical toad.

Junior doctors know all about being bossed around by health secretary Jeremy Hunt (“You will sign this new contract…”); schools are frequently the butt of dictatorial demands (“You will all become academies…”); now reports are circulating that culture secretary John Whittingdale intends to tell the BBC that it cannot broadcast to shows such as Strictly Come Dancing at peak times.

The doctors’ dispute seems unending and while there are two sides to every industrial argument, it is hard not to conclude that Jeremy Hunt has made a difficult matter a thousand times worse. Bullying, condescending and just plain annoying – those are the complaints for which Hunt seems to have no cure.

Over in education, the equally irksome Nicky Morgan is demanding that schools become academies without any evidence that this would be beneficial – and also insisting that six-year-olds sit difficult key stage exams that involve hours of intensive work on spelling, punctuation and grammar.

We now expect young children in primary school to understand grammatical rules that most adults would struggle to gasp.

After today’s bank holiday break, these children will tomorrow have to sit the SATs exams – although some parents intend to keep their children off school in protest at the tests.

Some of the newspapers are calling this a ‘kids’ strike’, while the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign says up to 30,000 children could be absent tomorrow.

The organisers say on their website that they are “sick of whinging in the school yard about the state of things and think it’s time to make a stand”.

They fear their children are “over tested, over worked and in a school system that places more importance of test results and league tables than childrens’ happiness and joy of learning”.

Now this is probably true, but it is a shame the above sentence contains a misplaced apostrophe, two absent hyphens and an ‘of’ instead of an ‘in’. Now that might sound pedantic, but if you are going to make a point it is best not to leave yourself open to obvious criticism.

The Daily Mirror reports that angry parents have “told how SATs tests are leaving their children stressed, in tears and unable to sleep as they fear being branded failures at the tender age of six”. The New Day says “many parents, teachers and education specialists believe that the standard set in the test is ‘developmentally inappropriate’”.

When not harrying doctors and teachers, the government is reported to have turned into makeshift TV schedulers by telling the BBC when it can broadcast its top shows and to avoid scheduling clashes with commercial rivals.

This government is already bullying the BBC and if this were true it would be something of an outrage. That famous acronym is rarely spelt out, but it is worth remembering that those letters stand for the British Broadcasting Corporation – and not the Government Broadcasting Corporation.

Commercial broadcasters have long complained about the power of the BBC, so perhaps they have been pouring poison into Mr Whittingdale’s ear. Some reports have been saying that the culture secretary wants to ban the broadcaster from going head-to-head with commercial rivals as part of the BBC charter review.

To be fair, the government has now denied that it has any such plans, although whether you choose to swallow that is open to choice. As a believer in the free market of thinking suspicious things about this government, I’d say we should still keep a wary eye on this space.

Due so such concerns, the BBC was embarrassed into dropping The Voice, which will now be shown on ITV. I wasn’t at all upset by this as I couldn’t bear to watch that show. ITV will now screen The Voice – that’s when it isn’t showing the X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent. So it looks like I won’t be watching ITV much at all.

The odd thing is, nowadays people watch television at all sorts of times and an all sorts of devices. So saying when the BBC can broadcast a hit show is pointless. And bossy.

WELL, now I know what all those Hollywood actors feel when they have to keep smiling after they don’t win an Oscar.

I promised in my last post to report back on the finals of the UK Blog Awards, so here goes. This big and glitzy affair was held deep in a grand basement of the Westminster Park Plaza hotel, a palace of shininess that sits on the southern side of Westminster Bridge.

Two floors down you went on stairs surrounded by reflective surfaces. Once in the basement a bewildering array of people bumped around while busy staff offered glasses of fizz and assorted nibbles. In one corner the main sponsor, Odeon, had set up a mini-cinema with free popcorn.

There was a Roald Dahl theme to the evening, although I never was quite sure why. Something to do with telling stories would be my best guess. Anyway, an elegant man on stilts stood in for the BFG, striding monumentally among the smartly dressed throng. Almost all of them seemed younger and perhaps more glamorous than Mr and Mrs Ledge.

An extravagantly bearded man with a ponytail blew bubbles and, at one point, encased volunteers in a giant bubble sheath that shimmered and then popped.

There was loud chatter and music; more to drink and more to nibble. We circulated and found another couple of a similar age and chatted to them for a while. Pictures were taken on mobile phones, standing next to a shimmering wall or beneath the branches of a rather fetching fake tree.

“This is all a bit glitzy for me,” our temporary new friend said. He’d once won an award at the northern blogging awards which had been more up his cobbled street.

After a while doors opened to a seated area with a wide stage at the far end. And that, after various introductions from the sponsors, was where we stayed as the many nominations were rolled out and the winners announced. Man On Ledge was mentioned twice but honoured not at all. I can’t pretend this wasn’t a disappointment but never mind.

It was fun and bewildering. We met various people and mingled as best we could. Sitting to my left during the ceremony was a woman nominated in one of my two categories. “We’re rivals,” she said, teasing. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

When she didn’t win she left midway through the ceremony. I stayed to the end because it was only polite. Oh, and because I was nominated in the main category which came last. So I had a long wait to learn of my double disappointment.

But it was a happy night and I thoroughly enjoyed being there. I might have thoroughly enjoyed it even more if I’d won something, but that’s life and awards for you. Going along for the ride was an honour.

Many of the blogs were as different as could be from my efforts. To be honest, I never was sure how to choose a category. For some incomprehensible reason there wasn’t one for Middle-aged Bloke Who Wrote A Column For 25 Years And Now Writes A Blog Instead. If there had been, I might have won that.

Finalists could stay at the Park Plaza but the special offer was beyond our reach. So we booked a Premier Inn for half the price, calculating that it was close enough. In the event it was only the length of a red carpet away, so that was fortunate.

We left at coming up to 11.30pm and from the hotel foyer you could see Westminster Bridge stretching to the Houses of Parliament and London looked impossibly glamorous. The next day after a long but lovely walk to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, we had to push through an almost impenetrable human throng to return across that bridge. London seemed less glamorous then; sweaty and rammed more like.

But we enjoyed our stay with a trip to Tate Modern too, walking along the South Bank, an old stomping ground, in a sleet storm and returning in the sunshine, with a pint of Youngs on the way.

Yesterday was sunny and warm. The rain waited until we were walking home from the bus stop. It poured then.

As for blogging, I shall keep up with my efforts at least until fully paid employment drags me away from this little strip of rock. An awful lot of people do this blogging lark, as I now know. A whole community of laptop tappers who sit in their pyjamas (me today, I confess) and try to make sense of whichever bit of the world they focus on.

My perspective is wide I guess; a bit of this and thattery. It seems to work for me.

THIS ledge has been a saviour of sorts. Eleven months it is now since I inched onto this strip of rock high above the unknown. Left work on the Friday and started writing on the Monday.

A cold wind blew on that first day and I guess it still blows now. Earning a living from words isn’t easy and this blog has no salary attached, but it does ensure the brain cells still collide into each other whenever I sit down to write, which is almost every morning.

Perhaps remarkably, at least it seems that way to me, I am now approaching 200,000 words, roughly the same number as to be found in two average paperbacks; or one literary stonker.

Anyway, this morning we shall be catching the train to London for the final of the UKBlog Awards 2016. I shall pack something old but stylish, the faithful Ted Baker suit, grey with an orange check; my wife has a cocktail dressed lined up. So long as there are no crossdressing accidents, her in the suit and me in that dress, we should brush up well enough.

The finals take place tonight from 7pm until midnight, at the Park Plaza Hotel on Westminster Bridge. By chucking out time, I will know whether or not Man On Ledge is among the winners.

It would be nice to win something. We don’t often win prizes in this house, although saying that last week we won an Aeropress coffee maker from the Attic coffeehouse in York. Very good and simple it is too, if you disregard the incident with the forgotten filter. Wet coffee grounds don’t half travel around the kitchen, I can tell you.

There are lots of good blogs up for an award and I haven’t a clue about my chances. Writing this blog remains a pleasure and a privilege nearly all of the time. Some days the ideas are scattered thin, but there is always something.

When I was on my postgraduate journalism course in ancient days gone by, I wrote a mini-thesis on gossip columns and interviewed Nigel Dempster, that noted purveyor of tittle-tattle to the Mail and the Express. I asked if it was hard to fill a column every day. He replied that with the whole world out there, you were a poor sort if you couldn’t find something to write about.

That’s my logic on this ledge. There is always something to write about; a political something; a personal something, or just something that pops into the mind at the required minute.

Some of the other nominees address serious personal issues. My starting point was no longer having a job, although various brambled byways have been explored away from that lonely track. I have no idea how you compare one blog to another, but that’s not my job. My job is just to sit there and await the announcements.

As to my actual job, that so far amounts mostly to writing features for the Yorkshire Post. I am proud of that work but the bills won’t be paid without more of it.

But today is not a day for worry; it is a day for fun and hope and meeting people.

We have had a guest this week who said something that struck me. She is Australian/Chinese and is taking a year out to travel for personal reasons. At the breakfast table we got round to discussing ages, and she said that at 36 she was older than many travellers (she clearly hasn’t bumped into my 84-year-old mother).

I told her I was 59 and she responded with the required display of flattery. This has happened before, so there must be a lucky gene in here somewhere.

Anyway our guest said that people who worried a lot showed their age more than those who spent less time worrying. You wear your worries on your face, in other words.

So there you go, perhaps I wear mine on my soul instead.

Anyway, wish me luck. And whatever happens, I shall report back.

HOW telling that The Times should apologise for not featuring the Hillsborough verdicts on its front page. And how interesting that one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers should know where to look up ‘sorry’ in the dictionary.

The Sun never managed to find that word, infamously preferring to use two simple words that caused unimaginable hurt to the families of those who died. The tabloid is still hated in Liverpool for publishing an article headlined “The Truth” days after the tragedy in 1989, alleging fans were to blame.

That attack on people who had been killed by the errors of officialdom, and then put at fault posthumously, was a stain on the memory of those who died and on the character of a city.

Both The Sun and The Times are owned by Mr Murdoch’s News Corp group, a combative outfit which has done both good and bad in the name of journalism. Plenty of people will decry the idea that Murdoch has ever done a good deed in this world; but the man loves newspapers and has invested much in keeping his inky sheets afloat.

I guess the good is only that if you believe newspapers are a beneficial part of life; as for the bad, so much of that is sewn into the opportunistic soul of the Sun.

That original hateful report days after the tragedy in which 96 people died so horribly and without need showed the worst sort of journalism: utter confidence in the ‘story’; arrogant belief in the rightness of what was being splashed all over the pages; and not a thought for the people involved, those who had died and those left to grieve.

So when a jury this week exonerated Liverpool supporters after the long decades, neither the Sun nor The Times printed anything on their front page. The Times was criticised for this oversight or lack of respect – even, reportedly, by journalists on its own sports desk.

By the second edition, a main picture of a man clearing snow was replaced by one showing relatives of the victims cheering at the result of the inquest.

The Times did not exactly grovel, instead pointing out that the digital editions led with the story all day, and that the verdict was also covered “with two spreads, the back page, the top leader and an interactive on the victims. We made a mistake on the front page of our first edition, and we fixed it for the second edition”.

But at least it was an apology. No such contrition from the Sun. It would have shown guts and sensitivity to report the verdict on the front page alongside an admission of past sins; to have owned up to being so hurtfully wrong in the past and to have at least attempted a stab at atonement.

Well, that would have been too much to expect: it is the Sun after all, so sure of itself, so good at what is does in many senses; and yet too wrapped up arrogance and swagger to swallow its pride.

Few in Liverpool start the day with the Sun, even all this time later. To have delivered such a big lie at such a time has never been forgiven, and the strength of feeling in the city was shown yesterday as thousands rallied outside St George’s Hall as they assembled to honour those who died and the long-delayed legal vindication for families who had fought for so long.

And what on Wednesday did the Sun choose to put on its front page instead? A bit of celebrity spittle about Rita Ora and a specious story about David Cameron’s aides sending group texts by WhatsApp to spin a line on the Europe vote.

In a sense that page, and those choices, betray the problem. If all those years ago the Sun could tell such lies about what happened to Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, why should we believe them on Cameron’s texting aides or anything else?

Sometimes a ‘good story’ in a newspaper is interesting and worth the read; sometimes it is only a scrap or two of rumour and speculation got together to support the headline; and sometimes, as with the Sun all those years ago, it wrong beyond measure.

Those, of course, were the years when Kelvin MacKenzie edited the paper with such cruel swagger and occasional brilliance. Surprisingly, this morning’s Independent website reports that MacKenzie has now apologised for accusing Liverpool fans of being drunk and abusive during the tragedy. And you wouldn’t have put money on that.

Mind you, his contrition comes with a footnote: “As I have said before, the headline I published was wrong and I am profoundly sorry for the hurt caused. Clearly, I was wrong to take the police’s version of events at face value and it is a mistake I deeply regret.”

So it was all the fault of the police. Sorry but still wriggling.