THE porridge is on the hob, ready to bubble – and that’s more than can be said for my mind this morning. Is blogger’s block a recognised thing? Who knows, but it should be.

Writing a blog is not difficult if it is something you wish to do, but some days offer more meagre pickings than others. First task of the morning is to scan the headlines, lining up topics like bottles on a wall. Then you throw a stone or two. Words being stones in this line of ‘work’.

I am at my laptop, waiting for the lapping of ideas. Here comes my wife to sit down to eat her breakfast. She talks, shares a worry or two and airs something she wants to address at work. That interrupts my train of thought, but never mind because it was not a profitable train of thought.

My wife leaves for work, and that still seems odd. Off she goes and here I stay, looking for more bits of this and that onto which I may cling. A man sits in offices for 38 years, and then he sits at home alone, writing. Is this healthy? Well, it’s certainly not financially healthy.

Let’s look at those bottles again. Mostly they contain political slops. That’s the trouble with the news: so much of it is about politics and politicians. I enjoy the shin-kicking side of politics watching, and a blogger with a political bent can soon stir a few words into life.

But here’s the thing: my blogs about politics are not as widely read as those addressing other matters. I know this because beneath the bonnet of my blog there is a daily chart showing my ‘score’. As a certain gnarled nub of ego is required for the task, it seems likely that most bloggers look at their ratings from time to time – possibly even obsessively throughout the day, as I am given to understand.

This daily score suggests the popularity of certain topics. Write about beer in York and lots of people will read what you have to say. Write about your wife’s long-running gardening column being pruned by your old newspaper and even more people will read. Write about politics and, well, people might read or they might not.

My beery wander of Sunday was still being widely read yesterday, whereas my freshly-baked blog on David Cameron’s statement to the Commons about his father was read hardly at all.

On an old-fashioned newspaper in the pre-digital days, there was no real test of popularity. Readers’ letters represented one way – or simply readers saying, often long after the event, “Oh, I enjoyed your column about…”

With digital newspapers it is possible to see who is reading what and when, and probably what they had for breakfast, too (must check the porridge – don’t want blogger’s burnt porridge again; it never tastes that good).

All this click checking offers ‘proof’ of interest. But it does also lead to a debate about clicking versus reading.

Websites like to generate lots of clicks as this is taken to indicate success. Sometimes items are put up for no reason other than to generate clicks. You will have seen plenty of daft things on Facebook teased with the tagline: “You won’t believe what happened next…”

So you click on and what happens next is not all that surprising or illuminating, but your click counts – you’ve been suckered into having a look.

What this has perhaps removed is an individual editor or writer’s firm belief that a certain topic is just worth writing about because they believe it is interesting.

None of this, by the way, is to suggest that Man On Ledge has tired of politics. To adapt that old Samuel Johnson line, “When a man is tired of politics he is tired of life.”

The trouble is that at the present, all that “yes it is” and “no it isn’t” shouting about Europe is enough to make a man tired of politics.

Anyway, I’ve just had a cautious stir and that porridge needs eating.

FOR some reason the following scenario came to mind on hearing David Cameron defend his “hardworking and wonderful Dad” Ian Cameron.

Daddy Cameron sits before the fire, covered in money dust. It’s been a long day at the coin-face, and his back is aching from digging up all that money and then burying it somewhere else where the taxman won’t fall over it.  Young David watches his father, grubbed in money, as he prepares for his nightly bath, and in that moment he realises that all the money-shovelling is paying for his fees at the Eton village school, and he feels great love for his father, and swears that one day he will carry on the family tradition and put all wealth creation to proper use…

So there you have it – David Cameron, a posh man’s DH Lawrence.

What did we learn yesterday from the prime minister’s statement to the Commons? Well, he laid on the filial devotion with a silver-plated trowel for starters. This would be fair enough in private, but he seemed to be going over the top here in using private love for public reasons.

Most sons love their fathers in some way or other – it’s how the relationship works. If you ask me, Cameron’s lump-in-throat moment was essentially a distraction, and a clear bit of spin policy worked out over the past few days, with assorted ministers making statements along similar lines.

He had to do something to contain the toxic fallout from the Panama Papers and the questions about his tax affairs, and those of his father. So he made a shield from his no doubt perfectly genuine love for his father, yet he did this as a way of hiding – and as a bit of emotional blackmail.

Mind you Cameron is not the only prime minister to come thick with the father love. Gordon Brown often spoke of his church minister father John in terms of glowing reverence, once saying in a suitably biblical manner: “He towered before me like a mountain, not in any way forbidding but in the sense of his strength.”

So what essentially did we learn from David Cameron making his tax affairs public; or apparently doing so for how do we know for sure? It’s hard to say really, except that it reinforced what we already knew: in most people’s terms he is super-rich and a member of the wealthy elite who control our lives (hedge-fund managers –modern versions of Ian Cameron – contributed half of all donations to the Conservative Party at the last election in a bout of mutual back-scratching, money looking after money).

We also learned that money breeds money, but we knew that already. A telling detail was that by living in Downing Street, David and Samantha Cameron have earned £430,000 (after expenses) from renting out their £3.5 million West-London home in the five years up to March last year. So the man leading the party that harried and pursued council tenants over having a spare room was benefitting very nicely from his own personal spare house tax.

Will all this flourishing of tax bills be enough to bury the potentially harmful notion that he is a member of a moneyed elite who arrange things to their own best benefit?

George Osborne made a similar tax announcement, and the most telling aspect of this was the way he referred to the bonus he receives from the family firm – which he referred to as the family “manufacturing business”. Strictly speaking this is true, but come on George – it’s a posh wallpaper business, so don’t make it sound like a steel mill.

Jeremy Corbyn had a last-minute scrabble to find his tax form, which stirred up mockery in the Commons but was in truth oddly endearing: aren’t we often all like that, unable to put on hands on an important piece of paper?

The Labour leader also was mocked by some Tories for having no savings. Well, again, that is not uncommon – besides David Cameron doesn’t have savings so much as oodles of inherited wealth. Which must be nice but it’s not exactly a virtue.

IT was only a small story, but my eye wandered to the item beneath this headline: “Police say sorry for egg theft appeal full of puns.”

Ah, dangerous things puns. Now I like a good pun and a bad one even better. In my time I have been a bit of a pun-slinger, but an addiction to wordplay can go too far.

Puns divide people, but they are hard to avoid if you work on newspapers. Always tripping over the things in those places. Perhaps that was why the police in Lancashire behaved as they did, thinking: well, it’s what newspapers do. Or maybe like the film director Alfred Hitchcock, they believed that “puns are the highest form of literature”.

Whatever the case, they were certainly not in the same league as Dorothy Parker, whose puns were as sharp as her tongue, as witnessed by the following: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

No, it is safe to say that the police in Lancashire were more in the league of the newspaper reporter who reaches for an oft-used pun, blows off the dust and pops it into a sentence in the spirit of dreary duty.

The pun is question was the egg one. That might almost be enough information if you’ve read a newspaper or two, or worked on a newspaper or three.

Anyway the police in Morecambe originally put out an appeal about the theft of eggs from a chicken sanctuary. In this they said: “We are asking for assistance with an eggtraordinary crime! We need to identify the chap in the picture who we need to speak to regarding the theft of eggs. We have scrambled the troops to try our best to detect this crime!!”

There was more, including a parting: “Thank you yolks… sorry I mean folks!!”

Tina Wilkinson, the owner of the chicken sanctuary, was not amused and asked for an apology, as reported in her local newspaper. How she felt about all those exclamation marks is not recorded.

Inspector Kirstie Banks-Lyon issued an apology on Facebook, proving that everything happens on Facebook these days.

Now the trouble with puns is that sometimes they try too hard. A good pun, like a good joke, should appear effortless. The difficulty comes when you can see the strings. Variations of the egg pun fill newspapers up and down the land at Easter. After which time they should be poached, coddled, fried – or boiled and cracked on the head.

What happened here was that the chicken lady of Morecambe saw the puns as somehow lacking in respect. She thought the police were not taking the crime seriously, and was offended.

There is a lesson here in the use of puns. Not everyone will be amused. No, scratch that – no one in all the far raddled corners of the universe will be amused by the egg pun. So either drop it or think of something better.

Now you might think that pun is a short word, and so it is, but it does have a posh cousin with more syllables up its sleeve: paronomasia. I confess that was new to me until a moment ago, but it comes from a meeting of Latin and Greek, and means “to make a slight name change”.

The British have long liked a pun. Think of all those old Carry On films that knitted hoary puns using a clacking pair of innuendo needles.

In a sense a pun is language pinching itself to check it is still awake. We know a pun is silly, but most of us enjoy a good one. Tired old puns a little less. And egg ones not at all.

Some comedians build a living out of puns. Here are two from Milton Jones, who always makes me laugh.

“When I was young I baked an apple tart. I took it to Leeds, Liverpool and Reading. All because my teacher said make sure you take pie to 3 dismal places.”

The second one even nuzzles up to topicality as we think of David Cameron’s ducking and diving: “People are hiding money offshore and you’ve got to really know what you’re doing with that. ’Cos I fell out of the boat six times.”

Incidentally, we now know why the chicken crossed the road. It was to get away from all the awful eggs jokes.

THERE was a good story in my old newspaper this week about beer. That paper does like its beer, and why not, as there is a lot of it sloshing around York.

The Scottish brewers Brewdog want to open a bar in Micklegate in a premises that has been empty for a while and has seen assorted uses (photography studio, Yorkshire deli, charity furniture store). A neighbouring restaurant owner had been attempting to block the licence in court on the grounds of suitability. Clarissa O’Callaghan owns a newish restaurant called Rattle Owl, and she was suitably rattled by the prospect of the Brewdog pub.

So much so that, bizarrely, she hired a private detective to visit other Brewdog bars. To no one’s general surprise, he discovered that people are sometimes found to be inebriated in their vicinity (possibly from drinking the lovely but lethal Punk IPA).

My York private investigator Rick Rounder was never employed on a job like that. Neither was he hired to investigate the toilet habits of bears amid the trees, but there you go.

Brewdog won the day in court and the pub will now open. I walked past the empty premises yesterday afternoon, then past the nearby restaurant. The empty shop would be better used as a full pub, I’d say; and, in fairness, Rattle Owl looked perfectly nice, and it had a good review in the Yorkshire Post recently.

I was on my way to visit another new pub in York. They open all the time in this city. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, except that they are often very good. And often full, too.

The minus side is that every time a local shop closes, a pub or restaurant moves in, often a chain. Already the departed china shop Mulberry Hall has a notice in the window about a licence application, so that’ll be somewhere else to eat and drink. If this continues, soon York will be nothing more than an endless jumble of pubs, coffee bars and restaurants. And with each properly local shop that disappears, a little bit of York goes too. This is a shame, but here comes the hypocritical footnote: I visit those pubs and coffee shops, and often like them.

I carried on down Micklegate which was filled with the usual Saturday throngs. Probably the usual Saturday thongs as well, the way some of these people dress. I passed a group of Señoritas tottering about in fancy dress, although I thank that is the wrong use of the word. Señorita usually refers to a young unmarried woman, whereas this lot were mostly middle-aged and wearing the sort of short skirts they might once have warned their daughters against going out it.

Often with these groups the shortest skirts rise above the oldest legs, but who am I to comment? Come the summer and I’ll be out there in my shorts, although not the lurid makeup.

My destination yesterday, after picking my wife up from work, was the new Brew York bar in Walmgate. This sounded odd in prospect, a huge warehouse turned into a brewery and pub. In the event it was fantastic.

The beer was tremendous: I had a pint of Brew York Brew York IPA, and will certainly return for more. There was folk music on a raised area above the bar, and at the back – if you brave all those smokers – a riverside area looks over the Foss, with Rowntree Wharf looming up like the prow of a very tall ship.

Congratulations to co-founders Wayne Smith and Lee Grabham. Brew York deserves to be a great success, and it gives a much-needed fillip to a part of York that is still working to overcome the effects of the floods at Christmas.

SO how’s the week been going for you, David? Ah, yes – not so good. People won’t stop going on about money. The headlines are full of pound signs. And everyone has suddenly remembered just how posh and very wealthy you are.

Amid all the coverage about your dad’s tax – how shall we phrase this? – your dad’s tax-efficient ways with his money, I read a splendid quote said to date from your youth. Apparently you once said you were so advantaged you were born with two silver spoons in your mouth.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I like to think it is. It has the ring of authenticity, being screamingly snobbish and also quite witty. Perhaps we should all call you Two Silver Spoons from now on. You see some of us have always suspected that’s the real David. The properly posh one instead of the ordinary, run-of-the-mill-owning posh one.

There is, you see, something solidly authentic about Posh Dave; you know where you stand with Posh Dave. Usually at the other end of the room. When Two Spoons is speaking, you know what you’re getting. You might not like it but you know it’s the real deal, gold-plated.

All those other Daves are the ones who cause you problems. Do you remember when you pretended to be Green Dave? Oh we can all chuckle about that now, but you were very serious about it at the time. You even trekked off to take some huskies for a walk in the snow at the North Pole or somewhere.

Maybe it was the South Pole. Maybe it was Hampstead Heath on a chilly day. It doesn’t really matter. No one believes in Green Dave any more. Hardly anyone remembers him at all. You’ve probably forgotten him yourself. A bit like you’ve forgotten all those other inconvenient versions of your old self, like Good Old Bullingdon Dave.

But people do believe in Offshore Dave. This is the Dave who didn’t benefit from holding shares in an offshore tax haven, honestly. Why would Honest Dave do such a thing? And then you found that – oh hang on a damn Eton rifling moment – maybe you did. It took five questions for that answer to be shaken out of the hanky like a man hoping to find loose change. And you did find it. All that fuss over an offshore tax bundle of £30,000. Don’t these people have something else to write about? How about that leftie beardy bloke – hasn’t he got a scandal tucked up under his 1970s jumper or something?

The trouble is, Dave, you are forgetful about money and all that. When you mentioned your everyday sort of wealth and your salary and the house you rent out, you plumb forgot about your other house in the country. Well, these things happen. One lump or two? One house or two?

But this tax haven business doesn’t look so smart for you. Bit on the hypocritical side even. I wouldn’t read the newspapers this morning if I were you. You’re in nearly all the headlines. Even the Daily Telegraph is having a go at you, laying things on a bit thick with the old italics – “I did have money offshore.” With friends like that, David. And don’t even think of looking at that common people’s rag the Daily Mirror – “PM’S SECRET £30,000 STASHED IN A TAX HAVEN.”

How’s it working out with that crack team of spin merchants? First rule of spin club is killing the story with a single blow. Get the facts and out there and move on. The worst thing you can do is dodge and squirm all week, saying it’s private this and private that. And then finally come out and say: “Oh, look I did have a measly thirty grand squirrelled away somewhere. But do we have to keep going on about that?”

What’s that? Ah, one of the spin machinists now has two silver spoons shoved up…

And then, to top it all, in the same week you go and tell people that it’s necessary and right to spend £9 million on a government pro-Europe leaflet. How’s that playing with all those rabid Eurosceptic types you have scuttling round the skirting board in your party? Ah, yes, apoplectic you say. Well that’s the way they like to be. Being angry is what gets them up in the morning.

All this talk about how wealthy you are – and never mind how even more loaded Samantha is – really is a pain in the bottom, isn’t it. And you know, Dave, is does remind people how not like them you are. Have those spinners of yours looked up the beardy bloke’s jumper yet?

THIS freelance lark is pretty difficult but nobody told me you could just make stuff up. Hell, if I’d known that I’d be flying by now.

I have just read that Hello! magazine carried a “one-on-one” interview with George Clooney that turned out to be a “complete fabrication”.

The celebrity mag has apologised unreservedly and said it bought the rights to the interview in “good faith” from a creative agency. A very creative agency, ho-hum, as the whole interview had been made up.

In the interview that never was, Clooney apparently spoke about his relationship with his lawyer wife Amal, and how the key to their marriage was that they never spent more than a week apart.

He said (or didn’t say): “We have a very strong connection and she’s an extraordinary woman doing great work. We’re both committed and shared a common concern for causes like the refugee crisis, but what really brings us together as a couple is the fact that we’re good friends and we enjoy each other’s company.”

Not a bad effort, I guess – just the sort of bland ‘revelations’ celebrities sometimes make. But George wasn’t impressed. In a statement he said: “I have never given an interview to Hello! magazine and the quotes attributed to me are not accurate. To have an ‘exclusive interview’ completely fabricated is something new. And a very disturbing trend.”

Now I like George Clooney, with one reservation which I will discuss with him in a moment in my own made-up interview. He’s an actor who mostly appears in good films. He’s a director of decent movies. He’s a liberal political activist. And he has the sort of impossible greying good looks I search for in the mirror each morning. Sadly, George never looks back. Just me.

He also doesn’t mind appearing in numbskull roles in films by the Coen Brothers. Now I love their films. Their latest effort, Hail, Caesar!, is a gloriously deadpan comedy about the golden age of the movies when films were churned out on a bizarre production line. Clooney is cast as Baird Whitlock, film star and giant clunk – the fourth time the Coens have written a dopey role for him.

So George, those Coen Brothers have really got it in for you, haven’t they?

“Yes, they like to cast me as an idiot. I really don’t know why. But every time a script arrives from Joel or Ethan, I skim through the lines, looking for what they want me to say. But the thing is, these people aren’t really idiots – not to me, at least. I feel sad when people say I always play idiots for the Coen Brothers.”

“But you are very good at being an idiot, George.”

“Thank you – and you’ll find the door over there.”

“Before I go, can I ask you about Dr Doug Ross – you must feel you owe him a lot.”

Here Clooney’s brown eyes moisten a little. “Yeah, that guy was good for me. But I can’t watch ER nowadays. I’m so young in that damn drama. Look at all the grey hairs now.”

“But you look so distinguished, George.”

“Thank you – you can stay a little longer.”

“Now you’re well known as a political activist and Hillary Clinton supporter. So what do you make of Donald Trump?”

For a moment all his usual geniality evaporates and Clooney growls: “He’s just an opportunist. Now he’s a fascist; a xenophobic fascist.” [Important note: that reply may just have wandered in from an interview Clooney gave to the Guardian; you know, a real interview].

“Now I’d like to ask the coffee question, George?”

“Oh yes?”

“Do you really drink coffee made from those silly capsules you advertise on television?”

“What can I say? They’re the best…”

Clooney leans forwards and whispers: “Beans every time, Julian. Never touch the things at home but buy beans and grind them myself.”

“And you must be able to buy the best beans, George.”

“Oh yes – especially with the money they pay me for promoting that stuff.”

“Thank you, George. It’s been a pleasure.”

His handshake is firm and he twinkles at me with those brown eyes…

THE epithet is irresistible to the Daily Mirror today – “Dodgy Dave”. The front page of a paper that is reliably unfriendly to David Cameron says: “How many people believe you’ve come clean about tax, PM?” next to a photograph of Cameron forming a zero with his thumb and first finger.

Full marks for picture research on that one. Politicians always stand in danger of being tripped up by pictures. If the days when Nigel Farage used to hog the headlines, a lovely photograph showed the Ukip leader taking an unwise boat trip, snapping him next to a sign bearing the word ‘Slippery.’

Revelations in the so-called Panama Papers about Mr Cameron’s late father’s offshore tax arrangements dominate this morning’s news, with several papers giving the story front-page treatment.

Initially Mr Cameron had insisted his finances were a “private matter”. This phrase was open to interpretation. Did he mean ‘private’ as in ‘none of your business’; or ‘private’ as in ‘privately arranged so as to avoid scrutiny’.

Of course he meant the first and hoped that would put an end to it. But after “24 hours of confusion and criticism he caved in to pressure” to make a statement, according to the Tory-friendly Telegraph.

Two things stand out about this statement: the delivery of these carefully chosen words; and the location of that delivery. The nub of the quote was: “I own no shares, no offshore trust, no offshore funds, nothing like that. And, so that, I think, is a very clear description.”

His statement was a studiously prepared reply to a reporter, Faisal Islam, and began with two telling words: “Sure. Look….” A verbal tic that recalls Tony Blair and his attempts to look like an honest, ordinary guy (How’s that working out, Tony?).

And the location? Another of those public showcases where David Cameron surrounds himself with ordinary people, in Birmingham on this occasion, and a handful of journalists. The PM virtually never holds what you might call press conferences, where hordes of journalists ask awkward questions; instead he makes carefully stage-managed appearances where the questions are few and rarely too, well, taxing.

Does all this look bad for David Cameron? Well it certainly whiffs a bit, and he doesn’t really appear to have fully answered the questions put to him. His carefully phrased answer was put in the present tense, thereby raising questions about whether or not he has benefited from such trusts in the past or might do in the future – and whether other members of his family have benefited in the past or will do in the future.

What does play badly is that most of us don’t have the wherewithal to make complicated tax-swerving arrangements. There is, by the way, no suggestion that Cameron Senior did anything illegal, although most people will probably consider such movement of money to be less than wholesome. And not something that should be done.

The thing about Cameron is that he is posh and has never pretended otherwise – and that’s the sort of thing people from that background got up to at the time. Like the rest of us, he isn’t responsible for his father’s behaviour.

As an often lucky politician, he may well slip away from this controversy, making another well-greased dash for the door. One bit of luck Cameron has lies in the bearded form of Jeremy Corbyn. So often it seems that the two square up for a gunfight, only for Corbyn to recall that he doesn’t like to carry a gun, leaving Cameron to whip his out and score another easy hit. That certainly was the case after the Gunfight at the Duncan Smith Corral, when the Labour leader failed to even mention the loudly departed minister.

Corbyn has been stronger on the matter of Daddy Cameron’s Panama proclivities, so that at least is something.

TODAY I am off to Hull for a spot of work. Despite having lived fairly close for 27 years, I have been there only once. And that was to visit the Deep, so I have never set foot in the city proper.

There is something spirit-lifting about an expedition, even if is only an hour on the train to Hull. My guide for the day is the crime writer Nick Quantrill, a proud man of that sometimes downtrodden city. “I’ll meet you next to the statue of Philip Larkin in the station because that feels fitting,” says Nick in his email.

Another crime writer with Hull links, David Mark, once described Larkin as that “grumpy bugger who looked like Eric Morecambe”. He also pointed out that Larkin was one of the most celebrated poets of the last century, winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry, and a man who turned down the job of Poet Laureate.

Larkin was known for his “piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent” – a man who half-filled his glass with the beautiful and the sour. He didn’t exactly fall over himself to praise Hull, calling it “as good a place to write in as any”.  But he stayed there long enough, so he must have liked something about the place.

Another poet, Peter Porter, calls Hull “the most poetic city in England”. Perhaps today I shall find out if that is true or if the scowling presence of Larkin still lingers like a sea fret.

Hull is City of Culture 2017. The honour was seen as a joke by some, including that noted cultural commentator Freddie Flintoff, who tweeted about the announcement: “It’s not April Fool’s Day is it?”

No it wasn’t; just Freddie’s a fool day. Hull has been having the last laugh and I suspect that guffaw will rise next year, mixed perhaps with the occasional salted growl of discontent in honour of Larkin.

The coastal city does lay claim to another man of words, the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, whose most famous poem was To His Coy Mistress. I studied the poem at A-level and fragments still roam around my mind like those specks that float before the eyes. When I first wrote a crime novel it was called A Fine And Private Place in honour of the poet, and the policeman hero was called Marvell, so there you go. Unpublished, sadly.

Here are a few other things I know about Hull: Hull Truck Theatre; the phone boxes used to be white; Maureen Lipman comes from there; John Prescott used to be the MP and developed a binge-eating problem in part because of Mr Chu’s in Hull – “My favourite Chinese restaurant in the whole world… I could eat my way through the entire menu,” he once said.

Oh, and the Deep, which is great but I am looking forward to learning more about Hull than that dockside attraction. I have heard too about the street called Land Of Green Ginger, but that’s about it.

Ah, I have forgotten William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist, who was born in Hull. There are bound to be other gaps too. The Housemartins maybe.

Ah, yes, and the Hull Daily Mail, which yesterday published one of those silly “we’re better-than-you” stories attacking York under the headline: “Is Hull Better Than York?” Not according to the paper’s own scorecard which declared the contest an honourable draw. I suspect my old newspaper is already preparing a riposte to that one.

But pardon me, for I am off to look for a tall crime writer standing next to a statue of Philip Larkin.

“BETRAYAL OF WHITE PUPILS” shouts this morning’s Daily Mail in its trademark capital letters, that familiar typographic bellow.

The research behind the report comes from the CentreForum think tank. The story is not confined to the Mail, although the forceful promotion of that angle is.

The i newspaper prefers to use graphs to illustrate how pupils of different ethnic groups perform at school at different ages. This shows that Indian children are most successful at an early age, while Chinese pupils outperform their classmates by the age of 16.

Over in the Times the research behind this analysis is said to show that migrant children can thrive in our education system. The explanation is said to be that the parents of children from ethnic minorities are more ambitious for their children and better at supervising homework and setting bedtimes.

The Mail’s interpretation is guaranteed to set the hackles rising, as that newspaper so often does. A Mail story always has to have a robust angle. Here the paper points out that white British pupils start out as the third best performers but are “overtaken by pupils from ten other ethnic backgrounds” by the time they sit their GCSEs.

The forcefulness of the Mail’s approach is not exactly designed to help matters so much as slap down a “told you so” trump card, offering further proof of how the world conspires against “our own”.

Yet this is worrying and how to talk about such matters is never easy. I don’t much like the Daily Mail’s shouty approach to life, here or with other issues. In this case the word ‘betrayal’ worries me. Is this a betrayal or just the accidental product of cultural differences?

The research on which the Mail draws suggests that pupils without English as a first language have a disadvantage which becomes an advantage: because they don’t know the language teachers help them to catch up – and their parents are more supportive and want them to do well, giving a double boost.

Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University says in the Mail: “On the face of it, the education system is letting down white British children and we must examine the reasons with great urgency.” He adds that the extra attention received by immigrant pupils “may inadvertently be diverting attention from the needs of the poor white British pupils”.

What a minefield this topic represents, with scope for many interpretations. You could argue that the success of immigrant children shows the strength of our education system. Or you could choose to say that accidental discrimination against white pupils, especially poor white pupils, shows its weakness.

My own theory is that it’s down to culture as much as anything else, with hard work and success being stressed much more in some cultures than others – and even in some families more than others. A lot of that is down to what parents want for their children, and what they expect their children to achieve.

As a parent it is easy to worry if you pushed your children hard enough; if you should have been on their case more often, watching over their shoulders more acutely. Should a parent force their children to do well, or create a space of personal confidence in which that child does well on their own terms?

The second approach is preferable I’d say, although maybe the first gets better exam results. These things are never easy. Flinging the word ‘betrayal’ about doesn’t help, but it does attract attention.