THERE are two Word files for this blog on my laptop. The second one opens every day on the Monday in November after the dreadful assaults in Paris. Now with gloomy circularity, we are back there again, only this time in Brussels.

At the weekend today presenter John Humphrys wrote an appreciation of the great broadcaster Cliff Michelmore, a man who helped shape modern broadcasting. He recalled being a young ITV reporter at the Aberfan disaster in 1966 and rushing about the place, attempting to capture what had happened when a waste tip flattened a primary school, burying the children.

“I spent much of that awful day on the phone in the village pub trying to convey the horror of it over the landlord’s phone. Trying and failing,” Humprhys said.

When Michelmore went live on the BBC, he opened his report by saying: “I don’t know how to begin. Never in my life have I seen anything like this. I hope I never see anything like it again.”

Simple and sombre – and to the point.

The Aberfan disaster is the first such tragedy I recall seeing on the television; the first but certainly not the last. Then terrorism took over, with the IRA attacks, 911 and the London bombings; and Paris and everything horrific in between. Horrors carried out now in the name of a religion that wants nothing to do with such barbarity, as has been the case before, thanks to a twisted agenda that makes no sense to most people.

Michelmore’s words speak to us across the decades in a way, capturing the sense of incomprehension, except that tragically we keep seeing things like this, again and again. Something truly dreadful happens, usually killing or injuring ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. Eventually life goes back to normal, or as near to normal as possible, the skin of everyday life forms again. And then it happens once more.

Brussels had been braced for an attack, and when it came it was as cruel and dreadful as could have been imagined. Four months after the deadly Paris attacks, we are there again, with bloody mayhem in a different European capital after an attack thought to have been carried out by the Islamic State group.

The bomb attacks yesterday morning were co-ordinated to cause maximum harm and confusion. Explosions went off at the city’s Zaventem Airport and Maelbeek metro station – and came four days after the arrest in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam in connection with the Paris shootings. Whether the attacks were planned as revenge for that arrest remains to be determined, although it would hardly be surprising if that were the case.

The way we learn about such terrible events has changed beyond recognition since Aberfan. Back then disasters happened in real time, and the news took its time. Now disasters happen and we know the first details within minutes, while the horror is unfolding.

This has happened for two reasons, or two that I can immediately think of, but it’s all down to technology. The newsgathering technology is so much more sophisticated nowadays and delivers the horrors to us almost immediately. And thanks to mobile phones, everybody can record these dreadful events, and often the most affecting footage comes from the phones of witnesses.

And then there is the internet. As I was at home on the laptop, news kept pinging in on Facebook, snippets from a Brussels-based former York journalist, and news of someone who lived down our old street. Both are safe, thankfully.

It is always hard to know what to say about these events, and some of what is being said this morning hardly helps. Thank you to the Sun for pointing out that last month David Cameron said Europe helps make Britain safer – “How hollow that sounds today.”

That comment sounds kind of hollow to me too, a little too opportunistic, a little too quick to link one thing to another. There is talk of war and how this war compares to past wars; and there is discussion of whether or not this is a war, with the Guardian offering the following: “Talk of war amounts to handing Isis the victory it needs. It is a vocabulary that lends Isis a certain and entirely unwarranted legitimacy, by casting it almost as a state.”

I’d say that was about right. And the lessons? Better use of intelligence, I guess. Let the last word go to a cartoon. Colombian cartoonist Vladimir Flores draws Tintin reading the headlines and saying: “Mon Dieu…!” His cartoon went viral on social media yesterday, perhaps because it says it all.

OH, let’s go back to those vultures. When last we met, the IDS vulture had flapped off to a distant rock to lick his wounds, surfacing again on Sunday on the Andrew Marr perch, where he insisted he was more in the way of a dove.

Having caused mayhem by attacking his Conservative companions, and having dipped his mean beak in the self-delusion pool, the IDS vulture withdrew once more, leaving much political mayhem in his wake.

Yesterday the King of the Vultures put on his darkest suit and indulged in a spot of smooth fighting talk in the Bird House, cheered on by his fellow vultures, even those who were not fully on side.

Now the King of the Vultures is good in a corner, and came out with his feathers standing proud, insisted that his party were on the side of the little birds, and that they really were caring and compassionate vultures, contrary to the rumours. He also defended the traitorous IDS vulture and the bean-counting money vulture, who stayed away from the Bird House, even though his cunning financial plan now lay in blooded tatters on the floor, having been sabotaged by the IDS vulture.

The leader of the others put on a bit of a sparrow show, hopping about in the budget dust without really scoring a hit. All this suggested that the vultures were doing the most damage to themselves, and needed no help from their enemies opposite…

David Cameron was in pinkly puffed-up fighting mood yesterday, and you have to admit that he is good in a corner – even if all that amounts to is being easily up for the performance.

So we got the usual compassionate Conservatism stuff and the one-nation stuff, all of which he can say by rote. And there’s the rub – he makes these proclamations with such regularity and such ease that in the end they sound like what they are: just words, well-meant, clever words with little bearing on reality.

Cameron doused the flames by praising Iain Duncan Smith, whom he allegedly called a “shit” when he read the resignation letter, and also praised chancellor George Osborne – as he always does. Say what you like about the Tories but those two stick together, having been united from the start, and having learnt how not to conduct themselves by watching the endless Blair/Brown civil warfare.

Sometimes it seems that Osborne is really the man in charge, with Cameron wheeled out to give the presentational spiel. And this is why the busted budget is such bad news for the government: so much hinges on Osborne’s grand financial plan (or, if you wish, grand financial illusion) that if it threatens to tumble, everything really is in a bad way.

Osborne stayed away from the Commons yesterday. Perhaps there were other demands on his time; a High-Vis Fetish Convention somewhere, maybe. In truth, of course, he was hunkered down in the Treasury trying to dig his way out of that £4 billion hole caused by the abandonment of his harsh disability cuts. Today he will go to the Commons to defend his battered budget – the first time a chancellor has done that in 20 years.

Oh, my mood does perk up when the vultures land themselves in a mess. Incidentally, do you know what the collective noun is for these birds? A search produces conflicting answers, but the best one by far is a “venue of vultures”. How grand is that?

SOMETHING different today. I am over in Knutsford to talk to my mother’s U3A book-reading group. So here is an edited version of what I’ll be saying…

My name is Julian and sometimes I kill people. Now I am quite a peaceable person really, so why do I do it? And how do I get away with my crimes?

Well I only kill people on the page, you see. I still feel guilty about it sometimes. You might have invented these characters but they are real to the reader. Or they should be. So killing them counts for something.

Once I killed an elderly German pilot who came to York to apologise for bombing the city during the Second World War, and I did feel pangs about that.

The reason for my guilt was simple enough. A German pilot did exactly that in real life – and I borrowed the incident for The Baedeker Murders. Only in my version he is murdered during his stay. But that’s what crime writers do – they take something ordinary and turn the setting to ‘dark’.

So, yes, I have killed a few people – although not enough according to one American critic, who said there were too few murders in my books. Well you can’t please everyone.

Crime is popular, as any visit to a bookshop will tell you. What a lot of crime books there in print. And these books fall into all sorts of categories, from what is known as ‘cosy’ crime to the more hard-bitten books.

What unites all these very different novels is that a crime has been committed, usually a murder. There are various appealing elements to a crime book, but part of the attraction lies in the puzzle. Sometimes this is as finely made as an old-fashioned watch, with all the cogs, wheels and springs busily working away.

A classic example of such a book is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, in which a group of strangers receive a mysterious invitation to a remote island. They never meet their host, who has used flattery to draw them in. But once they are trapped, the unseen host reveals that each of his guests has committed a crime in the past for which they have escaped punishment. And one by one, the guests are murdered until no one is left. So who can the murderer be if they’re all dead?

That is a closed-room mystery, a seemingly impossible puzzle with a neat twist or conclusion. Add a remote location, such as an inaccessible island, and the setting is perfect. No one can leave and no one can arrive.

Sometimes modern crime stories use the old-fashioned approach. A very good writer such as Sophie Hannah weaves her psychological crime thrillers from the old Christie cloth.

And then there is Iceland. Recently on BBC4 there was an excellent Icelandic crime drama called Trapped. The title said it all. The characters were trapped by a snowstorm – and in other ways too, hemmed in by the cold claustrophobia of their lives.

This was, in a sense, an old-fashioned Agatha Christie story set in a strikingly different location. Agatha with ice and a gigantic cop who mumbled from behind his beard. Instead of a closed room or island, there was a small coastal town made inaccessible by the weather.

There will be blood in a crime novel. That goes without saying. How much is a matter of taste for the writer and the reader. Too much violence can be off-putting for many readers – and some writers, too.

The crime writer Mark Billingham says that the single spot of blood on the floor is much more frightening than splattering blood all over the place. That single spot soaks through to our imagination. Show too much and the mind shuts down; hint at what might have happened, and the reader’s imagination joins up the (bloody) dots and finishes what the writer has started.

Another popular writer who has often addressed this matter is Val McDermid. I’ve heard her speak many times and this usually comes up. Val addresses a seeming paradox of crime novels: these books are very popular with female readers – and yet the victims are so often women? So why do women like books that inflict hurt and injury on other women?

Val’s answer often takes two parts. One is that reading a crime book is a safe thrill, like riding a rollercoaster. And readers like being scared, we like the adrenalin buzz and the excitement of the floor dropping away beneath us. Her other answer is that women have more vivid imaginations than men, and that they like to scare themselves by living through their fears in fiction. They are better at imagining terrible things and draw an odd sort of comfort from approaching their fears through the page.

For the writer, the crime book can be almost anything you wish it to be. There are rules. If there is a crime, there should be a resolution of sorts. And you should not play unfair tricks on your readers. The solution should make sense in the terms of the book. You can’t end a story by saying than a previously unmentioned alien did it. That would be cheating – as well as ridiculous.

But within the broad framework, there is room to do almost anything. And to explore almost anything. The darker side of human psychology, for sure. Or perhaps politics and sex and the wrongs of the modern world.

Crime books will also be about morality to an extent. Immorality will be tracked down and hopefully punished. But not all endings have to be neat. Sometimes a lack of complete resolution might be satisfying in a disturbing way.

The question that most amuses or annoys writers is: “Where do you get your ideas from?” One of my favourite writers is Ian Rankin, the creator of Rebus. He once became so tired of being asked this question, that he told a man in the audience that there was an official website where accredited writers could go and download all their ideas. The irony was lost on this man. He came up afterwards and offered Ian £200 for the web address.

My ideas come from here and there, and from history too. My first book, The Amateur Historian, concerns a girl who is kidnapped in modern times – a crime linked to the death of another girl who lived in poverty 100 years before.

That was inspired by the Seebohm Rowntree report on poverty in York. I read the report and soaked up some of the facts and figures, and retold them as fiction.

When I write I have no plan as such. I have a beginning, a shape to follow, a rough map in my head. Usually I have an ending. And then I just set off to see what happens.

Other writers do this too – although many prefer to plot and plan. I’ve tried that but it doesn’t work for me. So I pick up an idea and go with it. Somehow the writing brings the story alive in a way that planning doesn’t for me. I just follow myself into the dark…

THE vulture licks his wounds as he sits on a rock. Perhaps he is sulking but it is hard to tell with vultures. He hops closer to his friend, another vulture naturally enough, and says: “It was never meant to be like this. I only wanted to help the poor stricken creatures – not strip them to the bone.

“I told him this plan wasn’t right but he wouldn’t listen. That vulture never listens to anyone, even his own kind. He’s a rule unto himself and all he thinks of is his scheme to become King of the Vultures. Look – I’m a vulture, I understand vultures, but really this was just too much.”

“Yes,” says the other vulture. He’s heard all this before and wonders how many more times it will bear saying.

But the first vulture has no intention of stopping. As he likes to tell people, you underestimate a quiet vulture at your peril. “I couldn’t just sit there and passively watch while all this went on – I had to act, I had to do something. All I ever wanted to do was to help people.”

The other vulture hops from one foot to the other, usually a sign of embarrassment in a vulture. “But I thought all these plans were basically your idea.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” the first vulture says, flapping off in the air to go and sulk elsewhere…

So Iain Duncan Smith has gone, resigned as work and pensions secretary in the row over cuts to disability benefits. In his resignation letter, he said that he disagreed with the cuts to personal independence payments which were a “compromise too far”.

There are, I guess, a number of complexions to his departure – the biggest resignation David Cameron has suffered in his time as prime minister. Personal and political differences with chancellor George Osborne are said to have been part of the problem for IDS – an acronym that always sounds too close to a medical complaint for comfort. In his sod-off letter, he pointedly attacked the notion that “we’re all in this together”, that shabbiest of Osborne mantras. He said that the “fiscal self-imposed restraints” – that’ll be the cuts – are “more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national interest”. This is true, but surely should have been apparent to Duncan Smith a long time ago.

His resignation poses a problem to those of us who have gone out of our way to dislike the man. If he has departed on a moral point; if he is stepping down to protest at cuts affecting disabled people – does that make him a better person than we thought?

Tricky, but I’ll say no to that one. Duncan Smith has been a long-time member of the Tory Vulture Club, so it seems a bit rich to loudly proclaim his disagreements now. His differences with the Treasury were a mostly private matter before, and now they are written in the headlines – and making the stuff of Tory nightmares.

But he did go along with many cuts and changes, and indeed was their chief architect, so his protests ring a little hollow – and sound self-serving. Personality comes into this too, and Duncan Smith has always seemed to be thin-skinned with the air of being one shake away from an explosion.

The consensus seems to be that the EU vote has something to do with this, too – as Duncan Smith is anti-Europe and firmly on the opposite side to Cameron and Osborne. This illustrates that Europe remains a toxic issue for the Conservatives, especially now that Duncan Smith has lit a long fuse to a new bomb.

As for George Osborne and his budgetary boastfulness, his plans seem to be unravelling fast, with the government indicating a climb-down on the cuts to disability benefits even before IDS flew off to sit on that rock and witness the chaos he had caused.

WHAT the papers say has always interested me, even if it is an inky old start to the day. From today’s pages I offer you revolting Tories and a reminder that good satire has punch and prescience. O…

Source: Bowling at George and satirical brilliance about Trump…

WHAT the papers say has always interested me, even if it is an inky old start to the day. From today’s pages I offer you revolting Tories and a reminder that good satire has punch and prescience. Oh, and a cautionary word about school governors.

George Osborne’s budget on Wednesday already seems to have run into trouble. A consensus is growing that cutting benefits for the disabled while enriching the richest ten per cent is cruel and unfair.

Now Osborne is said to be a master of the political game, the supreme tactician who is always one move a head – so how come he didn’t see that one coming?

Much of the opposition is coming from Tory backbenchers – and good on them. The balls they bowl at the chancellor hurt, while those thrown by Labour MPs too often miss their target.

The leader of the Tory uprising is Andrew Percy, the MP for Brigg and Goole. He reports that unease among his colleagues is greater even than during last autumn’s successful revolt over Osborne’s plans to cut tax credits.

Percy gets it right when he accuses the chancellor of hitting “exactly the wrong people” by proposing to cut personal independence payments for those who need aids to help them dress and use the toilet. And he adds some everyday wisdom to that: “These people have these needs. These needs are not going away and therefore the payments should not go away.”

Hitting the weakest is a low blow from a chancellor who often aims in that direction. Many of those affected by the meanness of the bedroom tax are said to be disabled people – and now the chancellor has an even nastier way to make their lives more difficult.

An agency picture in today’s papers shows George Osborne watching netball at a school in Garforth, Leeds, on the day after his budget. He is clapping and grinning like an automaton gone on the blink, and a pink ball hovers in the air. A good picture – capturing the man’s weirdness while also offering hope that the ball might hit him on the head.

Keeping up the oddness quotient for female Tory MPs is the ever-reliable Nicky Morgan, education secretary and a woman who always brings to mind George Osborne in drag (apologies for putting that picture in your head).

Speaking on Question Time, Morgan said the disability cuts were “just a suggestion” – a bit of chutzpah so outrageous that it almost qualifies as satire.

For true satire, a story on the front of The Guardian reminds us that all the way back in 2000 the super-smart creators of The Simpsons foresaw the possibility of President Trump, in a flash-forward episode in which Bart has become a hopeless bum and Lisa is President of the US – having to clean up the mess left by President Trump. They even invented a great slogan for Trump: “America you can be my ex-wife!”

The writer of the episode, Dan Greaney, tells the paper that this was intended as a warning, and that it “just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.”

How brilliant is that – for America going insane is just what I see every time the crowds cheer Trump as he makes outrageous play with racism, nastiness and xenophobia, while also bragging about his virility and saying he wants to punch someone.

Well, yes, Donald – we all share in that feeling sometimes.

After announcing in the budget that all schools would become academies, the government yesterday slipped out the news that parent governors would be scrapped in favour of professionals with the “right skills”.

The two things are not unconnected.

David Cameron pledged that creating academies would take schools away from the control of local authorities – proclaiming that as a benefit. But instead schools will be owned by sometimes distant academy chains and controlled remotely by the government, instead of locally by the council. And this is an advancement why?

Now the local voices of parents will be stifled in favour of people with the “right skills” – and you don’t have to be a complete cynic to wonder if those talents might include not causing trouble and doing as the academy chains wish.

Now I am not saying that academies are bad – but neither are they automatically good. And there are worrying implications here that publicly owned and run schools will fall into private hands. Is this a way of privatising schools by the back door? If so you might not want parent governors asking awkward questions.

WHAT sort of Chancellor is George Osborne? He’s an austerity meanie, a generous chancer, a maker and breaker of promises, an accomplished juggler and a bumbling magician. He has cash to hand out or benefits to snatch back. He’s everything and he is nothing, and trying to work out what he did with all those mirrors and all that smoke will occupy many hours.

Not from me, though. Budgets of all sorts are a puzzle to me. The Chancellor looks after the country’s budget; and my wife looks after ours.

So I won’t worry about what George Osborne says even if it is worrying. My own budget is enough already. But the odd thing is that if my hole-in-the-pocket personal budget was run like the Chancellor’s, I’d be rich one moment (just bought a lottery ticket) and poor again the next (damn those numbers).

I’d be full of financial glee one day (the economy is robust, there is cash to spare, let’s go to Waitrose) and resonating with gloom the next (that world economy has let me down, all that cheap oil has screwed me, can we afford Lidl?).

I’d be tap dancing with glee over my own ingenuity; and I’d be shuffling my awkward feet as I attempted to cover up the collapse of my clever choreography, or indeed my personal economy.

I’d be – oh, you get the idea. Budgets used to be stern and secretive, now they are leaked all over the shop; they used to be concerned with dull finances (still are behind all the conjuring), but now they are mostly given over to political fireworks. George dazzles us by waving the sparklers while hoping we don’t notice that the rockets are rubbish this year

He speaks of planning for future generations, while keeping an eye on the next day’s headlines; he bungs a present here and hopes we won’t notice it’s the present he gave us last time, only with new wrapping paper.

“George, this is exactly the same present you gave me last year?”

“Ah, that’s because last year I promised you double presents as I’d got the whiff of an upturn in the economy from a bloke down the global betting shop. Turns out it’s all gone tits up. But it was such a good present last time that really you have gone two presents for the price of one.”

“George, isn’t it one present for the price of two…?”

Because George is such a chancer it’s hard to know what to believe. And with him being flush with money one moment (last November, as it happens) and suddenly broke again now, this all goes to reinforce my long-held suspicion that Chancellors are really just gamblers who ride the system. If the world economy is surging, they do well and tell us how brilliant they are; if the world economy stumbles they tell us that we live in difficult times, and they are doing the best they can.

As this ledge is based in the north, let’s end with some promises George is bunging in this direction. He will use this afternoon’s budget to set in motion plans for a high-speed railway line from Manchester to Leeds (good idea if it ever happens) and build an 18-mile underground road tunnel beneath the Peak District.

If the Northern Powerhouse means anything, and isn’t just a smoke-wreathed confidence trick, transport links need to be much better in the north, especially rail. But if I had a flat cap, I’d bet it on these rail promises being fulfilled sometime just beyond the stop called never.

MY topic today is something I know nothing about – heavens, I must be turning into a rent-a-rant Tory MP.

The BBC has bought a new drama from the French. Now imported dramas with subtitles constitute a pleasant niche of my TV viewing, so I do know something about them. But not about Versailles because I haven’t seen it yet.

This rarely bothers the sort of backbench Tory who pops up with a bundle of outrage rolled under their arm, ready to splash about in the shallow end of our cultural life, especially when an opportunity arises to have a pop at the BBC.

The other day the Daily Mail worked itself into a righteous lather about the costume drama Versailles. According to the Mail’s report, Versailles has been accused of being “porn dressed up in a cravat and tights”. Is this drama really that bad – or that good, depending on tastes? The only way to know is to watch before letting an opinion roll out of your mouth like a half-sucked mint, a sensible precaution which rarely applies when it comes to MPs complaining about a television programme.

According to the Mail, the first episode of Versailles – which has already been seen in France – contains “gay sex, a cross-dressing prince, and a queen with a penchant for dwarves”. All of this and a scene in which “the king, played by English actor George Blagden, is seen burying his head between his mistress’s thighs”.

Enter Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, indignation rolled up under his arm. “There are channels where, if you wish to view this sort of material, you would have to pay for it. BBC viewers don’t have a choice. They have to pay for it whether they approve or not.”

Dear me, what does Mr Bridgen know about such channels? He does seem to have an air of authority on the matter. Then we have “BBC viewers don’t have a choice”. Oh yes they do: there are endless channels these days, so many so we are drowning in choice; and there is always the ‘off’ button.

This is just another in the endless round of anti-BBC stories that fill the newspapers nowadays. Sometimes these confected rows end up looking ridiculous. The BBC’s adaptation last year of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was on the same day described in different newspapers as being the most explicit drama ever seen on the BBC; and as having had most of the sex removed.

I took the trouble of watching and wished I hadn’t bothered, as it was terrible – and hardly explicit at all, as it happened.

The newspapers daily carry stories knocking holes in the new Top Gear show. The latest one has presenter Chris Evans apologising on air for a stunt in which co-presenter Matt LeBlanc drove past the Cenotaph war memorial in Westminster and indulged in the sort of motorised silliness often seen on this show.

Evans went into apology overdrive, but why exactly? The Cenotaph is a site of hushed reverence on Remembrance Sunday, yet outside of that properly respectful moment it is a monument on a busy street in central London.

If LeBlanc had tried this stunt during the Remembrance Day parade, that would have been an outrage. This isn’t – it’s just another over-hyped bit of BBC bashing, with even the presenter being panicked into taking part.

All of this is happening as the BBC faces the most hostile government in memory, and comes as the Culture Secretary John Whittingdale continues his long war of attrition against the BBC. The most recent example of this is a 242-page government-commissioned report suggesting that BBC1 has become less distinctive and claiming that if the corporation’s services were made less populist, commercial rivals could benefit by more than £100m.

The BBC rejected the report, citing shows such as The Night Manager, War And Peace and David Attenborough’s Giant Dinosaur – as they should. I’ve not seen the Attenborough programme, but the other two dramas are excellent, and just the sort of thing the BBC should be doing – and is already doing.

This ‘distinctiveness’ argument is a swamp into which Mr Whittingdale would like to see the BBC sink. Follow that approach and you’d end up with the BBC making the sort of worthy and dull programmes that no other broadcaster would touch. And then nobody much would watch and the reason for the BBC would begin to disappear.

As for benefiting commercial rivals to the tune of £100m – that figure has surely been conjured out of thin air. And why is that even a good thing anyway? I’d rather have a strong BBC, thank you.

Incidentally, the other night a glance at the listings revealed that Channel 5 had a programme about internet clips of cats, followed by three episodes of an imported US crime drama. Do we really want to benefit such rubbish at the expense of the Beeb?

NEWSPAPERS are often sent articles or features that can be slotted in without effort. Rather more often than you might imagine, such articles are written by the Prime Minister.

You might think he would have other things to do. You know, a country to run, an EU campaign to mastermind; you might think that keeping eye on Boris Johnson was occupation enough and never mind all the rabid other ‘outers’ in his own party. But there is always time to write a composite article for that bit of the country that means so very much to him (insert name here).

So it was last week that David Cameron put his name to an article in support of English Tourism Week, following Prince Charles urging families to visit flood-hit areas for their holidays.

This tick-box article began: “I love Yorkshire & the Humber” and then listed various reasons why the region was so attractive to visitors. This piece was described as “very personal” – and according to the Yorkshire Post, a Downing Street press officer rang to offer this heartfelt plea on behalf of Yorkshire at the very moment Mr Cameron could be seen on Sky News in talks with EU leaders over the migrant crisis in Turkey.

As the paper’s columnist Tom Richmond said on Saturday: “Was this multi-tasking at its very best?”

Many newspapers carried this article, including the one I used to work for. I make no judgement on their decision, except to say that it was cheering to read that the Yorkshire Post had decided not to print this piece of prime ministerial guff and puff (the description is mine, no theirs).

The Post rejected the allegedly personal column on the grounds that it was “formulaic, lacked empathy and only made passing reference to the misery caused by the Yorkshire floods”.

The traditionally Conservative-leaning Post published an open letter to David Cameron at the end of January, asking him to answer key questions about flooding policy in Yorkshire, and says it has received no reply. So when Mr Cameron’s tattered little article floated in they decided to spike it.

I wish more newspapers had done this. They should all have refused to print what Downing Street was offering; and they should maintain that stance whoever happens to be in power. In the unlikely event that Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister one day, newspapers should decline to print such articles from him too.

The Post’s refusal to print Mr Cameron’s article and then to boast about it may well have got up the noses of those newspapers who did decide to use it. But good on them. Tom Richmond’s column was receiving quite a bit of attention on Facebook and Twitter over the weekend, and was being shared by people who, it seemed, were not regular readers of the Post but supported their position.

Governments of all persuasion spend untold millions spinning this or that. Sometimes the spin is upfront and obvious – witness all the stories at the moment about what’s going to be in this week’s Budget; and sometimes it is more low-key, such as Mr Cameron’s love letter to Yorkshire & the Humber (and all those other places, too).

As those of us with an eye or two might have suspected, Mr Cameron is an inconstant admirer, and his love letters ended up being sent all over the country. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, as that’s the sort of thing politicians get up to. But we should be surprised that so many newspapers print this friendly seeming propaganda. Wouldn’t it be something if the Society of Editors decreed that in future none of its members would sully newsprint with such cynical nonsense from Downing Street?

Apart from anything else, it would show some respect for their readers, who might not even know that such ‘highly personal’ letters are nothing of the sort.