WHO’S the real Lotto winner? Not that woman from Worcester who claims her ticket went through the wash. No, Google of course. What a cosy deal they’ve done with the Treasury.

Chancellor George Osborne has been crowing about the all-round wonderfulness of his arrangement with Google, under which the company has agreed to pay £130 million taxes in a deal covering ten years – on reported annual UK revenues of £3.9 billion.

“A major success,” says Osborne, hopping around with his crow head bobbing up and down and his black eyes gleaming.

“We’ve been had,” almost everyone else cries.

According to The Times this morning. Google could pay France three times as much in a similar settlement, even though the UK is the company’s biggest foreign market. In an aside, The Times reports that Google spends “$12 million a year alone on chicken for its staff canteens” – feeding them chicken while we get chicken feed, in other words.

Hardly anyone apart from Osborne thinks this deal is worthy of a crow dance – with even Number Ten distancing itself from Osborne’s enthusiasm. A press spokesman for David Magpie Cameron said “five for silver” and declined to make further comment.

Incidentally, should you be wondering why Mr Cameron has been depicted as a magpie to Osborne’s crow, I direct you towards the RSPB website, where you will find the following: “Magpies seem to be jacks of all trades – scavengers, predators and pest-destroyers, their challenging, almost arrogant attitude has won them few friends.”

Keeping financial tabs on multinational tech companies such as Google is a tricky business – but then so is politics, and what George Osborne is attempting to do is pass off a shameful failure as a success.

And that just won’t wash (a bit like that lottery ticket).

The Financial Times tends to understand these things. It says this morning of George’s dodgy arrangement with Google: “The deal ended a decade-long probe by the authorities into whether the tech group had skirted its tax bill obligations by allocating profits earned in the UK – its second biggest market – to its European base in Ireland, where tax rates are lower.”

Now Google is a wonderful thing and where would we be without it? Some of us can barely remember what life was like pre-Google. Yet if we are to have tax systems, it is only fair that companies such as Google and Amazon should pay their share of taxes, as smaller and less protean companies have to (just Googled ‘protean’ to check and reckon it will do).

Tech companies seem able to slip in and out of countries like spectral money-making machines, providing services people want, and yet being reluctant to pay a fair whack of tax, as if they believe themselves to be citizens of a higher world that shuns the old shackles and shekels.

Of course what various sketch writers have done this morning is put George Osborne into Google. I just did that and got “about 58,300,000 results in 0.57 seconds”. Wow! And I bet none of them say that George is right.

A different sort of tax applies to the National Lottery: a tax on idiocy. Now I stump up £2 a week as my contribution. It’s good to feel there is a chance of winning, however remote the odds.

There is much reporting this morning of the Worcester woman who claims she put her £33 million winning ticket through the wash. Susanne Hinte is splashed all over the front page of the Sun. The 48-year-old ‘gran’ is not believed by all, with one neighbour telling the tabloid: “Sue is a clever girl, but claiming to have a ticket with the barcode washed off is a bit much.”

Well, yes.

I might as well claim to have won because I had a ticket with completely the wrong numbers on – as happens every week. I’ve not checked Saturday’s numbers yet, so here goes. Ahem, not a single number again. And the millionaire draw? “Sorry not a winning match…”

I only know two Russian proverbs. And one of those goes like this: “Foolish is the man who thinks he can reduce War and Peace to a six-part TV series for Sunday night telly.”

Before relaying the other, let’s just admit that BBC 1’s War and Peace is a fantastic treat, marred only by a sense of having been more condensed more fully than a can of that sweet milk.

Enough of that though, as this morning I wish to talk about beer and bread, two important ingredients in a life roundly lived. That at least is my theory, one which has got me this far.

Here, then, is the proper Russian proverb: “When you die, all the bread you ever wasted is weighed. If it is heavier than you, hell is your destination.”

That came from one of my many bread recipe books, and I remember those words when tipping a small concrete chunk of stale bread into the bin. Stale bread can have many uses, not least in making croutons for soup, but there does come a point when what was once springy and fresh is beyond alternative use.

So I was thrilled to read about a London brewer who is using waste bread to make beer; genuinely pleased, as here were two of my favourite things joined in parsimonious union.

The Hackney Brewery is reported to have made beer from unsold loaves of bread, the first time this has been done in Britain. The ale is made from “bread that would otherwise be thrown away by bakeries, delicatessens and supermarkets”, according to the Guardian.

The idea for the beer came from Tristram Stuart, founder of the charity Feedback, which campaigns to end food waste, and was inspired by a Belgian brewer who already follows this process.

Stuart says that 24 million slices of bread are thrown away every year in this country. An awful lot of bread. And an awful lot of people going to hell.

Toast Ale is made by turning waste loaves into breadcrumbs which are toasted and then brewed with malted barley, hops and yeast. The resulting beer is said to be a pale ale with a distinctive taste. Each bottle uses one slice of bread, and all profits go back to the Feedback charity.

Toast Ale costs £3 for a 330ml bottle. That sounds a lot but I will definitely give it a try.

This crusty ale seems like a good way to raise the matter of what we throw away. According to a survey by Love Food Hate Waste, 49 per cent of adults eat bread every day, with 38 per cent buying two loaves a week (the same number as I bake each week). Shockingly, 18 per cent of bread buyers admitted to throwing away a whole loaf before opening it, while 25 per cent threw away the end of a loaf.

As for the ale, there is a pleasing wholeness to this idea, as bread and beer have always been linked, and not only in my diet. Bread needs assistance to rise in the oven, and this comes from yeast. Before the production of commercial yeast, early bakers made their own sourdough cultures (popular again now among craft bakers and bread-obsessed home bread bores) or made a ‘barm’ using yeast residue skimmed from the top of beer during the brewing process. This yeasted scum was fed with flour and left to grow, after which it could be used to raise bread.

Home bakers can have fun using live beer, which still has yeast in the bottle, to experiment with in making beer. Although you do have to waste a bottle of beer to do that.

I have been robbed by the actor Stanley Tucci. In today’s Guardian Weekend magazine, he features in a Q&A, one of those old newspaper ideas that still work well.

The questions are the same each week, and one asks: “What do you most dislike about your appearance?” To which Tucci replies: “I would love to have my hair back, and to be two inches taller – I am 5ft 8in.”

Ha! That man has taken those words from mouth, stolen them while I was sleeping perhaps. Still, it’s encouraging to learn that a famous man worries about follicular loss and a lack of height. I would have put Stanley taller than that, but that has been said about me too.

“I thought you’d be taller,” a letter writer/occasional columnist said when he met me years ago.

No, same height as I’ve always been since the growing business stopped. At the time this man had only spoken to me on the phone and seen my by-line photograph in the newspaper. Although I can’t claim much in the way of tallness, I can safely say that I am taller in the flesh than in the picture that accompanied my column.

Wishing one had been taller and hairier is pointless, but sometimes pointless distractions carry a certain weight. In the photograph to accompany the Q&A, Tucci looks handsome with his bald and shaved head, heavy glasses and stubble on his face that runs on from the bristles at the side of his head. That’s a trick I have never managed to pull off. Without visits to the barber, my hair grows thick at the sides and back, and eventually reaches a ‘mad professor’ moment with too many protruding clumps. And the stubble just looks scruffy.

People of perfectly average height – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it – often wish they were taller. My great university friend John Sheridan, the subject of one of these laptop excursions, was 6ft 4in and towered over me. I wished I could have been taller then but John thought there were disadvantages, including a tendency to slump your shoulders. It is also harder to pass unnoticed.

As a Tucci-sized man, I have one son of 6ft 2in and another of 5ft 11in. Thankfully our daughter is a little shorter than me, and indulges in a good-tempered squabble with her mother over who is taller.

According to a story in the Daily Mail last year, being tall can be good for your heart but can harm your sex life. The story below this was such a mass of worry-inducing contradictions that I fear I shrunk an inch while reading it. Nothing worth repeating there.

A couple of years before that, the Daily Telegraph was reporting on “The benefits of height”, and opined that “Tallness, particularly in men, has always been a valuable biological characteristic, where those fortunate enough to be at least 6ft benefit from a pervasive positive discrimination.”

If small men suffer the opposite effects thanks to their limited stature, then those of us in the middle – yes, I’m still calling this the middle, thank you – presumably get away without being too much affected either way.

Would I have escaped this ledge earlier if I’d been as tall as my son? Who knows, but I’m stuck at 5ft 8in, size eight shoes and a head of larger than average dimensions.

But then look at Stanley. He seems pretty cool to me.

Two hits for the price of one today: David Cameron talking to himself and the truth about Ed Stone.

Last Autumn, David Cameron – you know, prime minister of this country, chief architect of cuts to local councils up and down the land – wrote in his capacity as an MP to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire county council to complain about cuts to services in his constituency, saying that he was “disappointed”.

This story first surfaced in the Oxford Mail, and then went national. There was something pleasingly insane about David Cameron ticking off a council leader for the cuts he himself had made. This raised the frankly terrifying prospect that there might be two David Camerons in a Jekyll and Hyde scenario.

Now Cameron has once again warned his local council against making cuts, telling them to “look again”. In turn the council leader, Ian Hudspeth, tells Cameron his authority will have to make more than £69m of extra savings, including cuts to children’s centres – on top of cuts worth £292m already agreed between 2010 and 2020. Mr Hudspeth says his council has been “badly hit” by the government’s new funding formula.

Here we find David Jekyll talking to Dave Hyde. Please press OK to agree that you are over 18 and unlikely to be disturbed by this scenario.

David Jekyll: “Now Dave – and is it okay if I call you Dave? – I understand that you are upset about cuts to your local council and that the good folk of Witney might be up in arms.”

Dave Hyde: “Too right I am, David. I’ve already told that useless bunch to make back-office savings.”

DJ: “And what are back-office savings, Dave?”

DH: “Ah, not rightly sure. You’d need to ask George. He handles all the back-office stuff. Look, all they need to do is lay off a few unimportant people, you know, that sort of thing.”

DJ: “But don’t you feel at all responsible for cuts made by your own government?”

DH: “Who, me? I am the prime minister, I’m far too busy running the country to worry about something like that. Nothing to do with me, David, it’s all the fault of those local councils. We have made the cuts democratic…”

DJ: “Passed the buck, you mean.”

DH: “Look I don’t have time for any of this. I’ve got to dash off to Davos and put on my sad but reasonable face – and then bore the arse off all those Europeans until they get so sick of me moaning on and on they just agree to my demands.”

DJ: “Don’t go just yet, Dave. We’re still talking about the cuts in your own constituency caused by your own government – which is to say you.”

DH: “Me? Oh this has nothing to do with me. Look I’ve already told that fellow – damn fool is meant to be in the same party as me – that we have made it possible for councils to sell property assets and use the capital to invest in transforming local services – and ensure future savings.”

DJ: “And what on earth do those words actually mean, Dave?”

DH: “Haven’t the foggiest. George told me to say that. He’s big on selling things off is George. He’d put me on eBay if you gave him half a chance.”

DJ: “So what are you going to say to your constituents about the cuts?”

DH: “Constituents? Oh I’m far too busy to talk to them. They can go and moan to that council leader. All his fault. Nothing to do with me…”

Interestingly, when Robert Louis Stephenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde one of his interests was said to be the concerns over the divide between public and private selves in Victorian Britain. A similar divide seems to exist in David Cameron’s head.

Now let’s roll onto that stone. The Ed Stone was a two-tonne slab of limestone on which Ed Miliband had his election promises carved. This was by general agreement one of the worst gimmicks ever dreamed up by a politician (second only to Donald Trump’s hair). How many meetings did that idea go through; was everyone asleep?

After eight months of speculation, Labour officials have told Bloomberg News that the stone was smashed up shortly after the election. Presumably by applying it with force to the head of whoever had the idea.

Incidentally, Ed Stone is also a character in the York Theatre Royal panto, which ends an enjoyable run at the National Railway Museum tomorrow. So good I saw it twice.

Beards are nasty, unhygienic facial doormats in which germs and bits of undigested food can hide like fugitives in a jungle, right?

Plenty of people think that. Plenty of woman-shaped people insist on it. Yet beards have never been more popular, with hipsters going around the place looking as if they have swallowed a fox whole leaving only the tail on view, hanging over their chin.

Mind you, I have read a few times that we may be reaching beard tipping point. This phrase is open to interpretation. Either it suggests that beard popularity has peaked. Or it indicates the moment when a beard has grown so huge that it threatens to topple the wearer onto his face.

Yes, nasty, dirty things – and I haven’t attempted to grow one since I proudly turned myself into a garden gnome in 1983 during a six-week holiday to Australia. That beard followed me home like a facial fungal growth. Either that or a koala bear was missing an ear that had somehow become stuck to my face.

Thick hair under that young chin, no moustache to speak of – I looked ridiculous, although I was proud of that beard.

Since then my face has been clean or carried a dusting of stubble. The only further excursion into facial adornment was a moustache grown in the name of charity. I reckon my wife would have paid me more than I raised just not to grow the lamentable thing in the first place.

Anyway it turns out that everything I have just written is wrong. Not about me looking like a tit when I grew a beard in Oz; that is true. Not the bit about the creepy, near-invisible lip caterpillar; that too is veracity itself.

No, what’s wrong is the hygiene slur. Beards are not dirty at all but are indeed cleaner than a close-shaven face. According to study published in the Man’s Book of Beardy Excuses – sorry, the Journal of Hospital Infection – beards may contain bacteria which could potentially be developed into new antibiotics.

And it may seem strange to those of us with mostly respectable chins, but clean-shaven men are more likely to harbour bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

A ‘naked’ face is more than three times as likely to carry MRSA – and ten per cent more likely to harbour colonies of Staphylococcus aureus – “a bacterium that causes skin and respiratory infections, and food poisoning” according to a report in the Independent.

Apparently shaving could be the problem, as the bacterial nasties can lurk in the cuts men inflict on themselves while shaving.

So far from being dirty, beards could save the world and men shaving too often could be the ones harbouring nasties on their skin.

Mostly I shave every other day, with a brush and shaving soap, and of course a very sharp blade. Really women have no idea of the way we men suffer (although I might just go and hide somewhere when my wife is reading this).

Something a little unworthy today. I have been looking at the Daily Mail’s online strip of shame – also known as the sidebar of shame, a sidebar being a newspaper name for something incidental on the page.

A flight of nibs is a column of short stories – and the Mail’s online version is a column of flighty nibs. This is not a technical term as such, but something that occurred to me just before my brain rolled out of my ear. That’s the price I pay for research.

A ‘nib’ in this context is a mini-celebrity you probably won’t have heard of – and when you have been introduced, you will wish to jump again into the waters of blissful ignorance.

It’s surprising how much material you can get out of half-famous nonentities (not that most of them are wearing much in the way of material). Can you even be half-famous and a nonentity? Well you can on the strip of shame.

This sticky little feature has helped to make the Mail’s online version one of the most visited newspaper websites in the world, apparently. That ‘apparently’ is there as a caution, meaning I read that online more than once. And that’s good enough for me on my ledge.

Perhaps you are in a state of innocence about this modern cultural phenomenon. I shall explain. The sidebar of shame is a column of short stories about women in or half-out of their clothes. It is a tacky hymn to the bikini body; or a cautionary giggle about bodies that should never be seen in a bikini.

It’s raucous, shameless and smutty in a Carry On fashion. And scrolling through what amounts to an array of vaguely famous women’s breasts and bums is simultaneously sick-making and horribly addictive.

There are puns about bums, quips about tits. Flat stomachs often win a mention, as sometimes do their flabbier cousins.

Here is a taster of what is on offer today.

An Australian model called Lara Stone is worthy of three separate entries. In one she is “showing off her figure in a white bandeau bikini” on a beach in Sydney. In another she is having her photograph taken with a hunky male. And in the third the 32-year-old is seen shopping “with a sunburnt face after she took part in an outdoors photoshoot”.

The last pictures look like paparazzi shots. And what’s shown on Lara’s face isn’t sunburn but displeasure: she is pissed off at being followed round by a photographer.

Quite often the women have been snapped from a distance, possibly without realising. They do not appear to have been willing participants in their exhibitionism – although some shots look staged, so perhaps they knew all along.

Some of the photographs are selfies supplied by the women themselves. Someone called Lauren Goodger features often. Apparently she is a former reality TV star, which has a ring: what, do you think, “former reality” might be? It’s an interesting philosophical concept; more interesting anyway than Lauren’s self-snapped pictures of her “stripped down to her smalls”.

So a onetime reality star is now an all-out star in her own right in the smuttersome arena of not news. Perhaps not news sells because the actual news is just too damn depressing some days.

What a curious place this sidebar turns out to be. Women such as Lauren are on there all the time with semi-naked selfies they’ve put on Instagram – endless narcissism via mobile snaps. Scroll down further today and you will encounter Nikki Minaj’s “pert posterior”. Actually do be careful as it does stick out rather and I’m worried you might trip.

Ah, what’s this? “Has the world gone mad!? Bikini-clad Poppy Delevingne shows off her stunning model figure as she celebrates reaching 1 million Instagram followers.”

Yes, the world has gone mad – and you, Mail Online, helped make it a little bit madder, so don’t pretend otherwise.

I don’t understand this madness; and I don’t understand this sidebar of shame. It’s certainly traffic-accident compelling, but really I think I should pop my brain back in and look at something else.

THE victims are finished off one by one until no one is left at all. That may sound like the newspaper where I used to work, but actually it’s the plot of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

This was Christie’s most famous novel, a closed-room whodunit in which ten strangers cloistered together on Soldier Island are murdered one by one. No one else is on the island so the killer can only be one of those present.

Unlike on my old newspaper, we have no idea whodunit.

The plot is a perfect exercise in impossibility. The ten strangers are invited by an unknown, never seen host. Each of them has a dark secret to hide and a crime for which they must pay.

For some reason I’d never got round to Agatha Christie, who is often read by children taking their first steps towards adult books. I have just put their right by reading And Then There Were None.

The great Raymond Chandler was not much taken with Christie’s novel, concluding that the book was a failure as the murders could not happen in real life. Much as I like Chandler, having read all the Marlowe novels when young, he was missing the point. Christie’s  book is a perfect puzzle, and the exquisite challenges of its plot is the whole point. The writer herself was gripped by the impossibility of her chosen scenario. “It was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me.”

As the power of the story rests on the solution to its incredible puzzle, I’ll leave a cloak over that part of the plot, just in case, even though everybody else in the world has probably read this novel by now.

The revelation was no revelation to me, as I watched the BBC1 adaptation at Christmas. What a treat that was – stylish and sinister, and quietly, devastatingly menacing too. If anything that new TV adaptation was more satisfying than the book.

Christie’s murder mystery is swift but functional, with the dramatic flow interrupted by clunky outbreaks of “he said” and “she said”, often with a modifier: “he said desperately” – that sort of thing. Perhaps that is just how books were written then, and while it’s distracting, if you have up to ten characters speaking, you do have to identify who is saying what.

The TV adaptation changed the ending, and made the killing of Vera Claythorne more sadistic, showing a young woman desperate to live. Christie summons up this spirit of survival, then lets her penultimate victim – or last victim, depending on how you look at it – surrender to the suicide arranged for her.

Another difference lay in dispensing with the final section, where two police officers, Sir Thomas Legge and Inspector Maine, sit in Scotland Yard trying to puzzle everything out, only for the real solution to be found in a confessional letter put in bottle by the killer and cast into the sea.

The TV version also sexed matters up rather, introducing a locked-room fling between Vera (Maeve Dermody) and the wolfish Lombard (Aidan Turner, minus his shirt again, Poldark-style, only without the scythe).

Christie herself did introduce a romantic element in the stage adaptation, altering the ending to one where characters survive and fall in love. Although that now sounds like a dud Hollywood touch, she made the change because the show was being staged during the Second World War and she thought the original ending too bleak for the times.

Apparently today is Blue Monday – officially the “most miserable day of the year” according to the Daily Express this morning. The Sun raises our spirits with the thought that one in four animals suffer from depression.

I have to say that our cat didn’t appear unusually downhearted this morning, just the same content, empty-headed self, blissfully alert to all of life’s varied opportunities (new tin of food, push the biscuits on the floor, pop outside, come back in for a long sleep, scratch something you’re not meant to scratch).

No, I’d say cats had it sorted.

Today might be Blue Monday if you are Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader is pictured on the front of The Sun as a giant bomb (“OFF HIS WAR HEAD”) for saying that the UK should retain the fleet of Trident submarines but send them to sea without any nuclear warheads.

Mostly this idea has not been well received in the newspapers, with the Sun’s reaction being the most extreme, dismissing his “peacenik plan” while an academic in the Daily Telegraph describes the idea as “patently daft”.

I think it probably is mad, a crazy compromise brought about by Jeremy Corbyn sensibly hating nuclear weapons while at the same time not wishing to alienate union members who fears jobs will be lost if the nuclear deterrent were scrapped.

Yes, a daft idea – but surely no more regrettable than us not being able to even talk about dismantling our nuclear arsenal. Is it sensible to want to blow £100 billion or whatever – the figure is never precise, but it is huge – on a questionable insurance policy?

Politicians on all sides cling to our nuclear deterrent because they like to look strong, to cut a military swagger in their pinstriped suits. But does our blind adherence to nuclear bombs still make sense in a changed world?

Such questions are worth asking, but Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to, in effect, shell out billions for the guns, as it were, but not supply any bullets does seem half-baked.

And this is a shame because his honest opposition to nuclear weapons is, to this voter, one of his more appealing qualities.

As for Blue Monday, any day of the week must seem blue to the Labour leader as he looks to see how his latest statements have been disparaged or ridiculed in the newspapers.

Away from politics, there is advice in the papers this morning about circumventing this supposedly dismal day. Suggestions offered to lift the post-Christmas blues include hitting the sales, booking a holiday or saving money by “shopping around for the best deals on insurance, energy and credit cards”.

That last one is, if you don’t mind me saying, absolutely the bloody pits. It comes, unsurprisingly, from someone on a price comparison website. I’ve never been on one of those and never will. This obsession with moving everything round drives me mad. And if I spent the day doing that I’d been cast into the deepest pool of blue.

Let’s just pretend this is any other Monday, blue or otherwise; just a day with all that offers, good or bad. Or repel the blues with cheerfulness. Smile at the demons and screw up the newspapers with their dreary advice.

Perhaps not the Daily Telegraph today, in which psychologist Linda Blair says that you can “choose to believe that it will be a nice day, in which case you’ll be more likely to notice the high points”.

Hardly sensational advice, but sensible. Go for a walk, walking is good. And I hate to say this but perhaps you shouldn’t read the newspapers (especially if you are Jeremy Corbyn): that way you wouldn’t even know about Blue Monday.

Newspapers mostly remain a force for good if you ask this inky-fingered laptop surfer – but sometimes they fill their pages with desperate nonsense. Especially on a slightly dour Monday after Christmas.

A relaxed Sunday, on the surface at least. Cerys Matthews is on the radio. Her BBC6 Music show is the new now since my attachment to the Archers omnibus began to fray like a string vest belonging to Joe Grundy.

So what’s been going on in Cole-land? There was a leaving do on Friday for my old workplace. Yes, another one. What a queue of departures. For the first time I felt detached from my old life. Not surprising as it’s been a while now.

When you leave somewhere, even if you spent an unholy chunk of your life there, you are no longer part of what is going on. You know the players, the rules and the routines. But it’s all moving on without you; a case of long train runnin’ while you kick your heels on the platform (a couple of Doobie Brothers references in there for readers of a certain age).

Don’t get me wrong, it was good to see people again, to chat to old friends and former colleagues. But this onetime stalwart felt like a bit of an outsider. This is natural and healthy, if a little sad, as you have to let go. So far I’ve moved on but not fully onto anything else yet. Lots of writing, some earning a pound or two, but nothing you can rest your feet on.

Beneath the low rumble of panic, I feel an undercurrent of optimism, based on what I couldn’t say. What a fool believes, perhaps – right, I’m done with the Doobies now.

My Sunday morning run, the first in two weeks, took me along Walmgate towards my old office. Not been down there since the floods, and many shops are closed and being repaired. It was a sad sight, although not as sad as the photographs from a couple of weeks ago showing the street like a disaster zone.

The rising Foss did for that area – and also inundated Huntington Road, leaving many people without anywhere to live for months to come.

All this has created a wider problem. At the height of the flood the council leader announced to the world that York was closed. Some businesses believe that message resonated too deeply, as people seem to be staying away from the city. We’ve not had anyone in our Airbnb room for a few weeks, but we do have a guest tomorrow. Funnily enough from his details he seems to be here to help a business that was flooded out in Walmgate.

So York is open, back to normal for the most part. People and businesses are still displaced, but the ordinary visitor probably won’t even spot the city’s damp patches. So please come back…

“Diamond wheezers” is a newspaper pun used today in connection with the conviction of the final three men on trial for the Hatton Garden raid last Easter.

But as well as being a rather neat tabloid tag for a gang of ageing criminals who committed an audacious crime, could this label also apply to Jeremy Corbyn for audaciously winning the leadership of his party?

Corbyn is a similar age to the “Bad Grampas”. So what chance does he have of pulling off a votes heist and stealing an election?

On page 37 of last Sunday’s Observer the Labour leader wrote a long article under the headline “Reshuffle? Focus on Tory failings in health, housing and education instead.”

Now Corbyn won’t have written that headline, but it does encapsulate the problem. As reflected in the words he writes below, the Labour leader is saying the media should shut up about his reshuffle and concentrate on the Tories instead.

But the problem here, Jeremy, is that’s your job.

While the Observer article contained much that was true and sensible – including a critique of the ways in which the Conservatives are said to be attempting to fix the electoral system in their favour – it still raised other problems.

On paper Jeremy Corbyn sounds sensible and decent to these mostly sympathetic ears. But there is a gap between those printed words and how we see Labour operating. He might write good copy, but he just doesn’t nail his opponents often enough.

Now Corbyn’s supporters have an answer for this. They believe the BBC and its political editor are determined to stich up their newish leader who has no chance of a fair hearing or decent representation (most national newspapers are traditionally hostile to Labour).

Is this really happening? Plenty of people think so, and followers of the Corbyn cult react furiously at any perceived slight. The trouble is they end up looking petulant. The answer is for Labour find a better way to out its case, not to sulk at every alleged act of misrepresentation.

Corbyn is fantastically popular among his supporters. They really do love their Diamond Wheezer. His greatest achievement has been winning over all those new grassroots supporters. But that ground-level success brings problems too.

Any political party is a knitting together of factions, a union of foes as well as friends. The Labour Party splinters into many factions, as a helpful report in the New Statesman explained last October.

A sibling rivalry exists between these brotherly gangs. Now I shall try not to get too technical or dull here. The different groupings include, in brief, the Blairite gangs Labour First and Progress, the moderate Labour For The Common Good (a sort of Corbyn-sceptic gathering) and the cult-carrying Momentum.

Momentum is the Corbyn-worshipping faction with the grassroots support. According to the New Statesman, it is loved by its members and “decried as the renaissance of 1980s Labour Trotskyites, Militant Tendency, by its detractors”.

What the Momentum gang want is to transform Labour into a “more democratic party”, while opponents fear this will lead to a purging of moderate MPs and the creation of a “party within a party”.

Most voters will see all this, if they see it at all, as a political party squabbling viciously with itself – much as the Tories are likely to do in the run-up to the Europe vote.

As a sympathetic but sceptical observer, I’d say the danger lies in the gap between the Corbyn fanatics, who really do worship their Diamond Wheezer, and the ordinary ranks of those more or less inclined to the left.

It’s marvellous that Corbyn can win over new supporters, especially among the young who are too easily overlooked in our political system. But if the grassroots are much more left-wing than many of the party’s own MPs – and certainly more to the left than many voters – then you have created a problem.

Listen to the friendly hysteria and you seem popular, but victory is still buried deep underground in that election vault. And you need diamond-sharp political tools to get inside that place.