From the Guardian…

You know when you read something in the news and think, that can’t possibly be true. That’s happened twice already today.

Before we get to the latest Batshit Bulletins, let’s consider what you don’t read in the news. Exactly why Nadhim Zahawi has agreed to settle a tax bill in the region of £3.7 million, for starters.

This story has been reported to an extent. But the coverage has been scant, with the BBC just about acknowledging the story online after coverage by the Guardian and others.

If you look up Zahawi’s biography on the government’s website, he is basically the Minister for Was Previously, as those words stand before all the posts he has held, however briefly. One “was previously” post was as chancellor from “5 July 2022 and 6 September 2022” – basically a summer holiday job.

He also “was previously” allegedly (better bung that in there) not in a hurry to settle his tax bills. Now he has agreed to stump up that astonishing sum.

How did that £3.7 million slip his mind? We deserve to know more about how a Minister with a reputed £100 million personal fortune conducts himself, but there seems to be a reluctance to investigate.

Here’s something else you don’t see enough of – an honest assessment of the state of the NHS and how its problems have been caused by the Conservative party, not least thanks to George Osborne’s austerity drive.

Cuts, scrimping of NHS workers’ pay and reckless caretaking of our health system are in large part a legacy of Osborne’s cruel tenure as chancellor. Such squeezes take a long time to have an effect. And now everything is falling apart, however much the government pretends otherwise.

As nurses go on strike for the first time in their history, health secretary Steve Barclay, a winning combination of aggressive and useless, writes in today’s online-only Independent (above) that nurses calling for more pay are taking away money from patients.

No, they are not – they are asking for a decent pay rise, while also pointing out that without it, the NHS will disintegrate even more quickly as more staff leave.

Where is the deep and persistent reporting on the NHS at a time when the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Adrian Boyle, argues that as many as 500 people a week could be dying due to delays in emergency health care?

If such a situation occurred under a Labour government, the papers would be full of it, the pressure relentless. Under a Tory government, such coverage remains muffled – and even Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t seem that keen on joining in the row.

Anyway, time for those Batshit News Headlines…

The government bill aimed at protecting children from online harm, an important piece of legislation, has reportedly been changed so that “video footage that shows people crossing the Channel in small boats in a ‘positive light’ will be added to a list of illegal content”.

A floundering piece of satire, you might assume. But no – that toxic amendment has been included at the urging of backbench Tory MP Natalie Elphicke.

We can all play that game. I’d like protecting from the online harm caused by seeing putrid flapdoodle splashed about by Nigel Farage, GB News, Boris Johnson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Jeremy Clarkson, Piers Morgan – oh, any number of them.

Batshit news part two: A member of the House of Lords, an actual Lord, has proposed that students could have their loans settled earlier if they took a test to prove they had resisted “the high levels of woke indoctrination they face at university”.

Writing on the Conservative Home website (I went there so you don’t have to), Lord Wei argues that students could sit a national test to prove their non-wokeness.

Great – a test to prove something that doesn’t really exist but is a useful distraction for a weary government presiding over chaos, while at the same time tearing up rights to strike and or protest, almost as if they were trashing the house on the way out.

As a long-time resident of Woke Manor on Woke Road in Woke Town, this strikes me as barmy and malicious (two intolerances for the price of one).

Is it all right if I don’t have opinion about Harry and William?

I could probably find a few down the back of the sofa or pull something dusty from the pocket of a pair of jeans I don’t wear so much anymore.

But there are far too many thoughts and opinions out there already.

They tumble from the mouths of royal correspondents; they summersault across the pages of newspapers with nothing better or more important to discuss; they crowd the airwaves like so many angry bees; they colonise computer screens and phone screens; and you can bet that tonight more worthless words will slip from the lizard lips of Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’s veteran pontificator on matters royal.

Unlike Nicholas, who is 69 and should surely retire, I am not saying anything. Apart from saying that I am not going to say anything: does that count as saying something? I am trying to not let an opinion escape.

I don’t wish to take sides, to pour scorn on one brother and his much-abused wife, or to stick up for the apparently more acceptable brother and his far saintlier wife, or so they say, those pushers of idle words about princes.

What I know could fill the back of a stamp featuring their late grandmother; and soon to feature their father, known in Private Eye as King Brian, a pleasing detail that is as close to a fact as you are getting.

Princely brothers have fought throughout history, only nowadays they do so on the front pages of our newspapers and on the television rather than on the battlefield. Or others do so on their behalf, filling the gaps in their knowledge with the thumb-printed putty of rumour and speculation

What I don’t really understand, and apologies if this counts as an opinion, is why anyone could care less. Is there nothing else we can discuss; nothing else we can obsess about, instead of bothering to favour one or other of two extremely privileged brothers and their wives? Is one prince to blame more than the other?

Oh, God, who knows or cares.

I just looked down the back of the sofa and there was nothing at all. But there was a whole book down there about the collapse of the NHS.

The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan, as complained about by History Reclaimed

If you are lucky, you may know nothing about History Reclaimed. Here’s an end to your luck: it’s a collective of grumbling historians who tilt to the right and believe only in their view of history.

They are, according to their website, “gathering evidence of instances where British history has been distorted or misrepresented in the broadcast media…”

Their anger about ‘wokeness’, that usefully vague modern ‘sin’, is just the dirty diesel these historians need to fuel their fume-belching obsessions.

Chief among the grumblers is Andrew Roberts, who shared on Twitter a newspaper report about how “the BBC has been rewriting British history recently”. That report was in the Telegraph. Of course it was. The Telegraph is the natural home of History Reclaimed, alongside being a repository for alarmingly bonkers opinion columns.

A report on the History Reclaimed website points a finger at an edition of the BBC travel-comedy show The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan that visited Sierra Leone. Slavery was the cause of complaint here.

These grumbling historians seem to overlap with Tory MPs in the Common Sense Group who huffed and puffed about the National Trust’s sensible and sensitive report into how its properties are connected to slavery.

The short version here is that History Reclaimed believe the British Empire was a glorious enterprise that never harmed anyone. And Winston Churchill is god. Other views are not permitted.

There is caricature in my summary here, naturally, but these people are their own caricature.

Historians who believe that history is being ‘rewritten’ don’t seem to understand how history works: every fresh line of study, every new book – they all rewrite history, as rewriting history is basically doing history. That’s how it ticks over.

History is constant reinterpretation, so to pretend that there is a fixed ‘proper’ version – to pretend that “history got done”, just like Brexit allegedly did ­– is surely a nonsense.

Just imagine how future historians will look at, say, the crisis in our NHS. Various possible arguments could be made. Historians on the right might look back and opine that the NHS was a failed socialist experiment that could never work and deserved to fail.

Historians on the left might argue that it was the greatest social benefit invented but one destroyed by years of unnecessary austerity and intentional under-funding imposed by Conservative governments.

Those who favour the present government might wish to blame the pandemic, the energy crisis, Vladimir Putin or even 1066 and the Norman Conquest (who knows, they blame everyone and everything else).

Or, like the comedian, writer and sometime medic Dr Phil Hammond, they might ask: “The question with the NHS is not why it is has disintegrated so much, but why it has been allowed to disintegrate so much…”

The question with the NHS is not why it is has disintegrated so much, but why it has been allowed to disintegrate so much. With sufficient staff & capacity, in a joined up system with excellent IT & data, add a big push for public health improvement & prevention, it would thrive.

— Dr Phil Hammond 💙 (@drphilhammond) January 4, 2023

Or, like the front page of today’s Daily Mirror, they might point out the following..

The problems with the NHS may go deep but they are owned by the Conservative party as they have been in power for 12 years and have run everything into the ground.

Of course, I am displaying my own bias here, but that’s the point in a way. Future historians will be able to take whatever line they can sustain, and could argue any of the points mentioned here.

Some might also wonder why prime minister Rishi Sunak should get so prickly every time he is asked if he or his family use the NHS. It’s a fair question to ask of a multi-millionaire prime minister and one that deserves an honest answer.

Perhaps they might also look back and wonder why, faced with endless strikes, an NHS crisis, a social care crisis, a cost-of-living crisis and so on, Sunak should wish to should wish to announce today that all pupils will study some form of mathematics until the age of 18.

Then again, it is easier to dick about with education yet again than it is to sort out the real problems pilling up outside your door.

The old Daily Mirror building in Manchester

No journalists in my family but the ink got in somehow.

In the sixth form in the early 1970s, I worked on the Daily/Sunday Mirror in Manchester as a copy boy, carrying proofs and putting messages in vacuum bottles. Rode there from the suburbs on a Honda 50.

After that I went to Goldsmiths College in London to study English. The first person I ever interviewed, for the student paper, was the actor Leonard Rossiter, a prickly sort. Student years rolled away and I found a job as a reporter on the Droylsden Reporter in Manchester, leaving after six months to head back to London to work on the South East London Mercury.

Stayed there for ten years. The office was next to Deptford station, with a view of the platform. A world of typewriters and carbon copies, ashtrays on the desks, and lunchtime tipples in days when people still tippled at lunchtime. When you made a call, the switchboard woman connected you to the outside world.

Worked as a news reporter, feature writer, arty type, and sub-editor, interviewing Squeeze, Dire Straits, the Flying Pickets, assorted alternative comedians, and too many actors to shake a chewed biro at, although Doctor Who’s Tom Baker was in there somewhere, mad as anything but fun.

During that time, I also did sub-editing shifts on the Observer, working with a white-bearded man the printers called Captain Birdseye (me they called Captain Birdseye’s Son). His name was Michael Jacobson, and he is long gone.

Then on to the Yorkshire Evening Press. Stayed there for a preposterous 27 years. Happy times mostly, eventually running the features desk, editing, laying out pages and supplements, writing columns, reviews, features, subbing endless words, editing.

All good until it fell apart in a sorry heap of Newsquest templates and redundancy. But the people were great, as newspaper people often are (not everyone will believe this, but generally it’s true).

After that, a year was spent barely scratching a living from freelance features, although I did start writing for the Yorkshire Post, mostly in the Saturday magazine.

Then came my first stint working for the Press Association, learning Irish ways on the Sunday Independent newspaper, working ‘in’ Dublin out of Howden. Two days a week for four years until the contract ended.

In tandem with that job came a part-time journalism lecturing stint at Leeds Trinity University (loved that gig, but it went) and some equally enjoyable lecturing at York St John University, too.

After that my only non-journalistic work ever followed, as a Census engagement manager. You were meant to get out and about and meet people, but it was lockdown, and I never left the study.

Then came my second stint at the Press Association, working from home as a digital production editor, helping to process the endless stream of news, as part of a busy crew.

A lifetime in journalism, all the way from those clattering typewriters, carbon copies and a cigar-chewing editor, to a digital newswire that never sleeps. That editor, by the way, was Roger Norman, acclaimed for taking a stance against the National Front, and known to like a Guinness or two. Another one who is no longer with us, sadly.

Today was my last shift for the Press Association, but that’s not quite the end of everything. I still hope to be writing features for the Yorkshire Post, having one planned already for January. I will vainly attempt to get more crime novels published (two came out a while back in the US), as somehow I never get around to stopping writing.

I will also have a go at being retired, a grandad and co-babysitter, while still dribbling on about stuff in this blog.

It’s hard to say what sort of a future that young man had planned all those years ago when starting out. Probably a grander one than the one eventually arrived at, but that’s not a problem. I always wanted to be a journalist, I stuck at it through a varied career, while clinging on to the skidding wreckage of journalism.

Time for my retirement do, otherwise known as a drink with my wife at the Crooked Tap.

Sometimes even an agnostic man on a ledge can appreciate the compassion of those with religion.

As more asylum seekers drowned in the Channel yesterday, tipped into the freezing sea at night, two quotations came to attention, one a couple of years old, the other freshly delivered.

The first words were from Desmond Tutu, the South African bishop and anti-apartheid campaigner, who died at this time last year – “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.”

In other words, don’t ask why these poor people are in the freezing Channel, but ask what you can do to stop them ending up in the water.

Don’t just blame the gruesome gangs who conduct this cruel trade, as the front page of today’s Sun does, declaring: “Evil dinghy trade costs more lives.” For you could as reasonably claim: “Evil government policy costs more lives.”

What better recruitment advert for people smugglers could there be than a policy that purposefully blocks legal paths for migration? All legal routes are unavailable but give me £5,000 ­and you can step into this unstable dingy.

Now to Justin Welby. The Archbishop of Canterbury said the incident showed “debates about asylum seekers are not about statistics, but precious human lives”. Such talk will get you nowhere in modern Britain, Your Grace. Careless compassion costs votes, and all that.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak had, only the day before, come up with the latest plan to cut so-called illegal migration. I won’t bore you with the details as they are the same as last time round.

Then he had to stand up in Parliament after this fresh tragedy to bumble out thoughts and prayers.

As the Glasgow Herald commentator Neil Mackay said in a tweet…

“It’s obscene to watch Tory MPs spout about their sorrow for the refugees who died in the Channel today. They demonised the very people they’re shedding crocodile tears for. They called them invaders. Pathetic, cowardly hypocrites…”

And those doing the demonising themselves become demons.

Oh, and now here is Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, opening the fridge door to her heart: “Our capacity in this country is not infinite, we cannot accept everybody who wishes to come to the UK. That is a reality of the world and it is a reality of life.”

When a government’s main motivation to please its own hard-line immigrant bashers, what hope is there for the poor people who end up in those dinghies? None at all and they deserve better than this. Justin Welby knows where the compassion is kept.

ALSO deserving of better are the nurses who have gone on strike today for the first time in their history.

Like other members of the public sector, the nurses are expected to do more for less, and to see their pay diminish – all while a Cabinet of millionaires dismisses their reasonable demands by pretending we’ve “run out of money”.

No, we haven’t. Choices are being made, and the nurses are being denied a much-needed decent pay rise because it suits the government to string out all these strikes in the hope they reflect badly on Labour.

Sunak even came up with the bizarre suggestion that the Royal College of Nursing are Labour’s “paymasters” ­– yet that usually most mild of unions is not affiliated to Labour and gives it no money.

The prime minister also flapped out some discreditable nonsense about nurses “being the enemies of hardworking people” – when they are the hardworking people.

The Daily Mirror, as you could have expected, has a sympathetic front page today that backs the nurses with the simple words: “We are with you.”

As we all should be.

More surprisingly, the Daily Express – yes, that Daily Express – also has a sympathetic headline: “Give nurses a deal and stop this madness.”

Heavens, the editor must have had a funny turn. Or a day off.

The day before, the Sun had a go at Mick Lynch, leader of the RMT, claiming he had “lost his rag”.

Oh, when that happens you can guarantee that the ones losing theirs are the billionaire owners of newspaper groups shouting about why we should hate unions,

Strikes are inconvenient, as that’s the point. Nobody likes strikes, including those shivering on the picket line (been there, shivered that). But sometimes there is no other way.

Go on, Mr Moneybags – and we really can slap that label on Rishi Sunak ­– just give the nurses a decent pay rise.

What do we learn from Harry & Meghan, the docu-thingy that launched yesterday on Netflix with three hours’ worth of material, and the same to come next week? Well, you won’t learn what’s in it from me, or not directly. Three hours! You must be kidding.

There are better ways to waste time. After all, that’s what Walter Presents on All 4 was invented for.

There are better ways to use time, reading, listening to music, writing. Or indeed streaking naked through the icy garden (this is only a theoretical example, you’ll be relieved to know).

Netflix seems to have got good value for its investment, though, as former Sun editor David Yelland, a sensible observer of these matters, pointed out on Twitter…

Netflix playing the British tabloids with utter brilliance… page after page of anger… precisely proving Harry & Meghan's point… all they have to do is copy and paste to the US networks…. pic.twitter.com/nDAqUekRea

— David Yelland (@davidyelland) December 8, 2022

All that free publicity!  TV, radio and, especially, the old-style newspapers are full of it, cram-jammed with Harry and Meghan-propelled indignation.

As for Piers Bloody Morgan, he hasn’t shut up about them for ages, locked forever in a weird hateful embrace with Meghan, a woman he adores to hate or hates to adore, or something.

The inky sheets are mostly aghast, with the Mail going for “Palace anger at ‘assault on the Queen’s legacy’”, while the limping old Express chooses: “So hurtful! Royals ‘deeply upset’ by Harry’s slurs.”

The Times stoops to conquer the populist moment with “Palace and Netflix clash over Sussexes soap opera” (no apostrophe after the offenders’ collective name, but there you go).

Skimming pieces written by those with stronger stomachs that mine, there doesn’t seem to be anything too shocking in this soapy documentary.

Not that you’d know that from those inky headlines. What happens at times like this is that the newspapers seek out insults to the monarchy, and if they can’t really find any, they still make a big fuss, fuss-fettling being what motivates them.

Only the Mirror has a headline to agree with: “Stop this royal circus” as “ordinary Brits are choosing between heating and eating”.

Sarah Vine in the Mail does that old trick of pretending to be a softie at heart, slipping mittens over her talons to declare: “Harry is a very damaged man – and I feel for him.”

I am sure Harry is consoled by that.

What we learn, what we are reminded, in all this is that the British media is obsessed with the royal family. It’s good business, it’s an easy way to fill newspaper pages and TV hours. The slightest whiff or whispered rumour of a simmering row, the merest hint of royal offence having been taken, and they’re off.

Often the newspapers take up cudgels on behalf of the royals – who in turn have little to do with newspapers, other than inviting them along to official events and so on.

Yet  this relationship rolls along, suiting the newspapers and the royals, at a guess. Yet with Harry & Meghan, the Sussexes have grasped bolder, bigger way of using the media. Never mind all that sickly old subservience in the newspapers, here is Netflix.

And I say all this as someone who really doesn’t care. Taking sides in these royal squabbles seems absurd, as does accusing Harry and Meghan of casting their life as a soap opera. Isn’t it all a soap opera, a pageant played down the centuries to keep us vaguely amused and in our place?

Still, it’s a useful distraction from the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis, soaring use of food banks, the ever-growing number of strikes.

Anyone who sticks their nose in the tattered book of Tory tactics, with its torn-out pages and new characters added every other week, will know that the government we have likes playing these old games.

Pretending the strikes are the fault of militant unions or “union barons” (whoever they might happen to be). Rather than at least being partly the fault of a government that sees political mileage in the strikes continuing as it might reflect badly on Labour.

Same with that terrible decision to open a coal mine in Cumbria, while lecturing the world about how they shouldn’t so the same. Assorted right-wing MPs dragged a dirty sack of an argument around, bellowing at Labour opponents of the scheme, “Oh I thought you lot liked mines!”

Same with the unending “migrant crisis”, a subject deliberated pushed by the Tories as it usually plays well in right-wing circles.

They’ve run out of other ideas. Division is all they know. But then Harry and Meghan seem good at that splitting game too

Let’s dip into the dusty drawer, more of an email file to be honest, where blog-worthy scraps of news accumulate.

First up is Neil Oliver. Yes, that beardy bloke who once harmlessly wandered the coast for the BBC, but who now explores the imaginary coastlines of a same-but-different country for GB News.

And, no, my unstinting research doesn’t extend to watching him in full spout, as there are limits. A tweet will suffice.

Oliver has picked a favourite bauble from the shabby tree of right-wing moans, using his GB News sermon to bemoan the “relentless erosion of Christmas”, claiming this is “essential to those whose mission it is to unmake Britain”.

Oh, yes, Christmas is being cancelled – again! Funny how people like Oliver say that every year, and yet Christmas still rolls around. For something so prone to being cancelled, Christmas seems quite resilient.

From what I can see Oliver believes ‘they’ and ‘them’ are to blame, those handy anonymous stalwarts of urban myth. As for the rest, oh let’s leave him hanging on that tree with his beard tangled in the branches.

Another window on the world is to be found in the column pages of the Telegraph. A glance at the headlines yesterday revealed a “rising tide of anti-Britishness”, the “woke left declaring war on history”, Britain needing “more private schools, not fewer”, and Nigel Farage being “a real threat” to the survival of the Conservative Party.

Oh, what an assortment tin of absurdities, each one as unchewable as the last.

As for the supposed deadliness of Farage, the ONS has disparaged his mangling of the Census 2021 results to proclaim that “London, Birmingham and Manchester are all now minority white cities”.

For the capital, 53.8% of Londoners said they were white in 2021, so that is a white majority, if a slightly smaller one than ten years previously (59.8%).

Another reminder, should you need such a prompt, that Farage and his ilk are grifters who can only survive by jabbing a finger and promulgating untruths. But you knew that already.

Next up is the Conservative chairman Nadhim Zahawi doing the rounds yesterday and saying nurses shouldn’t go on strike at Christmas as this is just what Vladimir Putin wants to see.

There is always an enemy, and now Zahawi is casting striking nurses as the enemy for demanding a decent pay rise.

Oh, come off it. Didn’t you once claim taxpayers’ cash to heat your stables, later claiming this was “a genuine mistake” as you hadn’t realised your heating and that of your horses was on the same bill.

Well, yes, I make that mistake all the time.

You will have seen plenty of dubious statistics brandished by ministers and their allies about how much nurses are paid, but however much that is, years of falling pay have reduced what they earn. Along with the pay of everyone else going on strike to threatening to do so.

Perhaps, and it’s only a guess, but perhaps workers are going on strike because the state is falling apart and all those who’ve made this mess can do is blame other people (nurses, migrants, postal workers, railway staff, Jeremy Corbyn, Christmas being cancelled, etc).

All praise to Private Eye for reporting on just how much public money goes into propping up private industry, with support for the bust energy supplier Bulb having reportedly now reached £6.2 billion. Funny how private industry is so much more efficient that publicly owned industry, until the state has to step in to prop it up.

Anyway, let’s end with Brexit, the mistake that never owns up – even Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is still insisting he will make it work.

Yeah, right. Your opponents cock everything up while trying to settle their endless internal rows about Europe. And instead of pointing out what a terrible idea Brexit had turned out to be, all you do is say more or less the same thing as they do.

Here is Starmer on the Today programme this morning: “…there’s no case for going back to the EU or going back into the single market”.

As everyone struggles along, and as LSE researchers reckon Brexit added nearly £6 billion to UK food bills in two years, Sir Keir insists there is no going back.

I wish him well, really I do, but that doesn’t add up, does it?

Rishi Sunak is reported to be registered with a private GP practice that charges £250 for half-hour consultations, guarantees to see ‘urgent cases’ on the same day, and offers appointments at weekends and in the evenings.

If you are not an extremely wealthy former banker, or married to a billionaire’s daughter, you might baulk at the cost.

But you can get an appointment on the same day with an NHS GP, as I found out after a run one morning six months ago.

The familiar aches come and go, but this tightness in my chest felt different. I walked a bit, ran again, the tightness returned, so I walked home.

The best way to contact our GP is by using the online form, a response usually arriving within ten days. This time an email pinged back with an appointment for that afternoon (it’s an age-bracket thing).

The GP passed me on to a consultant, who booked me in for a cautionary cardiac scan at the hospital. After a bit of a wait, that scan is taking place this afternoon.

In the interim, I have walked more than ran, with some jog-walks, five minutes walking, a gentle speeding up, walking again. My squash has slowed, with a stretch up and down the corridor between games. Remarkably, the last three games have been won.

Breaks are also taken at badminton, to the concern of one friend who asks if I am all right, what with all the walking up and down while panting (allegedly).

Whether or not there is anything wrong will now be discovered, I guess. The consultant wondered about a touch of angina that only comes on during exercise.

Anyway, none of this is particularly interesting or unusual, but reading about the prime minister’s GP arrangement brought it to mind.

The story was reported in the Guardian, which wrote that: “Patients can request home visits from doctors for which they are charged between £400 and £500, depending on the time of day or night”. The clinic was also said to charge “up to £80 for prescriptions”.

Sunak has primly refused to answer questions about whether he has private healthcare, saying it was “not appropriate” to talk “about one’s family’s healthcare”.

Well, it seems highly appropriate if one happens to be the prime minister in charge of making decisions about how the rest of us are cared for by the NHS.

Sunak is so absurdly wealthy he cannot really have any idea how the less financially elevated get by.

As mentioned here before, Paul Waugh of the Independent calculated recently that Sunak, who was expensively educated at Winchester College, spends more than £60,000 a year on private education for his two daughters.

How can someone that wealthy understand the lives led by most people? Not sure he does at all, although there is probably a squeaky soundbite available somewhere.

You know, one thing that strikes me about Sunak is that he doesn’t really seem like a politician. It’s as if he is role-playing, having a go at something, chirruping out the sort of response he is expected to make, but leaving you to wonder if he believes any of it.

There is unendurable pressure on the NHS at the moment, partly caused by Covid, partly caused by long-term austerity (copyright George Osborne).

While Sunak stays shtum about his own health arrangements, there is always a pliant minister on hand to roll out the statistics.

“Judge him by his actions, and the health secretary’s actions, on the NHS,” the pensions secretary Mel Stride told Sky News, pointing to an extra £3.3bn unveiled for the health service in the autumn statement.

He added: “The commitment that we have to the NHS is absolutely central to this government. That is something that’s very much driven from the top by the prime minister.”

Well, yes, but elsewhere in the Tory undergrowth you will find more and more stories about how the NHS is falling apart, how we cannot carry on like this, pouring good money after bad, etcetera.

A Daily Telegraph leader two days ago continued this line of attack, while its never knowingly sensible columnist Allison Pearson joined in, saying “Let’s not criticise Rishy Sunak (or anyone else) for using a private GP. Given the alternative, who wouldn’t?”

Oh, me for a start, Allison. Alongside all the other millions of people who couldn’t remotely afford to dodge the queue.

Allison Pearson also describes the NHS as “appallingly broken”. Ah, yes, might that not be because it is slowly being ground down, so the only alternative is a total sell-off to a US insurance company.

Anyway, I have given myself a new nickname in the badminton WhatsApp group – Dickie Ticker.

This ‘fiscal black hole’ we are hearing a lot about reminds me of those clever pavement artists who draw something that isn’t really there at all.

The sight of this deep hole is enough to induce vertigo, although it would be perfectly possible to walk right over.

What a pair of political pavement artists. The chancellor with the name that’s often tripped over to pleasing effect, and the extremely wealth prime minister who still can’t buy trousers that reach all the way to his little feet.

This black hole they’ve drawn is a perfect excuse for a round of cuts and a return to what even the CBI has warned will be the “economic doom loop of austerity” – scary, sounds like the title of a progressive rock album you never want to hear again.

The Progressive Economy Forum argues that the reported £50 billion “hole” the chancellor and prime minister have drawn is “the result of government accountancy rules and highly uncertain forecasts, not tax or spending decisions”.

In other words, it suits them.

There is a lot of this going on. Talking up the so-called migrant crisis is a convenient distraction that makes the ‘problem’ much worse than it really is, helped along by an obsessive media interest in desperate people who risk their lives crossing the Channel in small boats.

While the man in the short trousers is wringing his hands about that, he diverts attention from what a giant, stinking mess his government is making of everything.

The economy shot to pieces, trains not running, inflation soaring, energy prices through the uninsulated roof, hordes of workers going or threatening to go on strike (quite understandable, as their pay has effectively been diminishing for years).

Don’t worry about all that – just look at those people invading our shores.

Rishi Sunak says our economic downturn is “the legacy of Covid” and “what Putin is doing”. That’s still pushing blame elsewhere while inflicting yet more austerity on already-shredded public services. Oh, and don’t forget the tax rises.

Also, here’s something missing from his list. Something those pavement artist tricksters have rubbed out altogether.

Yes, the B-word. The former Bank of England official Michael Saunders said the other day that Brexit has “permanently damaged” the UK economy, while also calling for closer trade links with EU.

Obvious stuff, really.

Hardly anyone in government will admit that Brexit was clearly a terrible idea, as it’s a matter of weird fundamentalism for too many of them. Either, they’re like Jacob Rees-Mogg forever lying through his over-entitled teeth about how great it’s all going. Or they are looking the other way and humming, as David Cameron did when he resigned after losing that referendum.

And don’t go asking Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to say anything sensible about Brexit. He just says things like “we’ll do Brexit better/properly…” Er, how does that work, then? A terrible idea is a terrible idea however you approach it.

This is all so disappointing. Surely Starmer could just admit Brexit has been a catastrophe brought about by the never-ending psychodrama of the Tories versus Europe (not all Tories, but it’s mostly been their squabble).

Sadly, pathetically really, Starmer is too afraid about putting off pro-Brexit voters who may vote Labour next time. Oh, they may have seen the light by then (that’s if the power’s not been cut). They may even have died, still dream of those sun-lit uplands.

Whatever, the next fight is never the same as the last one.

As for that fiscal black hole, it might not really be there. But right now, it looks like we’re all going to be dragged into it anyway.

Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook

You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

And now there is an extra reason to feel affection for Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, besides the punch-drunk, teary joy of all those evergreen short-story songs about ordinary lives.

On tour at the moment, the onetime south-east London lads, now comfortably into their sixties, can still belt out the old hits and more in lively style, as they showed last week at the Harrogate Conference Centre.

It’s still cool for old cats, as this old cat would concur in hope.

Tilbrook leads the show, singing and playing guitar. He is an overlooked guitarist, who plays quite brilliantly at times, running off into blistering solos that never last too long.

There are seven in the band now, and it’s a confident, ringing sound, and by the end everyone is on their feet, quite something for a Harrogate audience, some of whom need help getting up.

You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

You see, this tour and an accompanying EP and single, Food For Thought, are raising funds for food banks and awareness about food poverty. Donations are being collected at gigs for the anti-poverty charity the Trussell Trust, which operates food banks across the country.

In a news report for the Guardian (print edition, November 5), Tilbrook says that for years he was unaware of many things, being in his own “bubble of success”. Now he rails against the poverty crisis.

“It’s terrible and wrong that so many people have no choice other than the help that food banks provide to feed their family,” he says. “That there are so many people who have to choose between heating and eating is a disgrace.”

Tilbrook adds that the social security system was “set up to save people who didn’t have work, and now people are earning wages and it’s still not enough”.

As nurses vote to strike, worn out by seeing their pay diminish year after year, and as some nurses are forced to use food banks set up in the hospitals where they work, this Squeeze tour could not be timelier.

The Trussell trusts sent out 1.3 million emergency food parcels in the past six months –  just one provider of a service that shouldn’t be needed in a properly functioning country.

Various Tory MPs like to bluster about food banks, saying it’s just that poor people don’t know how to cook or budget properly. Invariably porridge is mentioned. Google for more details, but my fingers will not type their names.

You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

Back in the 1980s, as surely mentioned here before, I interviewed Glenn and Chris for the South East London Mercury a few times.

That Guardian report mentions “Jools Holland appearing on keyboards at one point”, which seems dismissive. He was there for quite a while, before wanting to go his own way. “Jools has got his own things he wants to do,” as Tilbrook told me.

Jools, who is quite grand nowadays, lived then in a basement flat and kept his gold records on the loo wall. Or he does in my memory, as it was a long time ago, and time plays tricks, the lens can smudge.

I still have an affection for Jools though, not so much the albums, of which I own a few, as the roof-lifting live concerts. And I must have watched most editions of Later, which has been going for 30 years now.

You have to love a bit of Squeeze.

When Jools left he did a final gig at the old Albany Empire in Deptford. Elvis Costello, who produced their album East Side Story, turned up as a surprise guest.

It was quite the night.

A lottery player in California has just won $2 billion on one ticket. As a long-time Lottery loser, that news stirs mixed emotions.

Yes, money would be good, but not that much. Such an unfathomable fortune in one go would be a golden curse.

Sometimes I do say a little prayer to the lottery god, while having another go at Lotto or Set For What’s Left Of My Life, but he just replies: “Here’s £30 to keep you going, now shut up.”

More than thirty quid would nice, but I am happy to have so far avoided two billion.