Picture: ITV News

WHEN unconnected stories roll into the limelight together, it is tempting to find a link.

So it is that the row over potentially offensive passages being rewritten in Roald Dahl’s books trots alongside Boris Johnson buying a £4 million manor house in Oxfordshire.

The author of the BFG meets the author of the country’s misfortune, and here you can fill in your own replacement words for Big Friendly Giant (mine includes a swearword and ends in “Gutbucket”).

Other titles to consider might include George’s Not So Marvellous Privatised Medicine, Boris And The Money For Nothing Factory and – should you favour a sweeping comment ­on those in power – The Twats.

We will come to Johnson’s marvellous mansion in a moment. First here is that giant rotten peach of a row about textual amendments.

It’s not unusual for children’s books to be edited as times change. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels suffered that improvement/indignity in 2010, with “jolly japes” and “lashings of pop” being excised from the text for the entirely sensible reason that modern children had no idea what they meant.

The Dahl story was ‘uncovered’ by the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that never misses calling a molehill a huge woke mountain. Among the alleged offences under the Permanent Outrage Act was that Augustus Gloop in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory is no longer “fat”, just “enormous”.

The fat reduction doesn’t end there, either. Earlier editions of James And The Giant Peach had the Centipede singing: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat, and tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire, and dry as a bone, only drier.”

These verses are said to have been changed to: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute, and deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same, and deserves half of the blame.”

And, yes, the originals are better, but honestly it’s no big deal.

Outrage of the sort certain newspapers keep by the yard (never the metre) was quickly rolled out, and everybody joined in ­– even Rishi Sunak, who said in a statement that “we shouldn’t gobblefunk around” with Dahl’s words.

Way to go there, Rishi! The country’s falling apart, there are strikes all over the shop, your own party is sharpening its self-stabbing sticks again ­– and you have time to join in the latest silly cultural scrap.

The Roald Dahl rumpus fits the usual template, featuring those long-standing bit players the pesky woke PC mob, who once again are said to be determined to undermine all that is good about British life (etc, etc until the worms begin to bite).

Even Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie characterised the edits as “absurd censorship,” adding in a tweet: “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”

Should they really, though? Publishing is a business based largely on whatever sells. Just go into a bookshop and see how many books there are by famous people.

If the Roald Dahl Story Company wishes to alter the original texts, it is to keep the books relevant and to make even more money. It’s a boring business decision rather than cultural vandalism.

Anyway, do generations of children have to keep reading these books for ever, just because their parents/grandparents did? I’m with Philip Pullman, the His Dark Materials author, who believes publishers should let Dahl’s books go “out of print” rather than attempt to edit his work to make it less controversial.

Brightwell Manor (picture: Mansion Global)

Boris Johnson is said to have already earned the outrageous cost of that manor house since he stepped down as prime minister – mostly by giving speeches to right-wing Americans and getting a £2.5 million advance for his memoirs (good luck getting him to deliver that on time).

As he basically only has one bluster-propelled speech, that might seem unfair, but let it go, honestly he’s not worth it.

One small detail of Brightwell Manor catches the eye. It is that the house has a moat that never runs dry, “as it is fed by its own natural spring”, according to the Guardian.

Now both his moat and his mouth need never run dry.

As for the millions that man is earning for being the worst ever prime minister (apart from Liz Truss), like I said, just let it go. He really isn’t worth it.

Is it any wonder that Brexit as a word is only a slip from ‘Brexshit’?

Brexit itself is relatively newly coined, while the second neologism pops up on some social media posts about the government’s seeming willingness to allow our rivers and seas to be polluted under the legalised daylight robbery of privatisation.

Some Tories still insist against all available evidence that leaving the European Union has been a godsend to Britain. They are more than likely the same slippery shysters who swear our waters are getting cleaner, even while allowing more sewage and wasted fertiliser to leak into rivers and the seas brownly lapping our shores.

You see, believing in Brexit requires you to turn a blind eye to all the economic havoc it has wrought. And believing that privatisation purifies water requires the biggest peg imaginable to be clamped to your nose.

The musician and campaigner Feargal Sharkey has become an unlikely saint in this environmental battle, pointing to the stinky evidence while the likes of Therese Coffey, the environment minister, look the other way.

Sharkey appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and uttered a sentence as simple as it was terrifying: “We are slowly killing every single river in the country.”

'We are slowly killing every single river in the country.'

Feargal Sharkey backs 'super' fines for profiting water companies.

The Prime Minister has denied the government is moving away from £250 million fines for water companies. pic.twitter.com/tx0kHPmjAM

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) February 14, 2023

Sharkey was there to herald a new campaign by The Times. Now it’s far from always the case that newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch do something to lift the heart, but the Clean It Up Water Campaign shows that sometimes they do right.

The Times reported on its front page that water companies privately lobbied to weaken the government’s £56bn plan to reduce sewage spills from storm overflows.

It suggests the companies argued the plan risked adding hundreds of pounds to household bills. In an entirely sensible editorial, the paper argues that if Britain wishes to enjoy the levels of water quality other European countries take for granted, then customer bills must be allowed to rise.

As Sharkey pointed out on GMB, in 2012 the EU Commission took the government to the European Court of Justice over allowing water companies to dump sewage into rivers. The court ruled that this was illegal.

And there’s another link with Brexit: leaving Europe allows us, basically, to have less clean water. Whoopee! Time for a round of I Spy A Brexit Turd (oh look, there’s Nigel Farage).

Another Times story published as part of this campaign has the headline: “Sewage pumped into Oxfordshire stream for 95 hours in seven days.” The river in question is Hardwick Brook, in the Rushy Common Nature Reserve near Witney, and the usual suspect in this case is Thames Water.

The privatisation of water is all part of the long hangover left by Thatcherism.

While Margaret Thatcher remains a sainted figure to some, the longer the distance between her time and now, the easier it is to see the harm she did, from wrecking the housing market with right-to-buy to introducing free-market ideology into every corner of our lives.

The lie was always that private companies would know how to run everything more efficiently. Perhaps sometimes they do, but what they really know is how to make money for themselves, off the back of the taxpayer.

As Samuel Taylor Coleridge, looking ahead to water privatisation, almost says in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – “Water, water everywhere/ Nor any drop that doesn’t stink…”

MY thoughts last week on the 50^th anniversary of John Martyn’s album Solid Air raised a few contributions and polite heckles on Facebook.

While my stream nowadays is mostly full of adverts, the original benefit of Facebook sometimes still surfaces. In this case, it was friends from long ago chipping in with their memories.

A Salford University concert was mentioned in my piece. I thought this was in 1972/73 but it was in fact in 1975. Martyn was by himself in my mind, as that mental picture glows the brightest. Turns out he was (possibly) with Danny Thompson, and definitely with Paul Kossoff, the troubled guitarist from the band Free, who died a year later, aged only 25.

My favourite contribution was from a friend unmet since those days. She collected ticket stubs from the concerts we used to attend in Manchester in the 1970s, and was able to say when the John Martyn gig was and who attended.

Considering some of my memory slips, I was relieved to find that I definitely was there.

You know you’ve been around a while when your favourite album has just turned 50.

Solid Air by John Martyn was released in February 1973, when I was a 16-year-old grammar school boy. I still have the original vinyl, as well as a digitally remastered CD version from 23 years ago.

It has never let me down, that record.

The title track was written for Martyn’s friend, Nick Drake, who died 18 months after the album’s release.  It floats mysteriously around the anchoring double-bass of Danny Thompson, whose first fathomless note still affects me, going somewhere deep, ushering in the song. The electric piano provides a bluesy mist through which Martyn’s voice delivers his oblique song.

The mystery is part of the attraction, the not quite knowing what is being said.

How much thinner life would be without John Martyn’s percussive and lyrical guitar playing, the slurred romance of his gravelled voice, or the bolshie beauty of his music.

Many great albums were released that year, including The Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd. I used to sit and listen to that with a friend who became a GP, drinking strong tea and making solemn observations, as 16-year-olds do.

All very fine, but the Floyd album doesn’t make that magical connection for me, doesn’t do something funny inside.

The album benefits greatly from having been recorded in only eight days by the engineer John Wood. Many of the songs were captured as played, without studio tricksiness, usually the best way.

Estate Of Keith Morris / Redferns / Getty

Aside from that title track, the most famous song is May You Never, a sort of blues prayer for a friend. Wood reveals in the notes to the later CD that Martyn was unhappy with the recorded version, “still swithering” about it as the album was due to be delivered. Wood suggested he “go down to the studio with a guitar and just do it”.

That’s what he did, and the version we have was recorded in one take.

Years later, at a concert in York, Martyn played the song and asked for applause afterwards, saying it wasn’t easy to play.

By then he was unwell due to alcohol and drugs problems and had lost a leg. The beautiful young man of the 1970s was old, heavy, ragged, and yet still possessed of the same spirit, the same ability to convey emotion and romance. He died on January 27, 2009, aged 60, hardly any age, especially viewed from a few years further along.

Incidentally, my wife says May You Never should be played at my funeral, and I won’t argue with that. I’ll be listening somewhere, nodding happily, and saying, ah, yes.

I saw John Martyn three times, once at Salford University just before Solid Air was released, and twice more in York. That first concert was the best, just John and his acoustic guitar, and his bank of effects pedals, including tape delays, that built an endless swirl of sound from one bashed-about guitar.

I’ve never stopped listening since then. Martyn himself didn’t particularly like Solid Air, but that’s sometimes the way with artists, still dissatisfied and never mind the adulation.

Other John Martyn albums from the 1970s such as Inside Out and One World have lasted well too, and get played often in this house, but nothing lingers quite like Solid Air.

Richard Thompson, another of my musical heroes, plays mandolin on the lovely folky track Over The Hill – and aren’t we all that by now. Thompson assesses Martyn’s talent in his highly engaging autobiography Beeswing, writing that “…it’s taken people a long time to realise his genius. Now everyone quotes him as an influence”.

This isn’t just about music. It’s the soundtrack to a life, a musical tape measure. That 16-year-old didn’t look 50 years ahead, and never imagined being 66 and retired, yet here we are.

Solid Air has been there through everything: a long and lasting marriage, three children, and now one grandchild, the loss of friends and loved ones, a lifetime of journalism, being made redundant, working alone at home, busking with a bit of lecturing, publishing a couple of novels, weaving in and out of words.

Our eldest son, born years after the album came out, listens to Solid Air, too, so it’s gone on a generation.

John Martyn looked angelic when young, a bearded cherub almost. But he’d rather be the devil, to lift a few words from track four.

Seeing The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s love letter to cinema, in the afternoon before watching the final episode of Happy Valley stirs thoughts on how we watch.

The Spielberg film is an autobiographical fiction woven from his early life: his anxiety, a nascent love of film, his parents’ divorce.

The screening is introduced by a short speech in which the director thanks everyone for going to see his film at a cinema full of other people. Ironically, there were only about 20 of us in the audience to hear that, but there you go.

In the scene that follows, young Sammy Fableman is taken by his parents to see The Greatest Show On Earth. A panning shot shows row upon row of cinemagoers, their faces tipped expectantly towards the screen, none more so than nervous young Sammy on his first trip to the cinema.

Then and now, and all that. But Spielberg is right: seeing a film in a cinema is just so much better. No Twitter or newspaper to distract you/me; no newspaper to pick up and shake annoyingly in quiet moments. Just a big screen to swallow your attention whole.

The Fabelmans is filled with light and shadows and has a deft touch in introducing the tyro director’s early obsession with film, and in handling the family’s difficulties. At times it almost feels as if you are watching the grandest home movie ever made.

Mark Kermode in The Observer was both warm and a touch lukewarm about the film, but it seemed better than that to this fan of still going to see films with others, to share the experience, and to absorb a film (and meet a friend for a drink afterwards in a proper pub, as is required in law).

It is his mother Mitzi who buys the younger Sammy his first camera, helping him to recreate the train crash from The Greatest Show On Earth, using his new camera and his now dented trainset.

Gabriel LaBelle is a perfect fit for the filmmaker as a teenager: small and nervous, angry and clever, sure of himself, and yet doubting too. He uses the camera to film a family camping holiday, and accidentally records signs of hidden love between Mitzi and her husband’s best friend, something that begins her unravelling, and accelerates the falling apart of the family.

Michelle Williams is brightly but oddly mannered as Mitzi, as if she is conscious of playing the role of mother, and perhaps that’s the idea: as Mitzi is pretending to be someone she isn’t.

When the family moves to California, the teenage Sammy faces antisemitism and bullying at high school. He uses his camera to win friends, and as a weapon to exact revenge on his enemies in a manner he only half understands.

The family’s name is, I guess, a play on fable, as in stories: a family tale from someone who will fill his life with many other stories.

Incidentally, the wonderful and funny denouement alone is worth the price of entry to a proper cinema.

If The Fabelmans is filled with brightness, Happy Valley is dunked in the rain and drabness of West Yorkshire, although brightness sometimes falls on Sally Wainwright’s truly great crime drama.

It fleetingly flames those moorland panoramas on the screen, and brightens the script too, as Wainwright spins humour from character and situation.

The conclusion of Happy Valley was brutal and funny, and unexpectedly tender, too.

After the guessing games, all the fan theories, we got to see how Wainwright chose to conclude her Yorkshire epic about Sergeant Catherine Cawood and her nemesis, the psychopathic criminal, Tommy Lee Royce (a terrifyingly horrible turn from the usually urbane James Norton).

Sarah Lancashire’s performance as Cawood was just such a perfect fit: you feel you are watching a rounded, bruised woman tramping through that valley in her exhaustion, trudging to the end, stubborn, valiant, and ready to call a twat a twat.

The real drama came the previous week with Tommy’s escape from court, and two story strands – that of the murdering chemist and the bullying PE teacher ­­– were tied up a little swiftly last night, almost as an after-thought.

A longer series would have been good, but all TV dramas have to end, and we’ve been lucky enough to see Happy Valley unfold over the weeks, over the years.

No binge-watching here, no televisual gluttony. The country bunched together at the same time on the Sunday sofa, crisps and all, the way it used to be. The closest television comes to seeing a new film at a proper cinema.

I have just read a column by Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail, so that you don’t have to. You can thank me later.

It didn’t seem very good but was a useful reminder of what pustulant whiffle looks like. Slap the envy tag on me if you wish, but I couldn’t write that stuff – whatever they paid.

Vine’s column was heralded on the front page with a typical bit of Mail handwringing: “Does anyone give a fig about all of us hard-working taxpayers whose lives are being wrecked by strikes?”

I’m guessing that the Amalgamated Union of Flatulent Grumblers And Mutterers is not coming out today.

That “does anyone give a fig” line is used to portray strikers as some sort of other. Incidentally, the phrase is “care a fig”, with the fig being something of little value, a slip that spoils Vine’s woman-on-the-street moan.

The false idea being pushed here is that strikers are not themselves “hard-working taxpayers”, whereas of course they are hard working and pay taxes, just like everyone else.

Teachers are on strike today alongside civil servants, train and bus drivers, and university lecturers – the highest number of workers on strike on a single day since 2011.

Many may justifiably resent being pushed this far by a government that refuses to either raise pay properly or to negotiate. And many teachers feel it is their duty to highlight how everything is falling apart, thanks to austerity (with more to come).

For cynical reasons, Rishi Sunak has decided that being tough with the unions  summons up the spirt of Thatcher versus the miners. Yet the mood now is different, with many opinion polls indicating  support for strikers remains surprisingly high.

For a spot of context in all this, the newly ejected Tory party chairman Nadhim Zahawi reportedly just paid as much as £5 million to settle his tax affairs with HMRC.

Nurses, teachers and others going on strike will be lucky to earn that much in a lifetime of work.

Body shaming…

In the changing rooms at the university, a young man with a gym-honed body stands before a mirror and lifts up his vest to show off his muscle-toned chest to his friend.

“Look at that,” he says, or words to that effect.

Across the room, sweaty and somewhat older, a man who has just lost at squash again is regretting standing too near to a full-length mirror that shows off his 66-year-old body in rather more detail than is strictly necessary.

You start there and end up here. Not that I recall ever having a chest worth the flashing.

An Observer staff photo with Donald Trelford…

Remembering Donald Trelford…

Donald Trelford, the former editor of the Observer, has died, aged 85.

A warm tribute in his old newspaper ran last Sunday, noting that Trelford ran “a classy stable of some of Britain’s most distinguished feature writers and columnists. These included Neal Ascherson, Robert Harris, Clive James, Katharine Whitehorn and Hugh McIlvanney”.

Unaccountably absent from that paragraph is any mention of a young journalist from the South East London Mercury who did casual shifts from 1985-88.

Those shifts came about after an interview with the poet Blake Morrison, the paper’s literary editor at the time. He put my name forward and I turned up one Saturday, not knowing if it was for a subbing shift or a reporting shift. Turned out to be the former.

I didn’t have much to do with Trelford, acclaimed as a consummate journalist, layout man, writer and liberal.

But thanks to smart footwork by an older sub-editor, the two of us used to sneak into the editor’s lunches, where cheese and wine was served – an old-school indulgence that eventually stopped. Among those present was the political editor Harris, later a best-selling writer of thrillers.

On the short side, like many good people, Trelford was, I seem to recall, referred to as “small but perfectly formed” in Private Eye.

I remember him quite fondly, although he wouldn’t have remembered me at all.

By inky group think, political columnists and leader writers have taken to quoting The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald, with reference to the government. They are good words, so I shall join the queue.

“They were careless people,” observes the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway. “They smashed up things… and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”

From the Jazz Age to a jazzed-out age; from days of ragtime to a ragged old time when careless ministers who smash up things are cushioned by personal wealth more capacious than anything amassed by the fictional Jay Gatsby.

It all makes you nostalgic for John Major’s government, when a mere £2,000 bought you a scandal.

You may recall that two Conservative MPs were accused of taking such an amount and accepting gifts from Mohamed Al Fayed (then owner of Harrods) to ask certain questions in the House of Commons.

Tory sleaze (2023 variant) is in the news again, thanks to the past behaviour of former prime minister Boris Johnson and the tax affairs of Nadhim Zahawi, the man he appointed as chancellor for a brief spell last summer.

And, no, Johnson hasn’t gone away as most of us had hoped but floats still in the Tory fish tank like a bloviating whale, spouting nonsense and gobbling up crustacean cash.

The Sunday Times reports that the present BBC chairman, Richard Sharp, helped arrange a guarantee on a loan with a third party for up to £800,000 for Johnson. Weeks later, Johnson recommended Sharp for the top BBC job.

Johnson dismissed the story in typical fashion, first saying it showed the BBC was “disappearing up its own fundament”. Then he burbled to Sky News that “Richard Sharp knows absolutely nothing about my personal finances. I can tell you that for one hundred percent ding dang sure”.

Why does that man speak like that? Perhaps so we don’t notice that his scuffed shoes so often stand in something that doesn’t smell right.

Whatever turns out to be the truth (a word to use around Johnson with extreme caution and strong glue), this all suggests a cosy, back-scratching club where a known Tory donor does a favour for an old associate and ends up being recommended for the job.

None of this suggests Sharp doesn’t necessarily have the skills, but it sure raises a bad smell over BBC impartiality.

There is something very odd about Boris Johnson and money.

Whatever he has is never enough to service his rapacious needs, so he begs and borrows from friendly sources. Or accepts endless freebies (accommodation, extravagant holidays and so on) from wealthy backers rather than stumping up for anything himself.

What a good job he’s so famously reliable or else they might never see their money again.

The accompanying money scandal – and there’s sure to be yet another along in a minute, queuing up as they are like taxi cabs – concerns the Tory party chairman.

Nadhim Zahawi is under pressure after apparently “carelessly” forgetting to report an estimated £27 million to HMRC ­– and coming to a deal reportedly paying as much as £5 million to settle the matter.

And all this was going on when Johnson appointed him as chancellor last year, admittedly on what turned into a two-month summer holiday job (see last blog), but the point stands.

Zahawi was in charge of decisions relaying to our tax affairs – while at the same time being investigated by HMRC. And if that doesn’t smell off to you, perhaps your nose needs investigating.

It is easy to worry that there is just too much wealth in the modern Tory party. Like Rishi Sunak, Zahawi is unfeasibly rich, rolling in so much money that he is quite disconnected from ordinary life and ordinary people.

A government of the super-rich, for the super-rich; a government of bankers for bankers, and so on, carelessly carrying on while inhabiting a world far above ours.

Odd footnote: After Boris Johnson flew off to Ukraine, his usual response when things get sticky at home, the Daily Mail published a front-page report under his by-line, as if he were a star reporter or something. Or perhaps an editor in the making, not that the dosh would be enough for him.

David Yelland, once the editor of the Sun, suggested on Twitter that Johnson had my old colleague Geordie Greig fired as editor of the Mail – presumably because he’d started reporting properly on his scandal-laden behaviour.

Another example of how those who run everything in this country are far too tangled up. In this case, two Eton old boys scrapping.

Incidentally, Greig has just been appointed editor of the online-only Independent.

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.