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.

The Battle of Lewisham in 1977 (Picture: BBC)

What my old editor Roger Norman would have thought about the home secretary referring to asylum seekers as an ‘invasion’ cannot be known, as he died in 2006. But he would not have been impressed, for sure.

The reason for raising this is not only the smudged nostalgia of a man regarding the start of his career from somewhere near its end. It is because Roger stood against the National Front while he was editor of the South East London and Kentish Mercury.

He would surely be horrified to know the right-wing racism he confronted in the 1970s finds an echo today in the language used by Suella Braverman.

As my old colleagues Peter Cordwell and Pat Greenwood noted in an obituary for the Guardian, the 1970s and 1980s were crucial decades for the Afro-Caribbean community in Lewisham.

“When the National Front wanted to march through his patch of New Cross in 1974, Roger’s front page lead spelling out in words and pictures exactly what they stood for was headlined ‘You’d Better Believe Us!’.”

He also, they wrote, numbered among community champions who by “tirelessly giving a sensible steer towards harmony, helped create the ‘live-and-let-live’ ethos among south-east Londoners that set the scene for today’s multicultural society”.

That is certainly true, although from this distance it seems as if that multi-cultural society is both a good and undeniable part of our lives – and something to be given a kicking by right-wing nasties.

There is not a direct comparison between the white-power National Front marching against the local Afro-Caribbean community in the 1970s and Ms Braverman’s deeply hostile portrayal today of the ‘migrant crisis’ (that’s if such a crisis even exists).

But what seems horribly telling is that the sort of vile language once found in the rank silos of the right now flows into our lives – much as all that shit flows into the sea.

Ms Braverman seems only to have increased the difficulties faced by asylum seekers living in the overcrowded Manston migrant processing centre in Kent.

The senior Tory backbencher Sir Roger Gale told Sky News that the overcrowded facility, where outbreaks of MRSA and diphtheria have been reported, were “wholly unacceptable”, adding: “These circumstances, I believe now were a problem made in the Home Office.”

The Times reported yesterday that senior Conservative MPs feel the home secretary risks fuelling support for far-right extremists, with one unnamed former Home Office minister describing Ms Braverman as “facile, totally uncompassionate and insincere”.

Antipathy towards asylum seekers is a deeply unattractive facet of British life. Mostly we are, or should be, a kind and reasonable nation. So where does this dislike, hatred even, of outsiders and otherness come from? We’re all an outsider somewhere; all an ‘other’ somewhere; all human wherever we are.

So why do so many people succumb to this inciteful hatred? Perhaps in part because we allowed Nigel Farage’s base racism to be treated as if it were normal, to be aired on the BBC far too often, and to become the main but unacknowledged force behind his beloved Brexit. And now, with a smack of irony, the Brexit fought for by Farage and his ilk has not improved our life one jot – but seems to have increased the number of small boats crossing the Channel.

Worth remembering, with a sigh at having to say it again, that there is no such person as an illegal asylum seeker. Under international law it is not illegal to seek asylum.

The ‘illegality’, or perception of such, is down to the likes of Ms Braverman trying to make asylum seekers seem illegal, and down to cruel and wasteful schemes such as the Rwanda deal (asylum seekers despatched via that route: none).

As even the BBC News acknowledged the other night in a report by Mark Easton, the UK receives far fewer asylum seekers than most other EU countries.

Perhaps it’s our island mentality – or its misappropriation by those who love to spout hate. Also, people crossing the Channel in small boats are highly visible, especially when Farage, that shabby study in tweedy vengeance and unsatisfiable spite, stands on the shore pointing.

We could ease matters by opening a process centre in France, run with the French (they’d be willing to co-operate). But that way the small boats would disappear, and Nasty Nigel would have nothing to point at.

As for Roger Norman, stout is not my drink, but perhaps I should raise a pint of the milky-frothed stuff in his memory, as that was his lunchtime tipple, back in the days when people still tippled at lunchtime.

WE’LL get to Rishi Sunak in a moneyed moment. First a parting observation on the one who went before the one who just went.

As the serial liar was dashing back from another summer holiday, blustering about driving the car he’d crashed only weeks earlier, a thought occurred.

Whenever Boris Johnson cocks something up, however often he ruins everything with his chaos and slapdashery, his backing singers will sing a chorus about how brilliant he is/was/ever always will be.

The usual suspect newspapers raise a hymn to whatever worm of duplicity just wriggled out of his mouth – and, well, yes, we know all that.

But the thought was this: just imagine if we all had such a chorus behind us. How propelled to glory we would be, every mistake shone to brilliance.

I shall try this on myself (facts to hand, no need for research).

In the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by all those people telling me that I am a leading light of my journalistic generation, a startlingly good columnist, interviewer, editor, blogger, novelist – ah, yes, don’t forget those books. This is a very good chance that I will win the Booker prize one day. Anything I turn my chewed biro to sparkles with wit and insight.

Sadly, during that last paragraph I have come to the conclusion this is all bollocks (any resemblance here to Johnson’s Trumpian withdrawal statement is coincidental).

We all have egos but when we drop all the balls, no-one is there to say what a great juggler we are as we stoop to retrieve what is rolling away.

A quick word about Liz Truss. Her resignation speech was a graceless laugh, wasn’t it? Turns out she was right about everything and everyone else was wrong. No mention of crashing the economy in the time most new prime ministers are still working out how to turn on their computer.

On to the latest Tory prime minister to be foisted upon us without so much as a flick of a stubby pencil.

If you ask me, and assorted grumble-heads on Twitter, Rishy Sunak is just too rich to be prime minister – twice as wealthy as the new King, apparently. How does someone get that rich, that quick? Asking for a man who never knew.

According to the Times, Sunak was part of a small team of hedge fund bosses “who shared nearly £100m after an audacious stock market bet that lit the touchpaper on the 2008 financial crisis”.

Here, by way of Paul Waugh on the Independent, is a telling detail of Sunak’s personal finance. Having been expensively educated himself at Winchester College, the latest PM has declined to use the state system for his own children…

“One daughter now attends a £40,000 a year boarding school, the other a £23,000 a year prep school,” writes Waugh. “Contrast those sums with the median average income of British workers: £38,000. Cutting education budgets further in those circumstances may be difficult indeed.”

That’s £63,000 a year on school fees alone. How does a man so wealthy have a clue about ordinary life, or teacher shortages, or ambulance queues or foodbanks? What does he know about the state education system he now says he wants to change (another change, there’s always another change).

As for his hasty reshuffle, that was all so much political soap opera – until you recall we are on to our third Tory prime minister in as many months, and all the pieces keep being moved around, and no minister stays anywhere long enough to understand anything. That’s if they understood anything to start with.

Yet even some of his natural backers are puzzled by Sunak’s outrageous decision to bring back Suella Braverman as home secretary ­ – one week after she was sacked from the same job for breaching the ministerial code.

He says she brings experience, apparently – and yet she did the job for six weeks!

And if you think she brings only right-wing nastiness and an appetite for cheap culture wars skirmishes, you are clearly part of the ‘wokerati’ she believes is intent on bringing the country down.

Climate protesters throw soup at a Van Gough painting at the National Gallery and people are outraged.

Understandably so in a sense, although when the noise dies down the young Just Stop Oil agitators sound calmly sensible, saying they knew the painting was covered in glass (more than I did), and therefore wouldn’t be harmed, adding: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet?”

Suddenly, the people throwing soup seem more reasonable than the right-wing politicians fulminating about people throwing soup.

Other anti-oil protesters glue themselves to roads and also generate shouty condemnation from government politicians. Sure, it’s annoying to have your commute disrupted, but having the planet disrupted is possibly a more serious annoyance.

Suddenly the people gluing themselves to tarmac seem more reasonable than the politicians shouting at them.

Do you remember the protesters who obstructed traffic a year ago because they wanted the government to insulate homes? Those crazy eco-hotheads with their outrageous demands.

Yet if only the government had listened and acted, rather than sending out someone or other with foam on their lips, whoever had fabricated fury to spare that day, perhaps a few more homes would have been insulated in time for the energy crisis.

It’s hard to say if throwing soup at paintings changes anything. To this big eater of soup, it does rather seem a waste, but such actions do raise important matters that mainstream politics seems unable to do much about.

And no action taken by these protesters sounds as ludicrously daft as Suella Braverman, who is the actual Home Secretary (heaven help us all), turning on them in the House of Commons with her now notorious anti-tofu tirade. Let me entertain/horrify you with the following extract…

“I’m afraid it’s the Labour Party, the Lib Dems, it’s the Coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, Tofu-eating, wokerati, dare I say the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.”

Yes, the blameless bean curd ­– not the sticky stuff that threatens your fillings. Braverman kept away from the toffee-sucking classes, perhaps because some of them might be old Tories. Pro-toffee, anti-tofu.

Look, I’m not much of a tofu-eater so the insult passed me by. But what a weirdo the Home Secretary seems to be, having earlier said it was her “dream” to send migrants to Rwanda. My dream is that we see the back of Tory politicians who think that passing round a bag of stale culture wars fudge is enough to impress voters. But maybe it will be, as you ever can be sure.

And all of this is without even mentioning the self-inflicted woes of work experience prime minister Liz Truss. Is she still in charge? I haven’t checked for ten minutes, so who knows. The new chancellor who replaced the one who had to go after three weeks seems to have the authority now, and when you find yourself saying that of Jeremy Hunt, you know that politics really has gone weird.

Yes, the same Jeremy Hunt who wrecked the NHS and flopped badly in the Tory leadership race, going out in the first round. How refreshing to know that losers can be winners; and winners can be hopeless zealots with a head full of crazy libertarian dreams that crash the economy and turn Britain into a Brexit-buggered basket case.

Will the Tories continue to implode in this spectacular manner, while ludicrously trying to claim they alone know how to run the economy; will Labour manage to stay so far ahead in the polls (unlikely as, however welcome, it’s not exactly an earned lead, more of by-product of that implosion).

Oh, who knows? A week used to be a long time in politics; now it’s practically an historical era.

From the Economist..

Welcome aboard this Zealot Airways flight to God only knows where. Your pilot is Liz Truss. She’s never flown before, but insists she knows what she’s doing. And her cabin crew all swear she’ll make a great pilot.

Anyone who questions her flying ability belongs to the Anti-Gravity-Coalition and will be roundly ignored.

Your co-pilot is Kwasi Kwarteng. He’s never flown one of these things before either, but he went to Eton so that’s all right, as that cocksure gaggle of entitled geese get away with murder in modern Britain.

As the plane takes off, you may notice a degree of instability caused by one wing being much heavier than the other; the right wing, naturally, as no self-respecting libertarian crackpot pilot wants a left wing to slow their progress.

Our destination is, well, no-one can say for sure. Somewhere over the capitalist rainbow. A land where shredding environmental protections, encouraging people to eat fat-saturated rotten food, building more roads, fracking the hell out of the earth for no good reason, sucking more oil and gas from beneath the sea while pooh-poohing solar energy is all the rage.

As is cutting taxes for the wealthy, all in the name of creating a small state.

But only for the poor and the ordinary folk, who will be prevented from demonstrating about the environment, or from striking about their never-increasing pay. They will dwell in a place of small protection where the NHS has been left to dwindle and die. But don’t worry about the wealthy and the corporations, as they will live in a commodiously baggy state where they will be allowed to do what they wish. Small states are for small people, you see.

On second thoughts, I think I’ll get off this flight…

Of course, it was not gravity Truss turned against in her Tory conference speech last week, but something called the anti-growth coalition. As far as anyone call tell, this sensible collective comprises anyone who disagrees with Liz Truss, whatever party they belong to, including her own.

Former party leader Lord Hague, for instance, has said that choosing faster growth over the environment would be a huge error. As anyone can see, unless you are wearing dark-tinted libertarian glasses found in the bargain bin at Old Ronnie Reagan’s corner shop.

Truss has already hit plenty of turbulence after her unfunded tax-cutting mini-Budget sent the markets into turmoil, causing the Bank of England to panic and spend billions, while accidentally shredding Britain’s reputation for sound money.

This also led to a last minute U-turn in her policy to cut the top rate of tax, the need for which even many of those who would have benefited could not understand.

Sometimes it is the ridiculous details that catch your eye. Truss’s team have dubbed her ‘pro-growth’ reforms Operation Rolling Thunder. That was the name the US gave to its aerial bombardment in the Vietnam War – a cruel policy and a failure, so perhaps Truss & Co are on to something after all.

Amusingly, the Times reports that the policy is now being referred to as “Operation Shitstorm”.

And don’t you just love the Economist saying that Truss is set to be remembered as the prime minister whose grip on power was “the shortest in British political history”.

“Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th. She blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of the queen, and she had seven days in control. That is the shelf-life of a lettuce.”

Ah, say hello to Liz Lettuce.

And here is something else from her speech, the bit where she said she was “not interested in how many two-for-one offers you buy at the supermarket”.

And yet, quite literally, she was foisted upon us by a “two-for-one offer” in the bad bargain aisle at the shoddy supermarket of Tory politics.

Buy one Boris and get a free Lettuce…