Here is a footnote to yesterday’s blog about Liz Truss and the economic chaos unleashed by her nasty neoliberal leanings. This addendum isn’t really concerned with any of that, as it’s about a once-favourite pub.

The Richard the First in Royal Hill in Greenwich, south-east London, was a hang-out for Goldsmiths College students in the mid-1970s, an affection that continued into the 1980s, when it became a hang-out for young journalists, or at least a few of those known to me.

It was known as the Tolly or the Tolly Shop, a name dating to an earlier time when part of the pub was an off-licence that sold beer from Tolly Cobbold, a brewery in Ipswich. Why Suffolk and why Greenwich is one of those mysteries. The brewery closed in 2002 after 256 years.

In my memory the pub sold Youngs beer in those days, and certainly seems to have become a Youngs house later, long after those brilliant young people (well, who could say for sure at the time) had left to discover what life held.

I loved that pub, and still do in memory, even if it is said to be much changed, more of a gastro pub these days, if the website is any guide. Members of Squeeze hung out in the pub sometimes in my early reporting days, or so hazy memory attests. Mostly I remember happy student drinking, then later days of a pint or two and a Hamlet cigar with a reporter friend. Haven’t smoked for more than 40 years, and never really smoked cigarettes, but did like an occasional cigar.

Now it seems that my student haunt, and the place I hung out while spending my days interviewing all sorts for the South-East London Mercury, has become a haunt of a different, and unkinder, generation.

I’d heard that Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, and his prime ministerial pal Liz Truss like to hang out in that excellent part of London and were informally known as the Greenwich set. It is unclear what Greenwich – ‘Grinidge’, to the locals – has done to deserve this dubious blessing.

Ah, dear Greenwich, early Sunday morning jazz in Greenwich Theatre, often from the South African saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, then early Alan Ayckbourn plays on the stage. Comedy and music at the Albany Empire in Deptford, with Billy Connolly never to be bettered. Runs around Blackheath and Greenwich Park, beer in the Tolly.

An old university friend, and we are all getting on a bit now, sent me a link a story in today’s Guardian with the headline, “Near the Greenwich pub where the mini-budget was born, Londoners share their fears”.

It turns out that Truss and Kwarteng reportedly trashed out plans for their disastrous mini budget in that very pub.

How dare they trample over my student past like that; how dare they tarnish mildewed memories of a tatty but beloved pub like that.

Time soon to pop to the Crooked Tap in Acomb, just to check there aren’t any neoliberal vandals lurking in there, plotting to ruin the country and spoil my present favourite place for a pint.

Some habits never change, even if the amounts consumed do.

After a five-day silence, Liz Truss this morning gave interviews to local BBC journalists around the country. Guessing she was told it was a softer option than facing the ‘professionals’ on the Today programme…

They’ll only ask easy questions, nothing to worry about, it’ll be a doddle, you’ll ace it against that lot…

This turned out to be a miscalculation. The local broadcasters fired off uncomfortable questions. The prime minister had no answers, only robotic phrases. And the process was repeated again and again, more tough questions from a different presenter, more spluttered pauses for answers.

The economic catastrophe that occurred immediately after she and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, unleashed their crackpot tax-cutting budget, the one that freaked the financial markets so much the Bank of England had to step in to stop the potential collapse of pension funds and our economy – yes, that one ­– nothing to do with her.

All that tax-cutting generosity towards the already wealthy – will no-one remember the poor bankers? ­– had been misunderstood. The mini budget was going to plan, she was changing nothing, and besides most of this was President Putin’s fault.

Truss is so convinced of her own rightness that she cannot waver or allow a second thought as the world collapses around her, as the markets conclude Britain risks becoming a basket-case economy.

It’s all said to be about growth, of course. Her oft-avowed determination to “grow the economy” (a dead phrase if ever there was). Even though there is no evidence tax breaks for the wealthy  boost the economy. Unless you’re a City banker, then they boost your economy nicely.

Trickle-down economics had their day under Thatcher and Reagan. Didn’t work then, won’t work now. Nothing trickles, the rich grow richer, the poor feel the spray but not the benefit.

This is all part of a neo-liberal experiment in how to turn Britain into a small-state country with few rules or regulations, no proper care for the environment (too expensive and bothersome) or for the disadvantaged (they just need to sort themselves out).

Truss, along with Kwarteng, is in thrall to the Institute of Economic Affairs, and other cabals of unsaintly ideologues.

Such shadowy right-wing think-tanks are often opaquely funded (we’re looking at you, the TaxPayers’ Alliance), and yet laid the rails along which Truss now wobbles.

Those two are based at 55 Tufton Street, where you can also find the climate-change-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation. It was also once the home of Vote Leave, chief begetters of our post-Brexit demise.

The IEA has been at this disruptive game for a long time, having been founded in 1955 by Eton-educated Anthony Fisher to right what he saw as the socialist wrongs of the Labour government.

One of its key aims was to undo the post-war social democratic consensus (or progress, if you prefer), and be rid of new-fangled notions such as our National Health Service. All these years later, their dark-eyed puppet is prime minister, so we’d better watch out.

Truss and Kwarteng ignored all sensible advice against their mini budget, even calling it a “fiscal event” so it would avoid the scrutiny of the Office for Budget Responsibility, and avoidable chaos ensued.

But here’s a scary thought – perhaps the plan is to weaken society and, with a cruel shrug, push the NHS into the grasping hands of US insurance companies.

And at the heart of all this, we have an unelected prime minister. No one has been allowed to vote for any of this. Truss’s policies are different to those espoused by Boris Johnson, yet she has hijacked his majority without the rest of us having a say.

Look, I hated the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that. But the latest Tory prime minister to have been shuffled up promises to be the worst of the lot. All of us who disliked  Johnson should look at his successor and shudder.

It has been reported that Therese Coffey, the new health secretary, doesn’t like the Oxford comma. This just in from an operating theatre in a corner of our creaky, under-funded health service…

The monitor beeps. The surgeon pauses, then goes in, knowing this is the critical moment.

“Vital signs are good,” she says, as she reaches into the patient and plucks out the cause of discomfort. The extracted object falls with a metallic cling into the kidney-shaped bowl, where it lies like a bullet recovered from a wound.

“That’s another one of those bloody Oxford commas removed,” the surgeon says, wiping her brow.

Coffey has riled health workers with a memo telling them not to use policy wonk ‘jargon’, to remain positive and to avoid those Oxford commas.

This is the punctuation mark that goes before the last item in a list. It is deployed below with ironic slight of hand by a sub-editor on The Guardian in its report on this story.

It turns out that I am an expert on this grammatical quirk, although that had quite escaped me. If you Google “Oxford comma and Inspector Morse”, a blog of mine from January 28 2020 pops up.

That blog recalled how Morse once paused mid bloodied footstep to deliver a lecture on the importance of the Oxford comma, a lesson from the heart of his creator Colin Dexter.

Having skimmed that blog, I am not sure I still agree with myself.

Forthright in the moment, I said of the Oxford comma that it was “…a pedant’s pause, a killjoy comma, a slows-down-your sentence comma and a comma that ought to be put into a coma. I won’t be using that fussy comma…”.

A former colleague called Tony Mallett, who sadly has since died, politely heckled me, saying he found the Oxford comma useful in avoiding ambiguity while separating the final items in a list.

Recollection of that teasing interruption sent me to two good sources: Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer, and Word Perfect by Susie Dent. Both highly recommended for anyone who worries words.

Dreyer is a copy editor in the US, but the UK edition takes account of English – rather than American – English. His very useful book has the teasing subtitle: “An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style”.

Dreyer favours what he calls the ‘series comma’, sometimes called the ‘Harvard comma’ or the ‘serial comma’ (he says ‘serial’ evokes ‘killer’, “so no…”).

He writes: “Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don’t want to belabour the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it. Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”

His logic is this: “No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.”

Dent, meanwhile, is less strict, pointing out that this “curious punctuation mark has, in the course of its lifetime, proved more controversial than the notorious split infinitive”.

Putting her finger on the grammatical nub, she says that those who dislike the Oxford comma do so because they were taught at school “that a comma before ‘and’ is always wrong”.

Ah, yes – those ancient grammar lessons (I speak as one who sort-of learned grammar in a grammar school where Latin was still taught).

Language moves on, as we know, like those walkways at airports that carry you forwards before depositing you to stumble on to immobile ground. Language changes, and if we insist something we were taught 40 or 50 years ago is right, perhaps grammar has just rolled along.

Of course, it’s ridiculous of Therese Coffey to deliver patronising edicts on small matters of grammar when she has a health service to save. That’s if she even wants to save it, as a leading member of Liz Truss’s clueless band of neoliberal, tax-cutting, banker-benefitting Tories.

Language does indeed change. Every time I hear someone use ‘enormity’ to mean ‘enormousness’ rather than its proper, and properly stark meaning of “something perceived as bad or morally wrong”, it sets me chuntering.

But if enough people mangle a meaning, maybe there is no longer any point in complaining.

As to that fussy comma, perhaps occasionally I will pop one in.

When it comes to the royals, the BBC has always mixed deference with nervousness about being told off for getting something wrong.

After the Queen Mother died in 2002, the veteran newsreader Peter Sissons, who incidentally went to school with Paul McCartney, was criticised for wearing a burgundy rather than a black tie. He had been tripped up by a change of BBC policy and thought he had chosen the required tie.

Perhaps more interestingly, and unknown to the public at the time, the last words in his ear as he went on air were: “Don’t go overboard. She’s a very old woman who had to go some time.” (Guardian long read, by Sam Knight, March 17, 2017).

Thanks to the same source for the information that after the event, “130 people complained to the BBC about its insensitive coverage of the Queen Mother’s death; another 1,500 complained that Casualty was moved to BBC2”.

Both stories fit the moment, although if you want to know what’s on the BBC news, you will have to ask someone else. I gave up watching or listening days ago.

None of this is intended as a discourtesy to Queen Elizabeth, a remarkable monarch who earned the long yards of respect her death has unrolled. She modernised the monarchy, while satisfying Britain’s love of tradition and pageantry, even if those traditions are largely invented. She was a steady point in a changing world, a unifying thread through 70 years of British life – not so much a golden thread as a no-nonsense thread, sewn through the cloth of different times, helping to hold things together.

There has been much coverage of the Queen’s death, some of it very good. This sort of journalism is hard work, even though it has been long in the oven, as it were, waiting for the expected day finally to fall.

The Elizabeth II supplement in last Saturday’s Guardian contained great writing and good photographs. The photographs include what for my money is the only one you need. Taken by Anwar Hussein for Getty in 2005, it shows the Queen giggling as she encountered Prince Philip in uniform at Buckingham Palace, in what seems to have been a loving prank.

But I’ve stopped reading now, as perhaps you have too. This is not intended to offend those who are still reading and watching, but after the fitting sombreness of the BBC’s announcement of the Queen’s death, it’s all become a bit much. There are only so many times you can hear the same story, however sadly momentous the occasion.

Isn’t there almost a risk that, as King Charles III begins his reign, all the wall-to-wall mourning by decree might actually put some people off the monarchy? Telling people how they should be feeling is tricky, as they might resent the pressure, or decide to feel something else instead. Even though many are indeed feeling sad.

The events being cancelled out of respect make for a curious list too. Centre Parcs originally said that next Monday, on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, holidaymakers who had already booked would have to leave its sites to return the following day, out of respect. The company backtracked after a perfectly understandable furore.

Other marks of respect include turning down the checkout bleeps at Morrisons, and British Cycling telling cyclists not to cycle on Monday – advice reversed after some backpedalling. Wetherspoons has not, however, banned the sale of condoms, ‘news’ relayed in a widely shared spoof on Twitter.

One cancellation seems strangest of all. The composer Judith Weir, who was Master of the Queen’s Music, but who now masters the King’s tunes, said on BBC Radio Four’s Broadcasting House last Sunday that she felt it was a shame the Last Night Of The Proms had been cancelled.

That thought had already struck me. What a fine occasion that would have been to celebrate the late Queen’s life, a flag-waving burst of music, song, and patriotism. Not all exactly to my taste, it is true, but an opportunity royally missed.

As for the (very few) anti-royal protesters reportedly being arrested or moved on, that shows how the government’s authoritarian tendencies can backfire. Trying to silence someone accidentally amplifies what they are saying. And, besides, people should be free to protest if they wish, just as people should be free to honour the late Queen if they wish, as many are doing.

Supermarkets are removing ‘use by’ dates on yoghurts and other products, saying if it smells off, don’t eat it.

Here’s something that’s been in the fridge for 12 years and definitely doesn’t pass the smell test. Stinks something rotten, there’s mould on the top and the added ingredients – rampant free-market capitalism, entitlement and riches, self-serving additives, neglect of the state and, fittingly enough for a yoghurt, a hefty dollop of culture wars – aren’t helping.

Yup, that’s a Tory yoghurt at the back of the fridge.

Just now, Boris Johnson is on a tone-deaf ‘victory lap’ of the country. The un-chippable crust of chutzpah coating that man is quite something, but at least the Daily Express is on side, with its splash headline today: “Farewell… I’m proud of the things we did.”

Ah yes, those 126 crimes in Downing Street and the first prime minister to be convicted of a crime, Brexit costing an unending fortune with no discernible benefits, billions doled out in dodgy Covid contracts to Tory-friendly companies, some 200,000 people dead in the pandemic.

All down to a deliberately divisive and indolent right-winger who hid behind clownish bumbling and a pretend name of Boris, a persona he is said to have put on while at Eton and has worn ever since, trying to fool us all.

Yes, those successes.

And what does this stinky yoghurt pot of a government have to say about the mounting energy crisis: nothing, not a word, just empty tax-cutting mantras from likely next prime minister Liz ‘No Handouts’ Truss, as selected by a dusty coterie of Tory party members who long ago lost their ability to smell when something is off.

The energy crisis is truly scary for everyone, especially for those with little or no spare money, no financial wiggle or hope left. And for the rest of us too ­ – is it even remotely possible to pay 80% more on energy bills?

All we’ve heard so far from last-tour Johnson is that we have to swallow this hard medicine for now, it’s all Putin’s fault, and a golden future lies ahead. Ah, yes, those sunlit uplands again, often promised but always a mirage, an evaporation of hope sold cheap.

Other European countries are already acting, with France limiting energy rises to 4% for a year.

But not ours. Johnson has spent the summer on holiday while his government has disappeared as Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak engage in a sour leadership parade. Just let Tory MPs chose the next time one of their prime ministers ends up being a total liability (and that might be sooner than you think).

The trouble for Conservative governments, especially the shallow, populist variety we get nowadays, is that many of the problems society faces don’t fit their worldview.

The energy crisis shows that the free market in energy is basically oil and gas cartels making billions by providing something everybody needs to survive, essentially holding us all hostage.

And that’s not just a figure pulled from my head: Bloomberg today reports that UK gas producers and electricity generators may make excess profits of as much as £170 billion over the next two years, according to the Treasure estimates that will be waiting in Truss’s over-flowing in-tray. And still our bills shoot up.

How are small businesses such as pubs (or lovely local bars like the one three minutes away from our house) going to survive; how are cash-strapped schools going to stay heated; how will the NHS afford those massive bills?

On the day the new 80% domestic price cap was announced, no government minister was available for the morning round of TV interviews. Not a single one. It was left to the financial expert Martin Lewis, but at least he knows what he’s talking about.

And let’s not forget the stuff that falls from our taps. The water industry, as privatised in 1989, now seems to be in the hands of unaccountable private equity investors, while the firms they control pollute our rivers and spew sewage into the sea (there’s a sobering article by Dr Kate Bayliss, a senior research fellow at the University of Sussex, on The Conversation about this).

Don’t swim in the privatised sea; don’t paddle in that fetid river; and don’t swallow that brownish mineral water.

But do sniff that Tory yoghurt. It’s well off.

Here, with the beach at Sewage-on-Sea in mind, is a scrap of dialogue from The Enforcer, a film released in 1976…

Harry Callahan: “You’re not making us feel too welcome.”

Koblo: “Oh, you welcome! ‘Bout as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool!”

Callahan was a role for Clint Eastwood, as anyone thrashing about in the turd-infested swimming pool of modern British life surely recalls, while Koblo was played by an actor called Bernard Glin.

Glin doesn’t seem to have been in anything else, but at least he was given a line that speaks across the years.

Around 90 of Britain’s beaches, from Bognor Regis in West Sussex to Swanage in Dorset, are said to have been polluted by raw sewage – in the past shitty month alone, according to the pressure group Surfers Against Sewage.

Looks like we could do with Harry Callahan to enforce good behaviour from the privatised water companies. You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky – or shall I take a dip in the sea at Bognor Regis?”

Instead of Callahan, we have Ofwat, the strikingly ineffective regulator that seems reluctant to regulate the moneyed ruination of our rivers and seas, all in the name of mouldy old Thatcherism.

Between 1991 and 2019, in case you were wondering while retreating in haste from a stinky beach, English and Welsh water companies shelled out £72bn in dividends, while taking on some £55bn in debt – and seemingly doing little to stem sewage or stop water leaks.

The idea behind all this was that private companies would invest more in infrastructure, but it seems that they misread that bit of the contract for “putting money in own pockets”.

A No 10 truth massager told the BBC that “since the industry was privatised in 1989, the equivalent of £5bn had been invested to upgrade water infrastructure”. As Feargal Sharkey, singer turned environmental campaigner, heckled on Twitter: “Let me remind you during the same periods WCs have paid out over £72bn to shareholders.”

And to think that the EU used to have the nerve to order us to keep our beaches clean. Then we got our country back thanks to Brexit and were finally free to fill the seas with raw sewage.

Rule Britannia, Britannia, rule the shit-brown waves

Britons never, never, shall be slaves to common sense…

Nigel Farage should be made to swim in that sea in tattered union jack trunks. And Liz Truss should be pushed in there with him, too. Turns out the frontrunner to lead the tax-cutting, sea-polluting Tories ordered cuts during her time as environment secretary, slicing away millions earmarked for tackling water pollution. And, wouldn’t you know it, this included £24m cut from a grant aimed at stopping the dumping of raw sewage into the sea.

While Farage and Truss are in that foul and fetid sea, they should shout for all those Tory MPs who voted against plans to stop sewage being dumped in our rivers to join them.

Come on in, the water’s horrible, but it does offer a perfect metaphor for the smelly ways of extreme free market fundamentalism.

And should you be worrying about those water bosses, rest easy – in the past three years, 12 chief executives are said to have taken home £58m between them.

All that money and still there is shit in the sea. Water privatisation has clearly failed. True, we don’t know what the industry would be like if it had stayed in state hands, but it couldn’t be any worse. Oh, hang on – we do know as Scottish Water remains publicly owned and has invested 35% more per household in infrastructure than the English companies.

As for the tax cuts promised by Truss and her rival Rishi Sunak, the University of Essex’s Paul Whiteley points out in an interesting comment piece on The Conversation that Brits suffer from “cakeism” by expecting decent public services but not wanting to pay for them.

Prof Whiteley adds: “The way to stimulate growth is to invest in both private and public assets at the same time, rather than by impoverishing public investment in the mistaken belief that this will stimulate private investment.”

Even someone who has trouble keeping control of his own bank account can see that cutting taxes merely benefits those who already have money, while further depleting a state tattered by years of cuts and needlessly austerity.

Anyway, here to close is a childhood reading memory, altered to suit the times we live in…

“I can smell the sea,” said Topsy

“I can smell the sea,” said Tim.

The usual suspect newspaper is having a go at cyclists again this morning.

Never mind 10% inflation, energy bills no-one can afford, food banks running out of food, water companies drowning in debt so they can pay massive dividends while pumping shit into our seas and rivers, and people pulling their own teeth out ­– and that last one is reportedly true and not just a handy metaphor for watching the Tory leadership contest.

No, the most important story of the day is that the government is muttering about cyclists being forced to have registration numbers, insurance and stick to speed limits “under a radical shake-up of road laws”.

Such moves win the approval of the solicitor Nick Freeman, who is quoted as saying: “This is something that needs to happen for everyone’s safety…”

Ah, yes, Mr Loophole, the man who makes everyone safe by getting misbehaving stars off motoring offences. Yes, let’s persecute cyclists while ensuring people wealthy enough to pay Mr Loophole can keeping driving after being caught breaking the rules.

And never mind that it is actual government policy, if that means a thing anymore, to “make cycling and walking the natural choices for shorter journeys”, according to the Department for Transport.

Meanwhile, the Department for Policies To Deflect From More Important Matters has come up with this latest anti-cycling suggestion.

Now let’s just admit that cyclists are not perfect. And I say this as a bicycle-pedalling, pavement-walking, car-driving man.

Here is a story. It is hot and I am waiting with other pedestrians for the lights to change at a busy junction in York. A cyclist on what we used to call a racing bike sweeps up the hill from the station, sees the red light before him, swerves over the road and on to the pavement millimetres from my shoulder, wings round the blind pavement corner and goes on his reckless way without a wobble.

A dangerous idiot, although his cycling skills were excellent. He was also riding topless, perhaps because his tattoos needed an airing. It is fair to say my own unadorned torso is always covered up, cycling or not, as no-one needs to see that. And when cycling I stop at traffic lights; most of us do.

In a snap opinion poll carried out within the confines of my own skull, 100% of those asked believed that the proportion of stupid cyclists exactly matches general levels of stupidity in the population. It’s just that society is much more forgiving of stupid motorists than of cyclists who behave in a similar fashion.

Still, at least having a go at cyclists makes a change from having a go at immigrants and trying to deport them to Rwanda while, as the FT reports, asking the High Court to keep secret documents that list “torture and killings” in that country.

THERE was a good story in the Yorkshire Post the other day, and not just that feature by someone or other about bar billiards in York. Kudos to political editor Chris Burn for his splash about how officials in Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’s department put pressure on Channel 4 bosses to delete references in its annual report to still having a sustainable future as a publicly owned broadcaster.

After a Freedom of Information request, the Post saw email exchanges between the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and Channel 4. These revealed that the government sought ten changes to parts of the report that did not fit with the chosen narrative of flogging off the station – something no-one other than Ms Dorries seems to want to happen.

Two references by Channel 4’s chairman, Sir Ian Cheshire, to the station’s long-term sustainability were originally queried, with the comments: “Suggest remove the highlighted sentence: the Government has made its position clear on C4’s long-term sustainability.”

The report was ultimately published without these and other demanded edits. What this  illustrates yet again is that we have a confederacy of bullies for a government. Leaving Channel 4 alone is clearly the best option.

The culture-warring Tories pretend to be looking to secure Channel 4’s future while really wishing to punish the station for not being in the past slavish enough to Boris Johnson. You may remember him, although mostly he seems to be on holiday nowadays.

Over there Donald Trump fumes his crooked head off about the FBI searching his Mar-a-Lago home, apparently in search of documents he may have lost or tampered with in contravention of the Presidential Records Act.

Over here, on our small Trumpian island, the Daily Mail and other diehard supporters of Boris Johnson obsessively attack the Commons parliamentary privileges committee investigating the prime minister for having possibly deliberately misled parliament – which could constitute a contempt of parliament.

This is a “kangaroo court” according to the Mail and a “Boris witch-hunt’, even though the committee has a Tory majority.

Tories on that committee are damned as traitors by the Boris-besotted Mail – much in the way that judges were slammed as “Enemies of the people.”

Nadine Dorries, that mouth-frothing member of the Johnsonian cult, calls the investigation “the most egregious abuse of power witnessed in Westminster”.

All of this to subvert the usual rules and procedures to protect one deeply unseemly man.

Whether over there or over here, what this teaches us is that rule-bending leaders sell us their colourful non-conformity while seeking power, bend the rules when elected, then bend them again to cover up the pile of bent rules they leave behind.

Talking of which, I do hope you are keeping up with the twists and turns in the Tory leadership contest. As gruesome as it is interminable, this tussle involves two of Johnson’s Cabinet ministers, one still active in her role, squabbling over tax.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, that unstable nuclear reactor of ambition on wobbly legs, says she will cut taxes immediately.

Don’t go looking to these two for answers to our real problems – or, honestly, just don’t go at all…

Former chancellor Rishi Sunak, that shifty shapeshifter lifting right-wing memes from the culture wars drawer, says he will cut taxes later. Now or later, it matters little: tax cuts benefit the better off and do nothing to help low earners.

Don’t go looking to these two for answers to our real problems – or, honestly, just don’t go at all, as neither has anything to say to anyone beyond the tiny constituency of Tory members allowed to take part in the crazy gameshow that chooses the next prime minister.

Don’t go looking for answers to the NHS crisis or the planet overheating madly, as these issues don’t appeal to the cruddy cabal who decides. So, naturally, Truss and Sunak have nothing much to say here.

A recent YouGov poll of Tory party members indicated no inclination to help the NHS, with 67% of respondents saying the NHS “has enough funds already, and just needs to spend current funds more efficiently”.

Don’t go looking for answers to the energy crisis or the water crisis, both of which have their roots in a Thatcherite obsession with privatisation.

As that singer turned environmental campaigner, and all-round top person, Feargal Sharkey said on BBC breakfast: “What you are actually looking at is nothing to do with droughts, it’s decades of under-investment and mismanagement.”

To mix the utilities metaphor here, we are being gaslit over water. All those leaks, all those huge profits, all the payments to shareholders, all the shit being pumped into our rivers, all the chronic underinvestment in infrastructure – this isn’t our fault, it’s down to the way the privatised industry is run.

As for the frankly terrifying way our energy bills are rising, both candidates offer nothing substantial. And now we all lose our shirts for foolishly playing energy poker. Not that we had any choice; these are the free-market rules, and we’re not free to do anything about it.

The financial expert Martin Lewis made a shocking observation on the BBC Today programme this morning. He pointed out that the new energy cap will amount to 45% of the state pension, adding that if Sunak and Truss only offer tax cuts and abolishing the green levy on energy bills, “we’re going to leave millions destitute and in danger this winter”.

Back over there, Trump went into hyperbolic overdrive, saying: “Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe!”

“Corrupt at a level not seen before…” – That’s certainly one way to write your own political obit. Over there and over here.

Watching the squash on TV at the Commonwealth Games stirred a few thoughts. The first one was, Oh, so that’s how you’re meant to play. The ball powers down the side wall and bounces off the back wall, and is hit again, and again. Thwacking hell, what a sight. The game was between James Willstrop (above) and Rory Stewart, who is ten years younger than the man they call the Marksman. Squash players like a nickname. Mine is the Man Who Always Melts Into A Pool Of Sweaty Despair. Willstrop wobbled but won in the end (only to be defeated by Joel Makin). At one point the commentator said: “The younger man is moving so well.” This raised an alternative commentary: “The 65-year-old is moving quite well for a man who woke up this morning with a stiff hip. He even managed a rally lasting almost a minute. But now he has dropped his racket on the floor and is staring at the wall, muttering. The 71-year-old has beaten him again.”

The thing is, I think I played Willstop once in Harrogate. This wasn’t due to squash prowess but for a feature. He was a young squash champion; I was a fortysomething bumbler about the court. I haven’t kept the cutting and can find no record online. If blurred memory serves, it was for a series called Have A Go. There was no cutting in the box of dusty newsprint dedicated to 25 or so years of column writing, and to newer magazine articles. Perhaps I should throw away all those words.

The Tory leadership contest continues as if it were a general election. It’s not; it’s a private poll of a small number of cruddy old Tories. Yesterday, Liz Truss, widely seen as the likely winner (and God help us all), had a bit of a wobble, a pleasing sight. That woman grabs right-wing policies like a breathless supermarket shopper given five minutes to fill her trolley for free. Off she goes, pulling items from the Woke aisle; now she’s plundering armfuls of Growing The Economy Cornflakes. Now she piles into the barmy offers, harvesting £8.8 billion of savings by saying she will cut the pay of civil servants and other government workers who live outside of London. Outrage follows, and even some Tories point out that this is hardly levelling up. A U-turn occurs, but not before Liz For Leader – Lizfer, for short – has complained of “wilful misrepresentation of our campaign…There will be no proposal taken forward on regional pay boards for civil servants or public sector workers.” Ah, and where did this “wilful misrepresentation” originate? In her own campaign press release sent to journalists that very morning. More please, that woman is getting away with blue murder.

Lizfer has the backing of the Daily Mail this morning. Presumably because one reckless blonde-haired egotist addicted to self-serving cakeism isn’t enough. The paper has this barmy line: “All political careers, Enoch Powell famously said, end in failure. Boris Johnson is a striking exception to that rule…” Have it your way, but his career has literally just ended in failure as he is being removed by his own MPs for being a total liability. Barmy Avenue, a suburban road that leads nowhere.

Thanks to the financial expert Paul Lewis for pointing this out on Twitter. The heft of the British Passport has declined. In 2010, it was ranked as the most powerful in the world by the Henley Passport Index, and we could visit more destinations without a visa than any other nationality. Now it’s 13th. It must be another of those “Brexit benefits”. Still, at least it’s blue, as you may notice while waiting in one of those queues.

The rise of the Lionesses shows things sometimes come right in the end. With seemingly indomitable spirit, this England women’s team has banished cruddy old prejudice.

Once the idea of women playing football at such a level would have been laughed out of court by the pot-bellied men who knew what was ‘right’.

Once the authorities, some perhaps pop-bellied men long distant from athleticism, decreed girls must be kept off the boys’ grass. Now footage of a Yorkshire girl dancing in her England strip as her England heroines beat Sweden goes viral, and the girl and her family are said to have been given tickets to the Women’s Euro 2022 final against Germany on Sunday.

Hurrah to all that. The dancing girl clip captured the general elation. And those of us who haven’t watched often were pleased to find that women’s football is more entertaining and spirited than the men’s game, and just more fun to watch.

Perhaps that happy virus could reach other aspects of life. We need some indomitable spirit to overcome the scabbed populism that infects politics.

Boris Johnson came draped in the ratty coat of populism, and now the gruesome contest to grab that garment from him has been reduced to a vicious yet dull squabble between two poor candidates who are each, in their way, to blame for the mess we are in.

Each outdoes the other in trying to win the approval of Margaret Thatcher’s ghost in a weird nodding-to-Miss Havisham routine. Each tries to wear her rotting old policies; each tries to prove to the Tory faithful that they are true to a Havisham no-one sensible should miss.

And that leaves us all trapped in Satis House, where the clocks were stopped by Thatcherism before being sold to the highest bidder.

The Tories rid themselves of Margaret Thatcher more than 30 years ago, and yet still they venerate the woman they defenestrated; still, they stand before her vengeful ghost.

The candidates call for tax cuts and a smaller state. And when right-wing people mention a smaller state, what they mean but don’t say is: you’re on your own, pal.

The size of state we have now can’t fund the NHS properly, or give schools the money they need, or run a transport system that isn’t in hock to shareholders or arrange for energy anyone can afford.

What’s going to be cut to pay for lower taxes? Rishi Sunak says he will cut taxes when the economy recovers; Liz Truss says she will borrow big and cut taxes now.

I don’t care who wins. Both are rotten choices and soon we will be governed by the fourth Conservative prime minister in 12 years, and the winner will have been chosen without troubling democracy by asking the rest of us.

Of course, Brexit was the ultimate act of scabby populism, sold to us on a raft of lies, and now revealed as a monumental act of self-harm. Yet none of the Brexit faithful will admit any failings, as Brexit has become a sort of religion, an evangelical sect that turns away all dissenters.

If scabbed populism needs removing, so too does the timidity of Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party. Sir Keir won’t discuss Brexit either, other than by saying he would do it better, whatever that means. He seems mesmerised by the Brexit lies, too timid to point out the obvious truth that it’s been a disaster.

And whenever you think Sir Keir might be getting somewhere, he indulges in avoidable acts of self-sabotage. Sacking a Labour frontbencher no-one had heard of for appearing on an RMT picket line and speaking out of turn diverted attention away from the government, and made Labour look chaotic and hopeless.

While Liz Truss indulges in 1970s cosplay, blaming the ‘union barons’, Sir Keir seems too embarrassed to admit his party has anything to do with unions.

All very disappointing as what matters is having a party, or a coalition of parties, or God just about anyone, who can prize off that crusted scab.

Populism can never deliver in the end, as it’s all about culture wars and exaggeration; about stirring up hostility and antipathy, about division and derision.

At least we can look forward to the football. Good luck to the Lionesses. And, more generally, good luck to us all. Looks like we’re going to need it.