A political gaffe, according to the Political Dictionary online, is “an unintentional comment that causes a politician embarrassment”. And a Boris Johnson gaffe is just the same, except that it is intentional.

An old bit of footage of the prime minister has been doing the rounds on social media. In this Johnson explains his political strategy: drop as many gaffes as possible as this causes confusion, no one knows where they are, and the media doesn’t know what to report next.

He was at this tawdry game in the Commons yesterday when he addressed the House after the mini version of Sue Gray’s ‘partygate’ report was published. This pointed to “failures of leadership and judgement” and excessive drinking at work against the backdrop of the pandemic.

Johnson did his usual sorry-not-sorry act. Where the sorrow concerns being caught out. Where he’s sorry if anything caused offence. And where, on this occasion, he “gets it” and pretends to understand why people have been upset about the reports of Downing Street parties while everyone else was busy abiding by the rules laid down by his government.

And then he went off on one, falsely accusing Labour leader Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile in his time at the CPS. Ranting and pointing, arms flailing about, mouth bellowing.

And this, remember, was when he was meant to be saying sorry.

Johnson always reacts viciously when cornered: never mind Big Dog, he’s nasty, yappy Little Dog barking too loudly and pissing off the neighbours.

Or to summon a different cornered animal, as an unnamed former ally was quoted as saying in the Times the other week: “The thing about Boris Johnson is that he’s like a rat. He bumbles on amiably enough until he’s trapped. Then he’ll chew through bone, kill anyone, do anything to get free.”

Here are two Twitter thoughts on Johnson (neither are from me):

Twitter thought one: “The smear made against Keir Starmer relating to Jimmy Saville yesterday is wrong & cannot be defended. It should be withdrawn. False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust & can’t just be accepted as part of the cut & thrust of parliamentary debate.”

Twitter thought two: “False & baseless smears re Jimmy Saville against Keir cannot be defended. PM should withdraw his comments. Parliament cannot become a place to peddle tropes, conspiracy theories &falsehoods -this damages our democracy.”

These Tweets are from two Tories: the MP Julian Smith and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.

But Starmer can stick up for himself, as he was doing this morning on Sky News when he angrily dismissed the attack as “a ridiculous slur peddled by right wing trolls”.

Ah, yes, those trolls.

We are in effect governed by right-ring trolls who follow their disgraceful leader down whatever dark alley he is prepared to enter, chanting in unison from whatever liar’s hymn sheet he has just handed round.

Reports at the weekend suggested that the government will now return to its ‘levelling up’ agenda, with money being set aside for overlooked parts of the country. Twenty towns and cities are pledged a share in a “new £1.5bn brownfield fund”.

And the areas receiving this money would apparently be known as “Boris boroughs”. Whether you must behave like Boris (cheat on your wives, colleagues, the country) to live in such a designated area is not known.

What is known, according to The Observer’s front page, is that the new money promised by Michael Gove’s Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Department isn’t new at all, as Gove’s department later admitted, but from the ‘levelling up’ funds that have already been announced.

When promised new money, it’s best to look in your wallet first and check for missing notes.

ALTHOUGH we are told that the birthday cake in question might have been Colin The Caterpillar from M&S, other cakes are available. Here are a few suggestions.

How about Other People’s Dough Doughnuts, as Boris Johnson does like blowing our money away. Or Millionaire Mate’s Shortbread, as there’s always a rich friend around when he’s forgotten his wallet while ordering gold wallpaper.

And then – sorry, I stole this one from somewhere – there is the plain old Flan B, ready for when  Flan A has flopped.

You know something has  changed when anger turns to ridicule. That point was reached with a sugary squelch last night when a friendly Tory MP tried to stick up for Boris Johnson over the partygate affair.

The lockdown parties, the birthday parties, the cheese-and-wining ‘business meetings’, and the suitcases full of booze are all now being investigated by senior civil servant Sue Gray and the Metropolitan Police.

The Tory MP Conor Burns thought he would help his boss by telling Channel 4 News that Johnson had been “ambushed by a cake” at that birthday party he shouldn’t have been having.

Twitter virtually broke down under the weight of sour hilarity. A lighter moment saw Nigella Lawson joke that she would use Ambushed By Cake as the title of her next book, only for the tone-deaf Mr Burns to say that she could have that one on him.

All this painful news has caused the Boris-backing Daily Mail to have conniptions today while flouncing out this front-page headline: “A nation that’s lost all sense of proportion.”

Well, yes. Or a newspaper that’s lost all sense of what a newspaper is supposed to do: report what’s going on, not dress up blatant views as news.

Yes, it could be cake and wine that do for Johnson, and that would in one sense be ridiculous. But the anger is real; the anger from those who stuck by the rules, sometimes at great personal anguish, won’t be washed away by the pained bleating we hear from Johnson’s supporters.

Jacob Rees-Mogg seems to be the first choice of bleater. And you have to say that’s a tricky role to fulfil when you look less like a natural cheerleader than a high-end funeral director who is about to hand over the bill with a whispered threat about paying by next Tuesday. A man of such thin-skinned condescension is just who you want covering your back on Newsnight.

A fellow Tory who appeared alongside the coffin-follower was not impressed with Rees-Mogg’s argument that this was all just about cake.

The Conservative peer Lord Finkelstein said: “Jacob Rees-Mogg says both inaccurately and intellectually offensively that this is a row about cake ­– this is a row about whether governments are subject to the laws they set, which is a far more profound question than about birthday cake.”

Quite so. It’s about people mostly playing by the rules, either gladly or with a leaden heart; it’s about people doing what they were supposed to do, only to discover that those making the rules were having a high old time.

That may yet turn out not to be the case, but it seems unlikely, and sometimes leaders are undone by perception gone deep. There has always been something deeply off about the way Johnson conducts himself, and that has now infected the government. And don’t whine about the media being in cahoots with the Labour Party, especially not if you’re a member of the party that’s normally in cahoots with the media.

If Johnson falls, it will all be his own doing, an arrogant clown tripped up by shoelaces he couldn’t be bothered to tie, because tying shoelaces is for little people.

HERE are two ways to spend around £4 billion. This is not from personal experience as I am only fit to advise on how to spend around four pounds.

Option one is to shrug your shoulders over £4.3 billion of furlough money stolen by fraudsters. That’s what Chancellor Rishi Sunak has just done.

Remember that the next time you are harassed by HMRC over some trifling amount of tax you owe. Are some sums just too difficult to go after? It seems like an awful lot of money to fall out of our collective wallet.

Here is the second way to spend about £4 billion. Run the BBC for a year.

According to the House of Commons library, total BBC income in 2019/20 was £4.94 billion, and the licence fee of £159 accounted for around 70 per cent of that.

In financial shorthand, sadly the only sort you’ll get from me, the money the Chancellor is writing off would pay for the BBC for one year. It would also pay for much else besides, but this comparison is pertinent as the government has just announced a two-year freeze in the licence fee, followed by its planned abolition.

Incidentally, the government doesn’t pay for the BBC, we do through the licence fee; governments just put the squeeze on the BBC, sometimes for reasons of ideology or political spite.

The licence fee will be replaced by who knows what. Don’t ask Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, as she won’t have a clue about that or anything else, being too busy serving up half-truths in an overcooked sauce of ideology and spite.

Certain sections of the Tory party have long disliked the BBC – much in the way they dislike the NHS. If you have a certain cast of mind, our national broadcaster and our national health service are spin-offs from socialism, and as such shouldn’t be tolerated.

The latest attack on the BBC was wrapped up in Operation Red Meat. This was pathetically designed to distract attention from all those headlines about Boris Johnson not understanding the pandemic rules he made himself, and the endless noisy cavalcade of stories about parties and boozing in Downing Street.

A decision as big as abolishing the BBC as we know it should not be taken to divert attention from Johnson’s woes. And it should not be taken to please media barons who dislike having to compete with the BBC.

The BBC isn’t perfect; but what is? Better that we have the BBC with all its contradictions and awkward dints than being left with a diminished, neutered, sold-off, half-arsed, semi-subscription service. And all because the current crop of morally inadequate Tories dislike like the BBC.

And here’s another thing.

This argument is nearly always confined to the news. While the news is important, the BBC is much more than that. And even if you stick to news, the BBC is far from a left-wing group-thinking cabal, as Nadine Dorries pretends to believe.

One Tory argument for all this is that the “BBC got Brexit wrong”. This is ridiculous as the vote was a close call. But the BBC did get something badly wrong over Brexit. It gave far too much airtime to bloody Nigel Farage. His rants were aired so often that his extreme views were normalised.

Stepping quickly away from Farage, always a good idea, I’d pay the licence fee for the radio alone, with Radio Four and Radio Three easily being worth it (more so than the TV stations at times). And Radio 6 Music. And the website. And BBC Sounds. And the iPlayer (when our Virgin wi-fi is working).

I hope the BBC fights its corner, as doing what the government asks has so far got it nowhere.

JUST give that milk a sniff. So said Morrisons the other day when announcing that it was dispensing with use-by dates.

With accidentally pertinent timing, this came just as everyone was finally starting to sniff something else that seems to have turned.

I just checked again and it’s off for sure. There’s a terrible cheesy and winey smell, a stink of stale entitlement mixed with a sour wash of shifty lies kept too long at the back of the fridge. Never mind that cartoonish splodge on the carton, Boris Johnson has gone right off.

Some of us spotted the mould had set in long ago. Doesn’t this smell funny to you, we said, passing the crumpled Eton yoghurt pot around. Oh, that’s just Boris smelling like Boris, his defenders said.

Now even his MPs are sniffing that pot and wondering what they bought, as their great communicator is reduced to bumbling his words, smirking when dodging serious questions, and hiding.

Even the normally supportive Sun newspaper is damning on its front page today – “It’s my party and I’ll lie low if I want to.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but you need to remove the ‘low’ for a more accurate headline.

As you will not need reminding, Johnson is in trouble over whether he attended a lockdown party in the garden on No 10. Along with other assorted parties he might or might not have popped along to.

The bring-your-own-bottle party is the one that’s causing him problems now.

A party that occurred after a press conference during which we’d all been told to stay indoors. A party that occurred just before the story broke about Dominic Cummings bending the rules to drive to Barnard Castle “to test his eyesight”.

And, more sombrely, a party that occurred when relatives were being told they couldn’t visit loved ones in care homes and some, incredibly, are even said to have been reduced to watching their loved ones die on Zoom.

And if Johnson cannot see what’s wrong with that, he’s an even worse man than we thought.

Many of his blatant character faults have been well aired here and elsewhere. It’s all too easy to assemble Boris’s Bad Bits, a sort of greatest hits album in reverse. Let’s widen this out instead.

Something else that smells off is featured on the front page of The New York Times today, under the headline: “How Boris is revealing his true self.”

This opinion piece by Moya Lothian-McLean is less concerned with his present troubles than with what his government has been doing with its power.

Having arrived at No 10 by hitching a ride on the back of Brexit, Johnson talked about restoring “freedom” and “taking back control”. What he and his lieutenants have done instead, Lothian-McLean writes, is to seize control for themselves and strip away the freedoms of others.

“A raft of bills likely to pass this year will set Britain, self-professed beacon of democracy, on the road to autocracy,” she writes. “Once in place, the legislation will be very hard to shift. For Mr Johnson, it amounts to a concerted power-grab.”

After wondering just who this political chameleon called Boris might be, Lothian-McLean delivers her killer punch ­– “Now he has revealed who he really is: a brattish authoritarian who puts his personal whims above anything else.”

That really is a case of how others see us. The BYOB party could be the undoing of Johnson, but another even darker story lies behind all those headlines. But you need to be in New York to notice what’s going on.

Now that Sir Keir Starmer is out of isolation (again!), perhaps he could start pointing out some of these things.

Meanwhile, one of our own newspapers prints parallel-planet propaganda like this…

But not all our newspapers are falling down on the job, as shown by this front ‘page’ from the online only Independent, suggesting that No 10 staff were told to ‘clear up their phones’ before the investigation into those parties…

It’s always an odd day, a hinge between what’s gone and what’s to come. Often there is a party with friends, but that idea shrivelled in uncertainty this year. There is a walk instead, Covid tests permitting, as WhatsApp messages ping-pong back and forth with tales of possible scares. Sharing lifts has been ruled out, fresh air ruled in. As for tonight, that’ll just be a musical threesome with Jools Holland.

Here are those shambling notions…

You always hope things will change, then sit back and watch the box set as they don’t. One thing that hasn’t changed is that Boris Johnson is still prime minister: still on holiday while pretending not to be. Still trying to play the loveable clown (editor’s note: are you sure about that?) with silly mussed-up hair and patter as stale as the jokes from last year’s Christmas crackers, mock-Latin edition.

And yet with every event-shunted day he looks more tragic than comical, as if haunted by a gnawing awareness of his own failings while trying to keep up the act.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Great British Fake-Off in which our hero (editor’s note: see last note) attempts to cook a post-Brexit mid-pandemic porkies pie while hearing over his shoulder the sound of knives being sharpened.

That’s almost enough of him. And, yes, it is an unhealthy obsession, but there you go. Here is something else. Did you know that Johnson now employs three vanity photographers, paid for by you and me to make him look good or to distract us with snaps of his dog?

A couple of days before Christmas, The Times explained that its policy was “to use such images as sparingly as possible” and to signal their dodgy provenance with the caption “supplied by No 10 official photographer”. It said that the “proliferation of staged images from Downing Street is disquieting”, and so it is.

Let’s give a shout-out to real photographers taking real photographs.

Turning away from what might bring us down, here is something genuinely uplifting. And, no, it’s not creepy Dominic Raab taking chocolates to NHS staff. And, no again, it’s not any number of Tory MPs ‘celebrating’ their local food bank with picture opportunities, gruesomely highlighting the very poverty they have helped to bring about.

Teacher and charity founder Bex Wilson (Picture: BBC)

This instead is the story of the Leeds primary teacher Bex Wilson, who was shocked to discover  the reason why a six-year-old boy in her class was always tired.

You may have seen Bex on BBC Look North. She has also just been featured on BBC Breakfast, where she said of that boy: “He was unusually irritated and had been short with one of his friends, I just kept him behind at the end and said, ‘What’s going on? I feel like you’re tired this morning’ and he said, ‘I’m always tired Miss, I don’t have a bed’.”

Instead of sitting back and thinking that’s awful, Bex got that boy a mattress. And from that one act of practical kindness has grown her charity Zarach, which provides beds and furniture to poverty-stricken children in Leeds and elsewhere.

On BBC Look North she has also been seen delivering food parcels to families.

Some people are remarkable, aren’t they? And some people sit typing at the back of the room because that’s all they know. Sometimes it’s possible to worry you should be the one and not the other.

Still, no resolutions from me as I don’t believe in them. And no giving up alcohol for January either, as that was last’s year punishment. I’ll be sticking to steady as she goes, a drink or two here and there, then no drinks for a short spell.

Talking of drinking, here’s a cautionary headline…

Happy New Year and all that.

HERE are a few random thoughts on life and other distractions, starting with: Life is what happens when you sit there thinking what life should be like.

This isn’t a complaint, just how it goes.

Many years ago, a young man, with hair on his head and airy notions inside, sat in a newspaper office at the start of what would clearly be a brilliant career.

A long time later, an older man, with no hair on his head and airy notions inside, sits in his study as he writes these words on his day off.

Plenty has happened in between, not least just about surviving in journalism, although that young man did not foresee inching out his wordy life at home alone in the study, with an old cat for company.

Human colleagues used to talk about this and that, passing the time; the cat colleague scratches at the door, yowls on the windowsill, and walks over the keyboard once admitted. Then nods off, as did some former workmates, although not usually on the floor.

Some days there is an escape from this study, people are interviewed, words are gathered into a newspaper feature; those are the best days.

All of this depends on the internet. The other day Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, was bloviating about a £5bn gigabit broadband boost or something, while giving an obligatory mention to levelling up.

Honestly, I have no idea what she was talking about, although someone should tell her how often the internet levels down and dies.

A man from Virgin Media recommended sticking a pin in a hole at the back of the box, a high-tech technical solution that resurrected the wi-fi for the shortest while. Then the work link ground to a halt, while the BBC iPlayer span the dreaded dotted circle.

Here, to end, is a slogan seen on a lorry while out running: “Precision prepared potatoes.” Who knew that a potato could be precisely done? Not this chopper of random sized pieces for the roasting tray; not this careless arranger of baking spuds on the oven racks.

IT’S easy to forget what letters clustered together in an acronym stand for. After all, it seems to have slipped Boris Johnson’s mind what the letters BBC represent.

An intemperate story in the Mail On Sunday (editor’s note: is there any other type?) yesterday reported that the prime minister had told ‘friends’ (editor’s note: please check he has any) that he was angry at the ‘frivolous, vengeful, partisan’ BBC for its reporting of the Downing Street party row.

He fumed to these apparent pals that the Corporation had ‘neglected its primary duty to focus on the booster rollout’.

Those pesky acronyms really are a nuisance: doesn’t everyone know that it’s the Broadcasting Boris Corporation?

Step a few feet along this stony path and you will stub your toe on a lump of irony about the size of Johnson’s head.

Mere hours after this story appeared, the prime minister commandeered the airwaves for another of his Covid announcements; not a press conference but a recorded address, slotted in before Top Gear. Unsuspecting viewers switching on for the popular BBC motoring show may have thought, Blimey, that Freddie Flintoff has let himself go…

There seemed to be no real reason for this interruption to Sunday night viewing, other than for Johnson to deflect attention from the party row and to have another try at looking prime ministerial (nope, still not getting those vibes).

The BBC is a public service broadcaster and asking questions of government is part of its job, and one it doesn’t always do properly. And anyway: endless dull bulletins are dedicated to reports about the booster rollout and other fresh-spun stories the government hopes might make it look in control (nope, still not seeing that).

Blaming the BBC is what governments do, especially this one. Yet the party story was unearthed by the Daily Mirror and the mock-press conference from last year that reignited the whole shabby charade was an ITV story.

Nothing about this is particular to the BBC. ITV covered this story, Sky covered it; LBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 ­– they all covered this story, as did the Mail and other newspapers, but Johnson’s ‘friends’ say he just wants to blame the BBC.

Johnson clearly thinks the BBC should only report stories that make him look good (editor’s note: is that even humanly possible?).

You know, if only there was a White House-style press room that Johnson could have used instead. You know, like the one he had built that cost us £2.6m. But that is always full of impertinent journalists asking questions. And what a nerve that he should be expected to put up with that.

If there is an upside to all this, it is the thought that Johnson faces endless rows of unseen people at home chuntering “oh do piss off” every time he blathers out another word; and worse, if a splendid “f***-off” meme doing the rounds after last night’s address is any guide.

Anyway, here are some suggested programmes for the Broadcasting Boris Corporation:

The Great British Boris Off

Would I Lie To You?

Only Fools And Voters

All My Sons (And Daughters)

I’m A Celebrity PM…You’re Not Getting Me Out Of Here…

Changing Rooms (wallpaper special)

Wish You Were Here (Bet You Wish You Had Rich Friends Like Me)

What We Do In The Shadows (When You Aren’t Paying Attention)

Kirstie And Phil’s Love It Or Punch It On The Nose.

Yes, we should worry about the Omicron variant; and we should also worry about the Omni-con prime minister, a man so woefully ill-suited to his job that it would be laughable if it was at all funny.

Switching off now…

BORIS Johnson likes dressing up as other people and cannot glimpse a hi-vis jacket without pulling it on over his ill-fitting shirt and skew-whiff tie.

When football was fleetingly his thing, he wrestled himself into an England shirt, yanked on over the indecorous shirt and that askew tie.

A couple of days ago, he took his dressing-up habit a stage further by pretending to be a copper (Johnson of the Lard, perhaps). It was hardly fetching, matching an over-sized jacket with body protection and a woolly hat branded with the world ‘Police’.

For continuity’s sake, that tie poked out of the jacket. His eyes peeped above a face mask, looking out for hardened criminals or possibly a passing headline.

The reason for this ludicrous charade was that Johnson had joined police in Liverpool on a morning drugs raid. According to later police comments, no arrests were made.

Why was the prime minister doing another fancy-dress turn? The official reason was to launch the government’s new drugs policy. Well, I say new, but it was hard to spot the difference from previous drug policies. More money was promised (keep an eye on that, officer) and Johnson was going to be tough on drugs and the causes of drugs. The BBC news obediently led with what seemed to be a bit of government spin.

The unofficial reason was surely to deflect all those hostile headlines about the party that might or might not have been taken place at Downing Street last Christmas.

You know the one, the party that wasn’t held but if it was it broke no rules, but anyway it categorically wasn’t held, unless it was.

Johnson burbled out his slippery explanation as usual, and then last night ITV News obtained a video of a mock briefing showing Downing Street staff joking while talking about a gathering where cheese and wine were served.

The prime minister’s former press secretary, Allegra Stratton, is shown laughing on many of the front pages, with the Times among other accusing Boris Johnson of “lying” – which is a bit like saying a leopard suffers from spotty pigmentation.

This story has traction because the alleged Tory knees-up happened at a time when everyone else had been ordered to stay indoors to comply with Covid rules, and when other rule-breaking partygoers were getting themselves arrested. And, much more seriously, it happened when people were prevented from visiting ill or dying relatives thanks to the lockdown.

This is how a small story becomes a much bigger story; how a little spot becomes a festering boil, and so on.

Plenty of us saw Johnson as a conniving scoundrel from the start, an unserious show-off who pretends to be an amiable clown. Lovable toff or hateful, chaotic incompetent – oh sometimes it’s hard to spot the difference.

After trying to bend the parliamentary rules to save his pal, Owen Paterson, and after the great northern railway let-down, Johnson needed some good news. Instead, he is haunted by the ghost of last Christmas, and a growing sense that rules only apply to the little people and not to himself or those within his queasy orbit.

Anyway, fun was had on Twitter with that police picture. The best response was from Jed Mercurio, the writer of Line Of Duty…

Thank you for submitting your audition for the next series of #LineofDuty but we’re looking for a character with at least one redeeming moral principle and a performance that places even just a scintilla of doubt in the audience’s mind that he might not be totally bent pic.twitter.com/3jnJL74c5f

— Jed Mercurio (@jed_mercurio) December 6, 2021

“Totally bent” – yup, that raised a weary smile.

TRYING to get a book published is a wearying business, but it seems that those of us who struggle to find a deal have got it all wrong. We need to blame Remainers, which in my case involves blaming myself.

Thanks to the bumptious Tory MP Mark Francois for this useful insight into how publishing is a plot against brave Brexiteers such as himself.

In case you need educating, if that’s the word here, Francois is the small and belligerent, Brexit-loving MP for somewhere or other. I could look it up, but those wasted seconds don’t grow on trees.

He is known for his shortness and the tottering height of his right-wing opinions. Enter his name into Google, and one of the first options is a question about his height.

Hilariously, a celebrity height site (honestly, I am not making this up) says the following, which has been copied verbatim: “At 55 years old, Mark Francois height not available right now. We will update Mark Francois’s height soon as possible.”

Perhaps he is updating his own height as we speak by trying on different shoes or something. Happy to recommend the High Dudgeon Shoe Lifts I have just invented, designed to give a boost to small, shouty men everywhere. As a smallish, non-shouty man, I am happy to donate this invention to those whose ego needs a wedge.

Anyway, here is what Mark Francois has to say about publishing, as told to the Daily Telegraph, whose ear is always open to right-wing, Brexit-addled politicians with a very small axe to grind, or possibly a pair of nail scissors.

He has written a book about the ‘battle for Brexit’ and is having to self-publish as no publisher would touch it, apparently, as they’re all Remainers. These Remainers get everywhere, plotting against a hard-working small man whose height has yet to be made publicly available. And to those of you putting up your hands to say, “Ahem, perhaps it was a just another shit boring book”, well, yes.

The likes of Francois always want someone to blame; there’s a plot going on; someone’s got it in for them.

Francois told a Telegraph politics podcast: “In a nutshell, the problem was that the orthodoxy within the publishing industry is very, very much Remain. I got some nice compliments about the book and the writing, but it became fairly evident after a while that no publisher wanted to publish.”

And if the book was written as Francois speaks, those Remainer publishers may just have done us a favour.

Apparently, Francois’s agent touted the book “to a staggering 24 publishers who all refused”, according to the Daily Express website. I have always hated that usage of ‘staggering’, which is dropped into newspaper copy like a soggy firework that never goes off. But I’ll make an exception here: perhaps they were staggering after reading a few pages of Spartan Victory: The Inside Story of the Battle for Brexit. Or perhaps they were staggered after reading the title alone.

Being rejected is what happens to writers – good writers, poor writers and puffed-up politicians jumping up as they try to see over the wall.

My main deal was with an American publisher about ten years ago, for two York-based crime novels featuring the Rounder Brothers. They did all right; and then they faded away, which is what happens.

I have two novels on the go now, almost ready to be sent out. I am off to look for one of those Remainer publishers.

Richard Thompson Beeswing Tour, York Barbican, October 25

Richard Thompson, Beeswing, Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice 1967-75. Written with Scott Timberg, published by Faber.

RICHARD Thompson is touring to promote the book about what he does when he stands on stage.

In some ways, this was like any other concert. Thompson alone with a loudly amplified acoustic guitar for company, an instrument that seemingly contained another band in its sound chamber. How can one guitar make that much music?

His rolling baritone voice barrelled away as usual, steeped in life and undiminished by 72 years and many more songs.

First up was a storming version of Stony Ground, a tale of aged lust, which Thompson grabbed by its mucky collar and shook, producing runs of chords and notes that were gloriously improbable.

Between songs he spoke wryly, as he always does. Yet this time the chat was more to the point. Thompson read passages from his autobiography, explaining how songs came about before he played them.

Walking The Long Miles Home recalled a ten-mile tramp home after seeing The Who. Turning Of The Tide dates from when Fairport played in Hamburg, where along Reeperbahn legal sex workers “in garter belts and bustiers” advertised for business. Young Thompson “decided to try the goods” and “felt a bit hollow afterwards”, fictionalising the experience in song years later.

Beeswing the book is fascinating and written in the man’s own voice, often dry and amusing, yet sombre when life turns that way; the section on the fatal van crash of 1969 shocks with its sober clarity. He also skirts the glory days and the difficult days of his duo with Linda.

At the end, Thompson wonders if Fairport have been an important band with their innovations in folk-rock. “We really did invent a genre of music, and not many can say that. We rattled a few windows without actually blowing the house down.”

As for Beeswing the song, he played that at the Barbican, of course he did, it’s always a favourite with fans, although no story, shameful or otherwise, was told.

Also played were favourites including Persuasion and 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Thompson was joined by his partner Zara Phillips for a rousing version of I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, and they sang newer songs too, including the stomping When The Saints Rise Out Of Their Graves.

And, in a wry nod to what we’ve all been through, they rattled the rafters with ­Keep Your Distance. Thompson joked that he’d hoped that song might have become the pandemic anthem.

The book is a fascinating account of how a life in music took its baby steps; on that stage, Thompson was shown to be still striding vigorously down that long path.

Julian Cole