WHENEVER Boris Johnson says something regrettable, another minister is sent out to clear up the mess, like a zookeeper trailing after an incontinent baby elephant.

This morning it was Sajid Javid’s turn to carry the slopping bucket.

The health secretary was valiant in his insistence that Johnson had not just made a direct comparison between the fight for freedom in Ukraine and the vote for Brexit.

To which the impatient bystander can only squeal: wash your ears out, mate – that is precisely what he did say at the Conservative spring conference in Blackpool.

Should you have been fortunate enough to have missed the words that tumbled from Johnson’s careless gob, let me spoil your day…

“I know that it’s the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time…When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don’t believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. It’s because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself…”

As President Putin attempts to bomb and starve the people of Mariupol into submission and surrender; as millions of Ukrainians flee their beloved country, our prime minister feels happy to make a cheap political point comparing their brutal plight to the Brexit referendum.

It seems to have slipped his mind that Ukraine wants to join the EU, applying last month after the Russian invasion began. Only three weeks ago, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “Our goal is to be with all Europeans and, most importantly, to be equal.”

Whereas Putin’s goal is to bomb Ukraine to shit, to murder innocent citizens, and to reduce once-proud cities to rubble.

There seems to be no logical reason for this war, other than Putin’s acrid resentment at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his refusal to accept that post-Soviet Ukraine has a right to exist on its own terms.

There are people who will tell you differently, who will say that this is the fault of NATO or the US or that we are no better. This may be true, but it is beside the point when Putin needs to be defeated. Will he be defeated – is there any way for him to be defeated without a wider war? I am only a man sitting on a ledge, so don’t ask me.

As for Johnson’s insistence that the Brexit vote was nothing to do with being “hostile to foreigners”, that was the undercurrent throughout, from endless tabloid newspaper headlines to Nigel Farage standing in front of his anti-migrant ‘Breaking Point’ billboard showing a queue of mostly non-white migrants.

Johnson and his Brexit-besotted cohorts cashed in on such hostile sentiment while pretending that it didn’t exist.

Sergei Rachmaninov

ANYWAY, time for a bit of Rachmaninov.

Much social media hostility recently greeted the decision of the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra to pull music by Tchaikovsky from a concert at St David’s Hall.

The 1812 Overture famously celebrates Russia’s defence against the invasion of Napoleon and features a volley of cannon fire. Some members of the leading non-professional orchestra were unhappy about this after the invasion of Ukraine and opted for a different programme.

Assorted commentators ridiculed their decision, with the right-wing comedian Geoff Norcott tweeting: “Cancelling a Tchaikovsky concert is so daft ordinary Russians will write it off as mad Vlad over-doing the propaganda.”

The American political advisor Matt Duss got in on the act too, tweeting: “Doubly absurd because Tchaikovsky spent a lot of time in Ukraine, and incorporated a lot of Ukrainian folk music and stories into his work.”

You know, I think the cannons had something to do with it.

Anyway, Rachmaninov.

Wishing to be reminded of the glories of Russian culture, rather than the barbarity of its present leader, I dug out my CD of Rachmaninov Vespers 1-15 (All-Night Vigil), composed in two weeks in 1914.

This beautiful choral music reminds you of a different Russia, as indeed does the music of Tchaikovsky normally: as do the plays of Chekhov or the novels of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy.

Incidentally, Rachmaninov and his family left Russia two years later, in 1916, just before the Russian Revolution, moving to New York, and the composer never again set foot in his homeland.

Whether those Ukrainians fleeing their country will ever return to their homeland is anybody’s sad guess.

I HAVE taken this ledge to my mother’s house for a few days for reasons explained below. The view remains much the same, as in gloomy, but this visit reminds me that news comes widescreen and in a narrow personal squint.

The world cinemascope is still screening the same news, the unreeling horror of what is happening in Ukraine, the lethal sweep of Vladimir Putin’s cruel ambition. And the U-bending insanity of his logic in telling Ukrainians that if they continue to resist his troops they risk the future of their country – “And if that happens, they will have to be blamed for that.”

That’s quite the twisted leap: I am invading your country and obliterating your citizens, but if you resist, everything that happens is your fault.

Narrowing the focus, we see that Boris Johnson has a six-point plan to solve the Ukraine crisis – an improvement, I guess, on a three-word slogan, although none of it seems particular to Johnson. It’s almost as if he said that just so the newspaper headlines would say that he had a six-point plan (which they dutifully did).

The seventh point, unmentioned, is the hope that his past sins and poor behaviour will somehow be forgotten, erased by events. For now, perhaps. But any notion that Johnson has suddenly become a world-class leader will eventually wither under the glare from that big screen.

Besides, the idea that any of our politicians is having a “good war” is deeply distasteful. I tell you who is having a bad war: everyone and anyone in Ukraine or being forced to flee their homeland. Trying to earn political capital from that unspooling misery is far from a good look.

A headline in the Spectator literally said this: “Liz Truss is having a good war.” That is, of course, true if you consider a good war to be a chance for many pointless photo-ops and empty-vessel interviews, in which the Foreign Secretary’s robotic mutterings convey little besides her own perceived importance.

But now we must return to the widescreen cinema club. We interrupt this news to bring you unlikely statements from Home Secretary Priti Patel and Culture Secretary Nadine Dories.

Patel would like to say that she popped over to Poland (poor Poland) and noticed that Ukrainian refugees were fleeing true terrors. All those other refugees and migrants she has demonised and told to go away presumably just fancied a cheeky day out and a boat trip.

As for Dorries, she turned tearful while praising the BBC for the standard of its reporting on Ukraine, after previously berating everything about the BBC and wanting to yank it up by the roots.

All of this and more is to be found filling the big screen. On the smaller screen off to the side is the roll of personal news, the lives we keep on living while worrying about the distant lives of others.

This morning I drove my mother to hospital. She turned 90 two months ago, remains bright as a button, but today she faces an operation, her first medical problem. The news on that front will be clearer by this day’s end.

For now, I wait and worry, eyes flicking between the widescreen of world news and the small screen of personal news.

SOMETIMES it seems you have lived beyond history, seen the back of all that, only for events to upend the foolhardy assumption.

Those of us now in our 60s were born not that long after the end of the Second World War (11 years, in my case). That fact still surprises: surely not, you think, that was all so long ago.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine unleashed by the thuggish despot Vladimir Putin drags us back into history’s bomb shelter.

What to think, what to hope and what to dread; here are a few thoughts…

Those on the left and right have been caught out in their admiration for Putin.

From the sentimental socialists there is too often a reluctance to allow criticism of Russia, and a willingness to blame Nato/the US for all wrongs (Jeremy Corbyn is a cheerleader for this gang). Yes, the West may have overlooked a chance to build bridges with Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but this bloodshed is all on Putin and his vengeful ego.

From the rancid right, you will find Putin fanboys such as Donald Trump, who when president basically fawned over the Russian leader, and our own Nigel Farage (“Vladimir Putin is the world leader I most admire,” The Independent, March 2014).

Also on the right is our prime minister, who seemed happy until recently to paddle in Russian money, some landing in his party’s coffers. In truth, successive prime ministers have indulged Russian wealth, earning our capital city the nickname Londongrad, thanks to the ease with which dirty Russian money can be laundered.

Putin has played both sides for fools, lying shamelessly about how he is not going to invade Ukraine, then marching straight in.

Of course, Putin has not physically gone anywhere, being safely at home as his young troops are sent to invade a country for reasons they may not understand, a country similar in many ways to their own. Instead, he stays at the end of that very long table, while his generals gather in a craven huddle in the far distance. A perfect symbol of a man divorced from reality, detached from humanity.

On any given day you will find criticism of the ‘mainstream media’. Trump loved that tacky phrase, and those on the left mutter it as they gather in disgruntled cabals online to complain that we are not being told the full story.

Maybe we never are told the full story about anything; but we are told a story. Our television news and our newspapers show what is happening, or their version of that. In Russia, the state media hides those Kremlin missiles firing at Kyiv, denies the existence of the war against Ukraine.

You do not have to like everything the BBC, ITN Channel 4 or Sky News broadcast, but the story is being covered by reporters who are on the ground and at risk, the likes of Clive Myrie and Lyse Doucet. That BBC pair have been calm and authoritative under pressure, with Mryie even allowing for humour:

The bloke sleeping next to me in this underground bunker is seriously snoring. But that’s ok! #kyiv #UkraineRussiaWar

— Clive Myrie (@CliveMyrieBBC) March 1, 2022

But the reporting honours for yesterday went to the Ukrainian reporter Daria Kaleniuk, who ambushed our photo-op prime minister Boris Johnson in Poland with an abruptness he was not used to. Speaking directly and passionately, she said: “NATO is afraid of World War III. But it has already started. And it’s Ukrainian children taking the hit.”

Johnson looked uncomfortable, as well he might, especially when Kaleniuk told him that three-word slogans were not enough. His latest is “Putin must fail”, seriously meant, perhaps, but ‘just too glib’ (we can all play slogan Scrabble).

As for refugees from Ukraine coming to Britain, the message from the government seems cruelly convoluted. The kneejerk attitude was that refugees should stay in the first country they enter – a shameless Brit response, made in the knowledge that we will never be that first country.

One charming Tory MP, Kevin Foster, even said that Ukrainian refugees could apply for fruit-picking visas. The best response to that comes in the Times cartoon below by Morten Morland…

Our government’s approach to accepting refugees is to brag about how generous we are, only for greater exposure to daylight to reveal this to be untrue, before they hastily step back, while still leaving the picture deliberately hazy. And leaving refugees in need without an honest answer.

The EU, funnily enough, acted more quickly and with greater generosity, but we have our sovereignty (whatever that is), so that’s all right.

🔺EXCLUSIVE: In return for a £250,000 donation to the Conservatives, multimillionaires are being ushered into the heart of government as part of a secret ‘advisory board’https://t.co/DOcrqO2jUO

— The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) February 19, 2022

Sometimes stories bump into each other like badly driven cars, leaving scratches and a dent, even though there are no witnesses, and no one can say who was to blame.

Each story is left with paint belonging to the other. Here are two such near-misses…

Alan Rusbridger is the former Guardian editor who now edits Prospect magazine. He tweeted the other day that he had been refused a freedom of information request to see the minutes of a mysterious body convened by the Government to consider the future of the BBC.

His request was turned down because this panel needs “a safe space to debate live policy ideas away from external interference and distraction”.

Coming in the other direction was a much-shared story from the Sunday Times. This revealed that a monied cohort of the most generous Conservative Party donors has been granted access to senior ministers and advisers during the pandemic.

The BBC website’s paper review said: “As Boris Johnson was taking controversial and difficult decisions, some of Britain’s wealthiest people were given unique opportunities to question his team and offer their views on the government’s direction”.

Ah, I see. That’s what they mean by levelling up. Improving opportunities for super-rich Tory donors, who are given a back-door key to slip into Downing Street.

Here is Boris Johnson’s real world, not that one when he dresses up in working people’s outfits, strains the fasteners on Hi-Vis jackets, bothers hospital staff on a busy day, or has an RAF P-8A Poseidon plane flown more than 330 miles from Scotland (and back again!) for the world’s stupidest Top Gun-style photo opportunity. It’s so much easier to be surrounded by real money rather than pretending to care about real people.

And should you be worrying that inviting a group of multimillionaire Tory donors into the heart of government sounds perilously close to corruption, you’ll get no argument from me.

Those were the two story-cars that passed on Twitter.

The paintwork left on one from the other is that the government could be asking, for instance, enemies of the BBC such as Rupert Murdoch to share their ideas for what should happen to the corporation.

That’s a guess, but should such a scenario occur, it’s likely his contribution will be a gruff “scrap it now”.

That’s why we should know who the government has invited to exchange ideas or swap grubby favours.

In a later tweet, Rusbridger said: “Update: the mysterious panel last met in November and no longer exists. Baffling that they still ‘need a safe space to debate live policy issues’. The DCMS is supposed to nurture a free press, not block it. Appeal has been filed…”

We need to know these things, to be told who’s doing favours for whom. For instance, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has removed legal restrictions preventing Murdoch from interfering in the editorial independence of the Times and the Sunday Times. These were put in place by Margaret Thatcher when he was allowed to buy the papers in 1981.

Why was this favour granted by the BBC-bashing Dorries? Oh, probably because Rupert gets what Rupert wants. And one of his embittered desires has long been to see the BBC obliterated.

Over in the Observer, my usual Sunday read, a report revealed that six Tory donors have been “given top culture posts since Johnson became PM”. This is all part of the Tories pretending that the world is against them, and they need to put ‘their people’ in all the top jobs – or, as an invite to such donors put it in 2019, “It is important Conservatives rebalance the representation at the head of these important public bodies”.

And if you think such jobs should simply go to the best people, irrespective of party politics, you’re clearly not paranoid enough to get the job.

Lies were told to bamboozle the country over Brexit. Many such glutenous whoppers were served up by the liar of the land, the man who pretends to be called Boris. He even had one slapped on the side of a bus.

All this truth-twisting has turned out marvellously, so long as the outcome you were hoping for was the biggest peacetime annual fall in British exports – down £20 billion to the EU.

There is more, a list longer than that line of lorries trying to leave the country in the Brexit bureaucracy queue. Or longer than the queue of farmers despairing at the duplicity of those promises.

In case you have forgotten, the advantages of Brexit were first touted by Ukip, as in this leaflet shared on Twitter the other day by Dave Lee of Hull.

How’s this working out, then? pic.twitter.com/6u9VU1hVmW

— Dave Lee (@davelee1968) February 15, 2022

Ah, yes, lower food prices, lower energy prices, more money for the NHS, better support for our farmers, revival of our fishing industry. It’s uncanny how accurate those predications have turned out to be.

The man who ate all the lies has just appointed Jacob Rees-Mogg as the Minister for Brexit Opportunities.

Boris Johnson likes to give ministers these titles. Michael Gove is the Minister for Levelling Up and Other Impossible Things. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is the Minister for Doing Unfortunate Interviews.

Oliver Dowden, who was elbowed out of culture to make way for Dorries, was made chairman of the Conservative Party instead. In that capacity, he has just given a speech of dull ludicrousness to an American right-wing think tank, blaming woke lefties for encouraging the enemies of the west. There is more but the urge to sleep while reading was just too strong.

Oh, and not forgetting Liz Truss, the Minister for Selfies. Dear me, that woman seems to travel the world just so that she can be photographed everywhere she goes. Do you think we should tell her she has a stalker?

Truss also does a shameless side-line in Thatcher montages, adopting poses once struck by the original. Now I hated that first edition with a bottomless passion, but she was a class act compared to this dopey doppelganger.

Anyway, back to the liar of the land’s new job for Rees-Mogg. According to the front page of the Sunday Express, we should be excited by this – “Coming soon! Brexit’s ‘Big Wins’ For Britain.”

Doesn’t that sound like a supermarket offer – “Coming soon! Two bags of lies for the price of one!”

Rees-Mogg is keen on touting the benefits of something that has so far proved to have none. He is even happy to turn potty-philosopher with remarks such as this: “The wisdom of crowds will ensure the benefits of Brexit.”

Heavens, what does that even mean, matey? Ah, hang on I’ve just been told there’s a mistake there. What Jacob meant to say was the “wisdom of clowns”. Now it makes sense.

As it happens, the same shameless right-wingers who sold us Brexit are now, having achieved one shabby ambition, insisting that we should abandon the green agenda, abolish net zero, frack the hell out of the countryside, and drain every drop of North Sea oil.

Chief among the never satisfied right-wingers who want to trample the environment is Steve Baker MP, a keen campaigner against Britain’s plans to reduce annual emissions of greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050.

How great this all is. The same people who landed us with a no-benefit Brexit are now stirring up divisions over the environment. As we know from Brexit, they won’t stop until they’ve got what they want, and lumbered the rest of us while they are about it.

Let’s hope they don’t bend the all-too-pliable ear of the liar of the land. Johnson does like to spout green messages, possibly composed while taking one of those private flights up and down the country he so enjoys.

TWO things can be true in the same breath. In that spirit of parallel pondering, let’s agree that levelling up is both a good idea and an entirely cynical bit of political foot shuffling.

It’s a good idea as it could boost parts of the country long left behind. ‘Levelling up’ is what governments should do; it’s not political rocket science, just the basic duty of a responsible government (ah, yes, now you come to you mention it…).

It’s a good idea as areas blighted by austerity and serial neglect deserve something brighter around the corner. Sadly, all they will discover is Michael Gove spouting fine words and flourishing an empty wallet.

Like a man who generously promises to buy everyone a round of drinks but suddenly finds he has left his wallet at home (or had it emptied by that monetarist meanie Rishi Sunak).

What they will also discover, according to a report in the Independent, is a White Paper that appears to have been padded out by raiding Wikipedia.

As the online newspaper wrote: “The white paper includes large sections of padding, with three pages devoted to the history of Jericho, Rome, and renaissance Europe. But bits of this section appear to have been lifted directly from the popular internet encyclopaedia….”

How could such a thing have happened?

Boris Johnson: “Hey, Govey, when’s that White Paper of yours coming out about my fantastic plan to level up the country?”

Michael Gove: “It’s still a work in progress, Boris.”

BJ: “Well, get your arse in gear and progress it now, Govey. I’m in the ordure here up to my knees and I need a distraction so everyone will talk about levelling up instead of trying to do me down. I need the BBC news to be filled with a lot of waffle about my great plan instead of all those endless hours about parties I might have attended.”

MG: “Pretty sure you did attend some of them, Boris.”

BJ: “Don’t you start, Govey.”

MG: “OK, prime minister, but we need more information, something concrete to put in there, not just airy good intentions.”

BJ: “Oh, Govey, just do what we all did when we were journalists with columns to write. Go and grab something off the internet. No one will notice. Does anybody read White Papers anyway? Can’t say I have ever bothered.”

MG: “Righto, I’ll get someone on it now.”

And that’s how the media agenda ended up being hijacked, or hi-Goved, for a night by ‘levelling-up’. The BBC pliantly bent to this windy announcement, with even the local BBC Look North programme joining what turned out to be an empty party.

No so much bring-your-own booze, as that Downing Street shindig advised, but bring-your-own-news. There wasn’t much to find here.

Genuine levelling up is a serious business that costs serious money. What Johnson promises is mostly empty booster talk and no new money.

Or untold billions if you believe the press statements. Kudos to the poor, truth-mangling sods whose job it is to write those releases, as they produce more fiction than is to be found on the shelves at Waterstones.

This money-free levelling-up wheeze comes with an irony-free special offer: the Tories caused many of the problems they now boast they are going to solve, but if you don’t mention it, they certainly won’t.

The long years of austerity, the shoving of cuts on to local councils so they would get the blame, the under-investment in the NHS – all political choices made by the party that now pretends it can solve those very problems.

Oh, and should you be wondering where all the money went, don’t forget the squandering of billions on useless PPE deals, the billions in furlough fraud written off by the Treasury, and the billions blown by an ideological Brexit.

Still, at least there was money left the other day for a generous tax cut for bankers. Their coffers are going to be levelled up nicely.

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…