Green MP Hannah Spencer (BBC)

NOW I’d like to tell you about the man who taught his dog to fly-tip, but that will have to wait for a few paragraphs. Let’s address the Gorton and Denton byelection first.

The Manchester constituency has a new Green MP in the personable-seeming shape of Hannah Spencer. That description, by the way, is not intended to be snide or slighting. It’s just that we don’t yet know much about Hannah, aside from her being a local plumber with a good line in social empathy. She fought a highly visible campaign, winning by a healthy margin.

Her victory gave Sir Keir Starmer even less to smile about than usual. And he wasn’t exactly grinning from ear to ear to start with (it’s not his way).

Does all this indicate the end of the world – the end of Starmer – the end of the old politics? It can mean whatever the shouty-mouthed beholder wishes it to mean, including the shouty-mouthed beholder quietly typing these words.

That’s the thing about byelection upsets. The result can be used to reinforce whatever it was you believed beforehand.

Something I’d ask is how much of the Green win was down to tactical voting, with potential Labour supporters switching to see off Reform UK. I’d certainly vote like that if necessary. And voters who do so may not necessarily repeat that at a general election.

Most of the mainstream comment has been about Starmer being doomed (again). Much less time has been spent wondering how Reform UK were beaten by the Greens. Instead the microphone was again handed to Nigel Farage, who was vile cockiness personified during a campaign he clearly thought he could win. Once that didn’t happen, he shouted about cheating and said the Greens had “emboldened the radical left”.

At least his candidate Matt Goodwin, former academic turned GB News host, accepted defeat with quiet good grace. Oh, hang on a second. He didn’t. Instead he sulked and said: “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain…”

To save Britain from what – being a mostly moderate and decent country, and a pleasant place to live?

In the Daily Telegraph, columnist Jake Wallis Simons was in a similar funk: “The Greens’ extremist victory pushes Britain one step closer to the abyss.”

And there was me thinking the abyss was where Nigel Farage wants to take us, right next to the one his pal Trump is creating in the US. An abyss, Mr Trump, in case you are wondering, is a bit like a bunker on a golf course. Only it’s much deeper and goes down for ever.

The biggest hole anyone has ever seen, as you might say, while boasting that you know more about big deep holes that anybody else.

Oh, and that moral abyss you are creating is deeper still and there isn’t a light switch at the bottom.

What about Tory leader Kemi Badenoch? I’d almost forgotten about Kemi. How did she respond to her party suffering its worst ever result and losing its deposit? She posted online that Starmer had no choice but to resign. Shortly afterwards she tripped and fell down the irony abyss.

As for Starmer, he must feel that life is a bit abyss-shaped. He is denigrated by almost all the media and hated by leftwing MPs in his party who speak against him at every opportunity and encourage union leaders to do the same.

Do they all want Nigel Farage as prime minister instead? Almost certainly not. But if that happens they’ll be sure to blame Starmer. Thankfully, the Greens winning in Gorton and Denton does show that Reform UK being certain winners, a scenario endlessly pushed by the BBC, is far from inevitable.

NOW on to that dog. A small story on the foreign pages of the Guardian concerned a man in Catania, Sicily, who is reported to have trained his dog to dump bags of rubbish.

The small dog carries a bag of rubbish in its mouth, before “dropping it neatly at the roadside”, thus evading cameras installed to combat fly-tipping.

What a clever misled dog. This quirky story struck a chord. A lane near us runs between neatly clipped hedges, with fields to either side, and a village at the end.

If that sounds rural, the rush of traffic can be heard from the ring road nearby.

Rubbish is always being fly-tipped down there. Not by dogs but by lazy inconsiderate people. The other day someone had dumped what appeared to be a baby’s wooden cot and mattress.

As I often point out absurd Telegraph headlines, let’s end with the Allister Heath Headline Generator, as created by The New World magazine. Heath has been responsible for some real culture war clangers, and now you can generate your own. I just made this one…

 Why fly-tipping dog is the most toxic ideology ever inflicted on the British people

Allister Heath

The Telegraph

Picture: BBC/Reuters

Here are three dictionary definitions of the adjective unprecedented:

Never done or known before…

Never having happened or existed in the past…

If something is unprecedented, it has never happened before…

You don’t have to be Susie Dent to know that the first definition is the only one you need. Shorter is always better.

It is fair to say that the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor led to unprecedented use of the word unprecedented.

This is understandable up to a point, but something happens whenever I hear the same word repeated in the headlines. First, I think, oh, here they go again. Then, I think, oh stop that now, please. Has a memo has gone round or something?

Now it may be true that arresting demoted princes is something hardly ever known. But too many reporters and journalists were masticating on that unchewable word.

Anyway, as you might have spotted, Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested last week in Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office. This dates to his time as a trade envoy, a roll that collapsed under a pile of tabloid headlines.

He denies all wrongdoing and, in common with anyone else, should be presumed to be innocent unless or until facts determine otherwise.

Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on his 66th birthday. All the sixes, clickety click, as they say in bingo. The relegated prince probably knows nothing about bingo, but then neither do I.

What I do know is that taking pleasure in the misfortune of others isn’t always kind or nice. Then again, you’d have to be the most ardent, the most myopic, royalist to feel much sympathy for Andew Mountbatten-Windsor; wouldn’t you?

When younger I always thought we should not have a Royal Family. Then I gave up worrying about that, having concluded that we were stuck with them, for better or worse. And Mountbatten-Windsor certainly ticks the box marked ‘worse’.

Whatever now happens, he illustrates the perils of entitlement – and also the opacity of royal wealth.

Both are captured in the £12 million the late Queen Elizabeth is believed to have shelled out to settle a civil suit brought by Virginia Giuffre, who said that at 17 she’d been forced to sexually service certain men, and also alleged that she’d been trafficked to Mountbatten-Windsor. He has always denied any wrongdoing. The suit was still settled. This might strike you as odd. Or just as what is done by people with vast amounts of money at their fingertips (or their mother’s fingertips).

The most striking aspect of this story lies in a picture taken by the Reuters photo-journalist Phil Noble. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor could have been taken to any one of 20 police stations in Norfolk, but Noble had a tip-off about the one thought most likely, which was in the market town of Aylsham. He is said to have waited for hours, headed pictureless to his hotel, then dashed back when informed the car was coming.

He told the Guardian newspaper that he took six images. Two were blank, two just showed police in the front seats. One was out of focus. But the final frame went around the world in an instant.

The former prince, once so often seen giving off an oddly meaty sort of matiness, slumps in the back seat, as if wishing to disappear into his double chin. His eyes are red from the flashlight. His fingers are threaded. He looks haunted.

Such snatched images used sometimes to suggest illicit glamour, a Hollywood star whisked away in a limousine with someone unexpected. Also, such grabbed images sometimes show suspects arriving at court in police vans. Capturing anything clear or coherent under such conditions is a game of photographic chance.

“The photo gods were on my side,” Phil Noble said.

His picture is worth a thousand words. Especially if any of them are ‘unprecedented’.

As for the dethroned prince, perhaps the way he turned out is what happens when royals are feted and treated as special and above ordinary humanity and yet given nothing much useful to do, then given a pointless playboy role.

To fill a vacuum with entitlement, money and arrogance is only asking for trouble. And that’s what King Charles now has. But then the trouble with Andy has been with him for life.

“They have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation,” the King said of the police after the arrest of his brother.

Sibling rivalry on an upper level.

A post from the journalist David Aaronovitch

If you compile a list of British prime ministers, Sir Keir Starmer is dated 2024 to blank. Plenty of people are predicting that date could be filled in any day soon.

What is it with us and prime ministers? We’ve had six in ten years. Rishi Sunak (2023-24), Liz Truss (2022-22), Boris Johnson (2018-22), Theresa May (2016-19) and David Cameron (2010-16). Is this country now ungovernable?

The booby prize goes Truss, who became PM in a Tory game of Who’s Turn Is It This Week Anyway? Then resigned 45 days later. Ever since she has peddled her own conspiracy theory about having been undermined by mysterious establishment forces.

Pull the other one, Liz, it’s got a fake moon landing on it.

When prime ministers go before their time, the fault often lies within. Johnson was undone by being Johnson, and because the man he paraded in public was a disguise, an inflatable confection, a blow-up suit of fake jollity hiding an insecure creature of deep selfishness.

But if all that applies to those departed Conservative prime ministers, questions must stick to Starmer, too. His weakness is that he’s never found a story to tell, politics being in part a narrative art.

Now I don’t particularly enjoy writing this. I take the mostly now unfashionable view that Starmer is starting to do much good. Business confidence is rising, inflation is falling, wages are rising, interest rates are down, NHS waiting lists are down, new breakfast clubs are opening in primary schools.

Starmer has also been successful at something I’d rather he’d not taken on so assiduously, and that’s curbing the arrival of small boats across the Channel.

The government is claiming to have stopped 40,000 crossing attempts since coming into office, and also to have removed or deported almost 60,000 people who were here illegally.

But here’s the shabby thing. No matter how ‘well’ the government does on small boat crossings, it makes no difference. Nigel Farage and Reform UK will still be light-blue sharks making a bloody frenzy in the water. And Starmer will get no credit.

All Labour prime ministers face media hostility. Starmer has been constantly attacked and belittled by the Mail, the Telegraph and so on, as is only to be expected.

But that hostility has been loudly amplified by the BBC, which also endlessly promotes Nigel Farage, letting him get anyway with anything and everything, even the other day bestowing an hour-long puff-piece by Laura Kuenssberg.

Starmer has also been unlucky in Trump. He’s faced an impossible task in trying to befriend the  US President, a man who has few if any friends and harms all in his vicinity.

It’s a pointless ‘if’, but if Trump hadn’t been elected for a second term, Starmer would almost certainly not have chosen Peter Mandelson to be our ambassador to the US.

That was a badly unwise decision. But the newspapers were quiet at the time; nothing was said in Parliament. Now everyone is busy blowing retrospective Westminster bubbles.

Everything here links and stinks in a most depressing way. Brexit, Trump, Steve Bannon, the inexorable rise of the greedy Tech Bros who want power without responsibility, billionaires owning and diverting the news, the cruel malign influence of Jeffrey Epstein, who was among those on the US right trying to overwhelm politics in Europe and the UK.

Trump knew Epstein well and is mentioned many times in the files. Starmer never met the sex offender tycoon, but his premiership could be ended by Epstein, thanks to that vile man’s links to Peter Mandelson.

What should never be forgotten here though is that the true story of the Epstein files lies in the girls and women who were abused, traded, passed around.

That is a topic better suited to a woman writer. I’d recommend Amelia Gentleman’s Saturday read in the Guardian:

“The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.”

If Starmer steps aside, Labour will look just as inconstant and unserious as the Tories were. And the party’s chances won’t improve. Those on Labour’s left who like to moan about their own governments always forget that the chance of electing a truly socialist government is just about nil.

Oh, and if we have had six prime minister’s in ten years, six is also the grand total for Labour, starting in 1924 with Ramsay MacDonald.

I’ve only ever voted Labour, or occasionally Green in local elections. But you know what? I’m not falling for Zack Polanski, the showy leader of the Green Party. His opportunistic calls for Starmer to go make him sound too much like Nigel Farage.

And remember this. Farage always pretends to be what he is not, even down to all those visits to the pub.

I find comfort in a pint as much as the next man who likes occasionally to sup. For Nigel Farage a pint is a prop, a piece of misdirection in an ever-rolling montage of con-trickery. His new piece of economic illiteracy concerns knocking five pence off the price of a pint at the cost of reintroducing the two-child benefit cap.

Yeah, let’s raise a glass to Reform UK pushing thousands of children back into poverty. Cheers, Nigel.

As for Starmer, it’s a long hill but he should keep walking.

Are you suffering from patchy memory? Do you conveniently forget terrible things you once did? Is there a 14-year lacuna in your mind? Is everything now mostly just a blank? Do you enter a room at your club and forget what you went in there for?

If you answered yes to any of the above, it is likely that you are a Tory thinking of jumping ship to Reform UK.

Whatever the case, help is at hand. That renowned quacksalver Nigel Farage will sign your sicknote and dispense quick-capitulation tablets that will make you denounce your former party in a shameless second. What’s more, those magic memory pills will erase everything you believed in until five minutes ago.

And you will then reel off flagrantly hypocritical speeches about how your old party should never be allowed near power again.

In that one particular you will be right. But everything else you spout should be ignored by all sensible people.

In the latest people smuggling news, Suella Braverman has followed Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi in leaving the Conservatives for Reform UK.

And in case you’ve forgotten, that’s the former Home Secretary who was forced to resign by Liz Truss and later sacked by Rishi Sunak.

Forced to resign by Liz Truss, the worst prime minister in political history, now reduced to shouting out conspiracy theories on her own YouTube show. Or perhaps it’s only available to view on Oh-Not-You-Tube.

“Britain is suffering, she is not well,” Braverman said as she hopped barges. “Our nation stands weak and humiliated on the world stage.”

Those pills must have really kicked in. She seems to have quite forgotten that she served as part of the Tory government for nine years. Perhaps she was being held hostage or something, waiting to be rescued by the People’s Army of Nigel.

It’s all very well slagging off broken Britain. Just wait till someone tells her who broke it.

And there is something else in those pills. A malign ingredient that makes you see things that are not there. Swallow one of Farage’s Magic Pills and the great city of London becomes a crime-swamped hellhole in which no-one is safe.

He’s always going around the world telling that lie. So just remember this. London isn’t broken. Britain isn’t broke. Farage just wants people to think it is. He only knows how to break things. That’s why he spills poison into the world’s ear. Only it isn’t Hamlet’s father who will be done for on this occasion. It’s the rest of us, poisoned by his vial of lies.

No-one was that surprised when Robert Jenrick skipped over to Reform, as he’d been trying out nasty far-right lines for ages, like a man pulling faces in a hall of fascist mirrors. As for Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor eventually paid HMCR just under £5m after making what he called a “careless mistake” over his tax. Oh, and don’t forget he was the one who claimed expenses for heating his horses.

These shapeshifting Tories are like that unfortunate museum visitor whose tumble down a staircase smashed three priceless Chinese vases.

Nick Flynn later blamed his fall at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge on a “Norman Wisdom moment” and a loose shoelace.

If any departing Tory tries to pull that one, you’ll know that they’ve overdosed on Nigel’s pills.

And there is something else in Farage patent medicine. What else can explain the hold that fake man of the people has over everyone. He’s hypnotised the lot of you with his shouty open mouth, rotten teeth – so rich and yet no time for the dentist – and endless lies and scheming, his tireless begging of US billionaire bucks, his pursuit of power without doing any actual politics.

And here’s the really odd thing. Something so obvious it hardly needs saying. But let’s spell it out anyway. If Reform UK is stuffed full of disgraced ex-Tories, then it’s just the Conservative Party with a different lanyard. Not rebellious. Not different. Not outsiders. Old kids, same block.

Time to beware yet again of quack doctor Farage and his tincture of Thatcherism. At the last election everyone was so sick of the Tories that Labour was handed an unexpected landslide. It would be mad if the follow-on from that was to then elect an even worse sort of Tory party.

I am sitting on the train, doom scrolling.

In the US a slavery exhibit is being removed from an historic site in Philadelphia. This is to please Donald Trump who thinks remembering slavery is ‘anti-American’.

As the train rattles towards Leeds, I remember how slave trader Edward Colston was dunked in Bristol docks during an anti-racism protest in 2020. The toppling of his statue was seen at the time by right-leaning historians as a disgraceful rewriting of history.

And now an extremely right-wing, autocratic US president is removing reminders of slavery from US history. One irony in this is that Trump would surely have been a slave owner had he been around back then.

Thinking about all this is depressing. As is doom scrolling the latest slipperiness from his British acolyte, Nigel Farage. A man who lies and shouts and evades and blusters. All so that he can dodge whatever question is sent his way and in so doing fool enough idiots into casting a vote for his party.

A man whose every political sin or omission is forgiven or ignored by the media (financial ‘irregularities’, past or present racism, spending half his time in the US toadying to Big Oil).

Not him again, you may well say. Not that shameless man again. Not that indefatigable stirrer of shit.

You may well have a point.

I stop to consider what is going on in this train. A toddler in the seat ahead leans to kiss the window. She looks round at me, then turns away. That window is clearly more interesting than an old man in a cap.

Normally the train goes straight to Halifax but today you have to change at Leeds. A longer trip but I have done too much driving lately.

At Leeds station the train to Chester is leaving soon, stopping at Halifax. Boarding with a minute to spare, I sit at one of those tables for four people.

A woman diagonally over the way is having one of those phone conversations better suited to somewhere less public. She is discussing, it gradually transpires, her divorce. She shares various details about the man she wants rid of, his unkindness, the things he has done or said. She mentions mental health problems she has had in the past.

Matter of fact and unself-pitying, she even laughs at times. But still, it’s not a phone call I’d conduct in public, on a train, across from an old man with listening ears under his cap.

As the train pulls into Halifax, I stand to leave and she continues discussing her divorce. I miss the rest of her story. Often I sit with headphones on, doom scrolling. Leaving your ears open has advantages, and disadvantages. Doom scrolling mostly just has disadvantages; if you stop doing it, nothing in the world changes but your mood does lift a little.

I am in Halifax to interview a potter in his studio. We chat surrounded by drying pots and mugs, like something off The Great Pottery Throw Down.

Later I am back on the slow train. I glance at my phone. Trump has said that Nato allies did not properly fight alongside the US in Afghanistan, where as in fact 457 of our troops died. This statement from Trump is so outrageously wrong even Keir Starmer is getting cross.

I put down my phone. Behind me a young woman is listening to music on her phone without headphones. How generous of her to share. I put on my headphones to listen to the new album from the American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, who had a stroke five years ago but has made a significant recovery. She is sounding good. She is also sounding mightily angry about the US.

The man in front has something up on his laptop. He is using headphones, so that’s a mercy. After a while I realise he is watching Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a new Netflix drama. We are going to give that a try. But not tonight because it is the final of The Traitors on BBC1. Once snotty about that sort of thing, I have enjoyed this series.

Don’t tell anyone or whatever credibility I have left will be gone.

Headlines in the Telegraph and the Sun

This one will address pubs and beer, but first a gulp or two of less appealing liquids.

Here are things that aren’t happening, never mind what certain people say.

The Labour government isn’t cancelling local elections, never mind how often Nigel Farage hisses like a Siamese cat with its head stuck in a tin. It is true that elections for nine councils in England have been postponed from May 2025 to May 2026, so that the councils can take part in local government reorganisation.

All other local elections will go ahead as planned in May, not that the government is looking forward to them.

Nothing has been cancelled, although the people saying that things have been should be.

PS: the Government also did not cancel Christmas; despite what you might have read online, the season went ahead as normal, for good or ill.

Sir Keir Starmer does not wish to cancel the social media site X never mind what Elon Musk, the site’s 54-year-old multi-billionaire owner, says. Musk always carries on like a whiny14-year-old.

What government ministers have said, reasonably enough, is that people should not be able to use X’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to create sexualised images of women without their knowledge or consent. Some of these altered images are also said to have been of children. Why would that even be a thing?

Musk has agreed, mid massive sulk, that only people who pay him to use X can now do that awful thing.

Nothing to do with suppressing free speech. It’s about decency and not behaving like a dick. Or a 14-year-old who can only see the world through his. And, no, I would not like to change ‘dick’ to ‘duck’, as suggested just now by Word’s artificial intelligence interference monitor.

And, no, this does not make Britain a police state, Mr Musk.

For clarification, a police state is a country where an innocent 37-year-old woman is shot dead in her car by a government ICE agent, as happened earlier this week.

Her name was Renee Nicole Good (above). She was a mother and a Christian, or so it is reported. It is also reported that the man who shot her is a Christian, although where does that get us?

Before anyone knew what had happened, Trump and his gruesome acolytes went on television to say without evidence that it had been her own fault. They put on their fibbing faces, the only ones that fit, and said Good ran over the agent who then shot her in self-defence. Yet assorted film clips from different angles appear to show that the agent remained quite uninjured.

This is what happens when everyone lies to back up the lies of the man who lied before they all did. A sorry game of liars’ leapfrog.

Also, back on our own shores, London is not a crime-ridden hellhole, never mind what assorted right-wingers here and in the US say. Go for a weekend and find out for yourself. You’ll have a good time.

Trump does have his fans over here who nuzzle up to that old orange face and sing his praises.

Among Brits lurking in that squeamish vicinity are two former Tory prime ministers. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are seemingly in competition to see who can crawl the most to Trump. I don’t care who wins as they are both, to quote their unworthy hero, losers.

And, no, never mind what you might have read in the Telegraph or the Mail, the government isn’t waging war on country pubs by wanting to reduce the drink-drive limit.

As this was going to be my original starting point, let’s put in an item break and go for a drink.

I STARTED swallowing beer as a slightly under-aged drinker in the 1970s and continue now as a slightly over-aged drinker. A decent hand-pulled pint is one of the sainted glories of British life.

And, yes, pubs have faced difficult times, so news that the government may relent on its plan to raise business rates for pubs is a good thing.

No less a York authority that John Pybus, landlord of the splendidly eccentric Blue Bell pub in Fossgate, told the BBC website: “I think a lot of businesses are going to be squeezed into non-existence in the next financial year.”

But drink-driving is a different matter. Years ago I used to have the odd glass of wine at lunch and drive home later. But now if I’m behind the wheel, I don’t drink.

And why should reducing the drink-drive limit hurt country pubs when there is so much alcohol-free beer available nowadays?

Our local bar always has one alcohol-free beer on tap. Not a patch on the real stuff but perfectly OK. It won’t spoil lunch or a night out.

Still the usual suspects spout on, even though this is about road safety, keeping people whole.

As we know, Nigel Farage, the brag and moan man of politics, complains about everything all the time. He says that lowering the drink drive limit would be “absolutely ridiculous and wholly unnecessary”. He also claims the proposals were the work of the “Islington, north London bicycling classes” who “hate” rural Britain.

Ah, there he goes, wheeling out those stale cliches again. What a load of beer-dribbling twaddle.

Should you yearn for more, here’s Stanley Johnson burbling in the Telegraph over the froth of his pint – “We must be allowed to have a pint and still drive. It is an essential freedom.”

Ah, yes, the essential freedom to get pissed and run someone over. What a twerp.

Full disclosure: I have been known to have two pints – or even two-and-a-half very occasionally, look at me go – and to then cycle home, although not all the way to Islington.

Perhaps that is not something to boast about. Anyway mostly now I am carried home by my bus pass, which is almost certainly safer.

As today is Sunday, I shall be going for a pint or two later. A short walk away so need for the alcohol free.

THIS time last year, I looked back at what this blog had covered in the previous 12 months. Nigel Farage was mentioned 20 times, Donald Trump 73 times – another ‘win’ to go with his fake peace prize from FIFA.

That exercise won’t be repeated as it’s too depressing to be reminded how often those two occupy space in my mind.

This does though present a problem for a blogger who tends to write about politics. Do those who indulge my words and opinions want more Trump and Farage or is everyone frayed half to death by all the attention given to such terrible men.

What bliss it would be to ignore Trump, to drop him into history’s over-filled bin or, better to still, to wipe away his name as if from a blackboard (not a whiteboard, as he probably thinks those are better).

But just when you think it would be best to ignore Trump for now, to think of something else, anything else, he goes and invades Venezuela, kidnapping the president and his wife, declaring he will now be running the country, while also calling on his billionaire pals to share in the oil spoils.

This matter requires a better understanding of foreign affairs, a firmer grasp of the ways of old men who want to take the world with them, than I possess.

The US has just conducted something between a hostile takeover and a war. It isn’t about drugs, as Trump maintains. To recall that famous catchphrase from the Watergate scandal film All The President’s Men, “follow the money”.

The US attack is reported to have created a financial windfall for billionaire investor Paul Singer, who is said to have donated untold millions to Trump and Republicans in Congress.

Trump will now do whatever the hell he wants in the world, while ignoring international law. And it’s all about the money, alongside Trump’s wish to cause distraction (especially from those Epstein files), and to act like a tough guy even though he’s a spoilt softie who cheats at golf.

One of Trump’s often professed mad ideas has been that the US should conquer the Arctic territory of Greenland. Keir Starmer actually spoke against Trump on this, insisting that Denmark and Greenland should determine Greenland’s future.

This was encouraging in an age of what some are calling sycophantic diplomacy. This is what goes on if all the world has to pretend that a mad president isn’t mad at all, instead saying what a grand old president he is; or something like that.

Oh, as well as Greenland, Trump seems to be eyeing Columbia, Mexico, Iran and Cuba. America First is no longer a slogan for that country’s domestic politics – it means putting America first against all other countries. Shooting first and asking questions later. Or not asking anything at all, just shooting.

As for Farage, he’s the biggest Trump sycophant around, a Donald tribute act at the windy end of Clacton pier.

But the parallels here are worrying, and once again it’s all about the money.

Christopher Harborne, a leading cryptocurrency investor who lives abroad and once bankrolled Boris Johnson as an MP, recently donated £9m to Reform UK.

Should one small party be free to accept so much money; who else is funding Farage; and what proportion of such donations come from abroad and the US in particular?

Oh, and how much is spent on all those bots that support Reform UK, those digital splodges of aggression from accounts with two followers, or none at all?

Without social media, and his admitted skills at exploiting it, Farage would struggle to get anywhere. He’s never had time for political foot-slogging. Twisting things on social media and hanging around big money men to see what falls from their pockets is so much more congenial.

Just think, if social media hadn’t been invented, we would all find more productive ways to spend our time. And Trump and Farage might not be here to spoil our lives.

Oh, and it shouldn’t need pointing out but posting on social media that Trump should invade Britain and remove our prime minister isn’t patriotism. It’s treason, basically.

It’s unfashionable to defend Keir Starmer. I have my qualms but still believe that he offers a safe, diligent and thoughtful presence during troubled times. He is also quietly getting on with undoing the mess of long Tory years. And would you really rather have that chancer Nigel Farage, who offers refuge to the worst Tories?

Anyway, here is something sensible Starmer has just said about populism, that hard to shift graffiti of politics…

“We need to shoot down this idea that slogans and easy answers will fix the country. Johnson pretended to drive a bulldozer through a wall saying that would get us £350m a week for the NHS. It didn’t happen. Farage pretended that leaving the EU would reduce immigration. The opposite happened. We’ve already taken steps on food and agriculture to align with the EU’s single market. I think we should get closer. If it’s in our national interest to have even closer alignment with the Single Market, we should consider that and go that far.”

We are where my mother lives before driving back to York for Christmas.

Dashing out on a mission I pass one of the neighbours. We’ve spoken before but she’s forgotten that. ‘Are you a new resident?’ she asks.

A while later I go to put a bag of rubbish down a chute and meet a dog called George. Pets aren’t allowed here and George’s owner asks if I am all right with dogs. ‘So-so,’ I say.

‘I can see that,’ he says.

George runs up to me regardless, trailing his lead, then does a friendly circuit around my legs His owner calls him back and explains that the flat used to belong to his father.

Then he asks: ‘Are you a new resident?’

‘No,’ I say, trying not to sound mildly cross.

Twice within the space of an hour. I must look older than I thought. All that exercise and latent vanity and people still think I might live in a retirement home. This is both mildly annoying and yet unsurprising. I’ve just checked and the age limit is 60 and I am more than nine years past that.

So I could be in one of those apartments off the long corridor where often no one stirs, apart from a visiting dog called George.

But still, it’s a bit much. I will never live in one of those places until, well, age and fate suggest otherwise.

Mum is nearly 94, wobbly after a bad fall in the summer, and she still feels put out about living somewhere like that.

Now we are home in York, sitting on the sofa. I am typing this and mum is asking if I know where her phone is. I often ask myself the same about my own phone.

‘Are you sitting on it?’ I say. That turns out to be the solution.

Anyway, this is a diversion around the rocks of age rather than the usual Trump-bashing, Farage-despairing to be found around here. Such topics will almost certainly still be there in the new year. But for now I am parking the opinions for Christmas with all the usual familial suspects, aged three to 93.

The youngest member was asked at nursery what she was looking forward to at Christmas. ‘Meeting all my family,’ she said.

Have a happy Christmas, whatever your age, whether you are looking after or being looked after. Or just hoping to slope off to a party soon (guilty on that score) and later to visit the shed where a mini-cask of beer sits cooling.

LET this all make sense. Donald Trump now seems to think Europe is the enemy. Or this week’s enemy. It can be hard to keep up.

Any day now he’ll be shouting at his own shadow – “If you don’t stop following me around like that, I’ll have you deported in chains.”

Oh, and if you have ever posted anything mean about him, you’ll not be allowed into America. More of that in a moment.

First, the US has published a security strategy that runs to 29 pages. Alongside much puffery about how well Trump is dong – so well, so much better than anyone ever in history before, etc – there is a warning about Europe. Economic stagnation, censorship of free speech, the suppression of political opposition, falling birthrates and migration all “raise the stark prospect of civilization erasure”, according to Trump.

In a poorly attended rally in Pennsylvania the other day, Trump raised the stark prospect that his own common decency had been erased for good. As if campaigning all over again, he wondered why the US only accepts people from “shithole countries” such as Somalia, adding: “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden… from Denmark?”

Incidentally, why citizens from those sane and well-run countries would wish to move to a dwindling US remains a mystery.

And, scarily, US policy is now hard to distinguish from a Fox News broadcast or an unhinged Daily Telegraph columnist going off on a white supremacist rant.

Trump says Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” and pledges to back far-right ultra-nationalist parties leading what he sees as the “resistance”.

Wow! Wake up Europe. Wake up Britain. Wake up the EU. Trump wants to rule the western world. That’s why he’s been putting out delusional messages about how all Europe is clamouring for him to be their president. They all love me, he says, reading off the cracked autocue of his mind. No we don’t. Many Europeans think you’re a dangerous, self-obsessional loon with thinner skin than the average sausage.

And wise up Keir Starmer. This is where crawling to Trump gets you. Offer him a totally unwarranted second state visit and he’ll grin like a self-swilled goon for a day only to throw it all back in your face.

Flatter his sorry old arse and all you’ll get in return are pledges to support the likes of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, and their far-right equivalents in other European countries.

A disproved right-wing conspiracy theory about “the great replacement theory” claims Muslims are moving into Europe in order to see off western culture. A foul fallacious idea now promulgated by the White House.

This is all bad, mad, wicked and wrong. Trump wants to extend his Maga movement into Europe, possibly to weaken or break the European Union. All of which must please Putin’s Russia no end.

No mystery then why wealthy, posh and entirely bogus man of the people Nigel Farage spends so much time in the US. He’s not interested in British politics as it is usually conducted. No, he’s after Trumpian help, money and validation. If you can’t see that, you’re looking down the wrong hole in the ground.

Trump also intends to introduce strict rules for anyone wishing to travel to the US. These include details of all social media accounts from the past five years. If you’ve said anything unkind about dwindling Don, you’ll not be let in. That’s me and approximately half of Europe staying at home then. Or visiting somewhere more congenial.

You may also have to provide your DNA. All phone numbers and email addresses from the past five years. And the same for family members. And – oh, I’ve had enough of repeating this authoritarian nonsense.

Ironies abound here. If free speech is so restricted in Europe, how come right-wingers receive so much unquestioning attention; how come Nigel Farage has so much exposure and media support, especially on the BBC?

And how come a president who endorses AI images of himself as a pilot king dumping loads of shit on his rebellious subjects gets to whinge about freedom of speech?

Oh, and if we’re talking about cultural invasion, which country has done the most to bombard the rest of the world with its values, music, films, TV and fast food? Yup, the US.

Now you may like US culture, or you may not. Personally I’ve always enjoyed many Hollywood films, the better sort of US TV and much of the music. Either way, we’re up to our necks in the stuff.

Now they’ve exported their barmy president, too. We’re sinking in Trump-swill. However much you try not to think about the man, he dwells in your tired mind. As this blog has just shown yet again.

LOOK, I can’t claim to understand how budgets work. I barely comprehend my own. I squint at the banking app and look away until my wife sidles over with a quaver of concern in her voice.

I trust my wife on finances more than I trust myself; and I trust the chancellor Rachel Reeves more than all those misogynistic twerps calling her Rachel From Accounts.

And I trust Reeves more than Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch or the editors of the usual suspect national newspapers that disparage or despise anything and everything this Labour government does.

Oh, and I definitely trust her more than Chris Mason, the BBC’s weaselly political editor.

The budget was in the headlines for days on end. This was mostly thanks to a whipped-up delirium of headlines claiming that Reeves had ‘lied’ about the state of the nation’s finances as predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

That set the outrage wind machine turning. Imagine, if you will, a giant film-set fan blowing angry hot air. Or that wind symbol found on old maps, a man with puffed red cheeks from time spent in bars, hiding a hernia got from lifting boxes heavy with weighted facts.

As for Mason, he fidgeted away doing what he always does, which is to amplify whatever the usual suspect newspapers peddled that morning. Without their biased bellowing, he wouldn’t know where to start or what to say.

After a working life spent in and around the inky sheets, I don’t always find it easy to face up to what newspapers are – or some of them, at least.

But the worst newspapers are little more than propaganda machines, aren’t they? Sure, readers who still buy them may do so for various honest reasons. The sport, the crossword, the features, the recipes, whatever.

But those squawking front pages? They are battering rams filled with boiling oil (to mix the medieval siege engine metaphors).

The Mail and Telegraph, backed often by the Times and the much diminished Express, were outraged that Sir Keir Starmer won the election. And since that unexpected victory, all they have done is campaign to undermine Labour.

Now you might well think, what has Starmer done to deserve our support. And that’s the hole he has planted himself in. He’s loathed by the usual suspects; and those who should show him a little love are too often put off by the way he behaves.

Much as Donald Trump types his social media posts in capital letters, raging with incoherent capitals as the light fades, the Mail clutches its fake pearls and caps up the word SOCIALIST in headlines.

Meanwhile those who might like a socialist government fall off their chair at the notion of Starmer being a socialist.

Personally, it is Labour’s immigration policies that put me off the most, too closely shaped as they are in imitation of Farage and Reform UK. Labour makes the same shoddy mistake of assuming that most of the country’s problems are down to migrants crossing the channel in small boats.

Aside from that, I’d say Starmer, however unpopular in the moment, deserves to see out his time. Otherwise we’re allowing ourselves to be governed by short-term panic, political in-fighting and the shouting of loud-mouthed opportunists such as Farage (who hates the Tories – oh, look, he just told the FT that a deal/stich-up with the Tories is inevitable).

And what of those budget ‘lies’? Prof David Miles from the OBR later told MPs he did not believe the chancellor was being misleading about the state of the public finances. His statement undermined everything in those newspaper headlines. The apologies to Rachel Reeves were hard to find, unsurprisingly.

And the budget lifted 450,000 children out of poverty, protected renters’ rights, boosted earnings for the lowest paid, and the markets reacted well. So that’s all good. Although I have slipped in my own lie there. You know, I honestly don’t understand what the markets are, what they do and why we are always so in thrall to whatever it is they do.

And the BBC and that Mr Mason? Oh, the BBC should report impartially rather than pretending to do so while in fact reheating whatever stew of hostility has been sitting for too long on the headline hotplate.

The newspapers might be dwindling, certainly in print, but the influence the Mail and the Telegraph have over the BBC shows the lasting extent of their power. Oh, and the owners of the Mail are in the process of buying the Telegraph. Two haters for the price of one.

FARAGE FOOTNOTE: Nigel Farage said the budget was “great for you if you are a Somalian with 20 children”. That’s quite the racist statement from a man who swears he’s not a racist. He will, for sure, continue to duck and dive like this, insisting he is not what his own mouth and behaviour prove him to be.