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Geoffrey Cox, second jobs and what Gordon did…

THERE is a defence to be put for Tory MP Geoffrey Cox reportedly earning nigh on a million pounds a year with his second job as a QC, but you won’t find me making it here.

The legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg is your man for that unseemly task. On his blog, Rozenberg says “being a backbench MP should not be a full-time job. Our representatives in parliament should remain in touch with the real world”.

Former Tory MP Dominic Grieve also mentioned the real world when he popped up on the Today programme.

This ‘real world’ doesn’t seem to be the one the rest of us live in, where you do one or perhaps two jobs to make ends meet.

No, this is a smug stratosphere where people paid £82,000 a year from the public purse are offered even more for sitting in a meeting or two, preparing the odd talk, having a quiet word in ministerial ears.

MPs of all parties have other jobs, it is true, some in the real world. MPs who are also doctors and medics, for example, can make informed contributions to the debate about Covid-19.

But most of the MPs raising eyebrows on the register of interests are older male Tories who are already well-padded. Being an MP should be a platform for public service, not a job advert for snuffling up money.

I mean, how do you explain £100,000 a year for Chris Grayling to advise Hutchinson Ports? Sadly, Grayling gets the last laugh here. ‘Failing Grayling’ they used to call him, and not without reason, but now he’s raking in an extra hundred grand for offering advice on a topic about which he once knew so little.

Then again, Boris Johnson is reported to have cleared a million in his last year before becoming prime minister, including around £300,000 for writing his tatty weekly column in the Daily Telegraph.

And yet even with all that money, when Johnson can’t run to the cost of a holiday or a few rolls of gold wallpaper, a rich pal with deep pockets steps in.

Tory sleaze and MPs’ extra jobs have resurfaced thanks to the Owen Paterson lobbying row. The now former Tory MP was said to be creaming in £100,000-plus a year extra for lobbying on behalf of two companies.

But that pales next to that true master of the game, David Cameron.

The former prime minister – biggest achievement in office: the unending shitshow of Brexit ­­– celebrated his resignation by landing a job lobbying for Greensill Capital and reportedly earned £7.2m in salary and bonuses before the firm collapsed.

What on earth did he do to earn that much? How that was never a bigger scandal must just be one of those mysteries.

Geoffrey Cox, a man whose appearance suggests he’s spent some of those side earnings on a good meal or two, added to the outrage by voting from the Caribbean while working his side job.

Maybe not all second jobs for MPs should go, but earning a fortune while sitting in the Caribbean – isn’t that taking the piss?

Still, sometimes with MPs you don’t know what you’ve got till they’ve gone. Interviewed on the Today programme, the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown was challenged about his second jobs…

Q: You earned nearly £1 million in 2014 on top of your parliamentary wage.

A: No, I  didn’t actually. I gave all the money to charity, I’ve always done that.

I wouldn’t always have said this, but I do miss Gordon.

To close, as the veteran broadcaster Adam Boulton is leaving Sky News, here is an unforgettable clip of him talking about Cameron, as shared on Twitter by Mahyar Tousi…

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One rule for you, none for us…

Tories being sleazy, it’s an old story. In a dusty drawer somewhere, you will find the expression “Sleazy does it”, as used often and long ago in my newspaper column.

That phrase is back again today, not from me but on the front page of the Daily Star, so perhaps I will step away leave it in that drawer.

The behaviour of the government yesterday certainly betrays sleazy attitudes, entitlement, one rule for you, none for us. All attitudes that are rolled into the oafish, bullying and entitled shape of the man in the ill-fitting suit – a clumsy concoction, by the way, designed to distract us from his true nature.

In case you need a refresher course on this one, the Conservative MP Owen Paterson was found guilty of repeatedly breaching lobbying rules by parliamentary standards commissioner Kathryn Stone, who recommended he be suspended for 30 days.

A relatively mild punishment, you might think, for a man who was reportedly paid £120,000 by two companies to lobby parliament on their behalf. But Boris Johnson kicked over that independent system for combating sleaze in parliament and ordered his MPs to back a vote protecting Paterson.

You may recall that Johnson himself is facing what would be inquiry number four for breaking those rules, this time into the funding of the absurdly expensive refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.

As we now know, Johnson cannot tolerate any criticism or the upstart notion that anyone other than himself might have the final say on anything.

What happened yesterday was that a Tory MP found to have been abusing lobbying rules complained about the system and the verdict. And the government said it would abolish that system and set up another more to its liking.

There was much huffing, not least from Mr Paterson himself, about “natural justice”. This appears to be the sort of justice you call on when you’ve been caught out but wish not to be caught out. Natural justice would surely require Mr Paterson to have submitted to his mild punishment while reflecting on why he needed another £120,000 to add to his MP’s salary of £82,000.

Without wishing to make this party political, here is what the 25-year-old Labour MP Nadia Whittome said in the Observer magazine the week before last…

“I give away all that I earn above the average salary. I’m in Parliament to represent workers – why should I earn so much more than them? Instead, I put that money to good use, donating to strike funds and causes locally.”

There you have one MP feeling guilty about what she earns and donating the excess to wider social good; and there you have a Tory MP trousering what he can get, then having a tantrum when told he has broken the rules.

You may have heard assorted Tories, such as Dame Andrea Leadsom, whose idea this shabby wheeze was, explaining that this has nothing to do with partly politics or indeed Owen Paterson. And if you believe that, you may wish to have your credulousness levels checked.

This is the sort of government you get when you elect a man like Boris Johnson. A shameless, self-serving man who wouldn’t know a scruple if he sat on it.

But don’t just take my weary word for it. Here is Kevin Hollinrake, the Conservative MP for Thirsk and Malton, speaking to the Times:

“It just looks wrong for the powerful to be able to change the system when they get a judgment they don’t like.”

I don’t always stand next to Kevin but will happily do so today. Equally, I don’t offer rub shoulders with the Daily Mail, will happily do so today as it leads with the headline “Shameless MPs sink back into sleaze.”

And should you wonder what Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, a man whose hesitancy can frustrate, thinks about all this, he has written a stinging article for the Guardian with the headline: “Let’s call out the Tories’ behaviour for what it is: corruption.”

Yes, let’s do that. Whether enough voters will pay attention is another matter, but it’s time something stuck on this conniving government.

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Mind the gap between rhetoric and action at Cop26…

Is there something unpalatable about all the private jets and all the polished limos gathering in Glasgow at Cop26 so that world leaders can tell us what an ecological mess we are all in?

Is there something unpalatable about Boris Johnson giving a speech both frivolous and silly – complete with James Bond jokes and quips about what he’ll be like when he’s 94 ­– and yet almost suitably sombre in parts, only for him to hop back on a private jet the next morning for the return flight to London, trailing fumes?

Is there something unpalatable about a photograph widely shared on social media showing the prime minister slumped with his eyes shut during a speech, and not wearing a mask while those around him are suitably covered?

Yes, all round, and especially to that photograph in which Johnson is sitting next to Sir David Attenborough, who is 95, a year older than the self-referential projection the prime minister slipped into his speech, and clearly vulnerable.

To have put a mask on while he sat there would not have been a sacrifice.

If a Labour prime minister had done such a thing, that picture would be displayed all over the media to a chorus of hostile derision.

With Boris Johnson, not so much.

Such behaviour seems to be factored in, and anyway he always gets away with everything; it’s his crumpled birth right.

Are we to believe the greening of the previous climate sceptic whose columns so often berated those who worried about climate change? Back then he used the same cheap oratorical tricks against ecological campaigners that he now uses to convince us of his own green credentials.

People can change their minds, of course, and perhaps he’s changed his, although it’s always wise to wonder. How much of this is a genuine desire to protect the world, and to be judged, as he said in that speech, by the “children not yet born and their children”, and how much of it is political expediency?

Flying all over the place in private jets is not a good look when you are lecturing others on why we must all save the climate. Lowering the tax on domestic flights is hardly a good green look; wanting to licence more oilfields in the North Sea is hardly a good green look; wanting to build more roads is hardly a good green look.

And an unwillingness to speak straight about coal, as exposed in an unusually tough interview with the BBC’s chief environment correspondent, Justin Rowlatt, is hardly a good green look.

As to the wider conference, once all those private jets and polished limousines have gone away, we shall see.

The pledge to halt and reverse deforestation by the end of the decade is an encouraging start, but we need to talk to the indigenous people who live and work in the forests of the depleted Amazon rainforest, and elsewhere, not just lecture them from afar.

It’s encouraging that the world is talking about the climate (even if Russia and China have handed in a sicknote), but there is still something queasy making about the ecological damage caused by getting everyone to gather in the temporary green chapel of Glasgow.

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I won’t be raising a glass to this budget…

BEER and budgets go together, and Cole’s law of politics dictates that it is easier to swallow the beer than the budget, especially when it’s Boris and Rishi’s round.

This image doesn’t quite work as Boris Johnson surely never buys any drinks. I picture him patting his pockets in mock-search of his wallet and then asking someone else to pay. As for Rishi Sunak, he is an immensely wealthy teetotaller who pretends to be part of the prosecco posse.

Budgets nowadays seems to be all about the politics anyway, a rush of printer’s ink to the head before anyone has worked out what’s what.

As a man who does his modest best to support the brewing industry, I shall attempt to assess the headlines with a morning-after squint.

A cut in duty on draught beer by 3p a pint is something, although this boozy proclamation from the no-booze chancellor may not be all it seems. This cut appears to apply only to barrels or kegs of 40ltr or more – a size bigger than many of smaller breweries use.

This seems to be a cut mostly designed to help the big brewers. As York beer man Rich Mellen, head brewer of Ainsty Ales, pointed out on Twitter: “… it only helps your tory mates who run the multinationals or super breweries. This doesn’t help the 3000 microbreweries in the UK. How were you lobbied? Free beer in every spoons?”

Johnson and Sunak went to a brewery to be photographed before the budget, and the publicity snaps are all over today’s front pages.

One shows Sunak mock-groaning as he pretends to lift a barrel, and Johnson holding up a barrel, clearly empty, while pulling a face somewhere between a grimace and a smirk, and a long way from a sight you might ever wish to glimpse again.

He looks like a polar bear with piles, although perhaps now I should apologise to all my polar bear friends.

The photos were taken at Fourpure Brewing in Bermondsey, south London, an area that was on my patch as a young reporter in the 1980s, a down-at-heel but proud place in the days before trendiness landed.

It is interesting to wonder why businesses submit to these political stunts. The brewery put out a tweet proclaiming the cut in duty, even though the size of the barrels mock humped by Johnson and Sunak suggest that Fourpure may not qualify for the cut.

Whatever the case, the comments beneath the tweet are telling, and here are a couple:

“Posing with Johnson and Sunak bad idea! Your beer has a bacterial infection so I won’t be buying it anymore.”

“Won’t be drinking your beer again then…”

 

One of those photographs ended up on the front page of the Daily Ex-Press Release alongside the headline:­ “Cheers! Rishi on a mission to cut taxes.”

Call me picky if you must, but a mission to cut taxes doesn’t usually involve raising taxes to their highest rate since the 1950s. This budget is another distraction, a clutch of headlines held together with sticky tape and catchphrases.

Boris Johnson’s favoured trick is to repeat something so often that it appears to be true. He did that when he “Got Brexit Done” (still not done) and he does that every time he mentions “levelling up”. He doesn’t wish to be judged on whether that levelling up ever happens. No, he just thinks that if he says a thing often enough, people might just believe him. And too many sections of the media are happy to oblige.

Perhaps the media should try judging Johnson on what he does and achieves, rather than what he says he’s done and achieved; there is an important difference.

At the least the Daily Mirror front page gets it right…

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A few heat pumps don’t undo the harm of putting raw sewage in our rivers…

Doing the right thing environmentally isn’t always easy and we’ve all been there.

You use the car when you could have walked. You drop a plastic pot in the rubbish bin because you can’t be bothered trying to spot the code on the bottom and it needs the right symbol for the recycling. You put paper in the ordinary bin because it’s dark and raining.

And on a particularly bad day, you secretly lobby the United Nations to play down the need to move away from the whole fossil fuels thing, as it really is such a bother, and your economy is so much is more important than that airy thing called the climate.

Or there you are about to host a climate conference in Glasgow and you reject calls to make it a legal duty for water companies not to keep pumping raw sewage discharges into rivers. Because, well, you know, the markets know better than rivers, and where there’s shit there’s money.

Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries reported to have been pushing back against the UN recommendations for action ahead of the Cop26 summit, according to leaked documents seen by the BBC.

All this just days before these foot-dragging countries will be asked at to announce what significant changes they are prepared to make to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees.

This shows the scale of the challenge faced by the world, or those part of it that will be in Glasgow to meet Boris Johnson, the “Green PM” according to a line in the Sun the other day. Perhaps that was a day when he wasn’t flying a few miles so he could be photographed coming down the steps from a borrowed private jet.

In a column-style article for the newspaper, Johnson said grants of £5,000 would be available towards the cost of expensive heat pumps to replace our boilers.

He offered this reassurance: “So while we’re going to have to make some pretty major changes to the way we heat our homes, the Greenshirts of the Boiler Police are not going to kick in your door with their sandal-clad feet and seize, at carrot-point, your trusty old combi…”

He just can’t help himself. There’s always an imagined enemy to be summoned, wielding carrots or not; there’s always an inane and attention-seeking quip.

It turned out that this scheme would pay to fund only 90,000 heat pumps over three years. Quite where that leaves the other 25 million homes with gas boilers is anyone’s guess. Perhaps we should ask that carrot.

The logic will be that this will kickstart the markets, prices will come down, and everything will be all right.

Leaving everything to the markets, a little like me betting my future on a lottery ticket, only gets you so far. And with the water companies it gets you with more shit in your rivers and seas than you might imagine was possible in a civilised country.

Witness how Southern Water would apparently rather be fined than invest in the privatised industry from which they profit greatly.

If I may for a moment quote that unreliable authority known as myself from July 19: “The privatisation of the water industry was literally a shit idea in that companies such as Southern Water now find it more profitable to pay a £90m fine for literally pumping shit into the literal sea than to invest in infrastructure.”

Assorted recommendations to the environment bill were made in the Lords, including that the water companies should be legally bound to reduce putting raw sewage in our rivers; all were ignored.

This bit of post-Brexit legislation shows again how marvellous these Brexit bonuses are: now we are free to pollute our rivers as much as we like, so it might be best to stick to those sunny uplands to avoid the smell.

Last year raw sewage was discharged into waters more than 400,000 times. The water companies do put decent water in our taps, and thanks for that, but much else they do alongside that duty is a shitty disgrace.

And yet our ‘Green PM’ doesn’t seem remotely bothered about stopping them.

If you want to keep up with the dreadful state of our water, you should follow Feargal Sharkey on Twitter. Yes, that Feargal Sharkey, a man whose anger about the water industry keeps him well informed…

 

 

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Here is another episode in that long-running saga called Julian versus the Sat-Nav…

I am driving to Masham but haven’t bothered tapping in the details. That’s because I know where Masham is. Here is the extent of my knowledge: it’s up the A1M towards Scotch Corner, but off to the left before that.

The route is a shape in my mind, and that’s enough.

This won’t be like the time I drove to Hornsea in the sure and certain knowledge that you drove to Beverley and turned off somewhere, as there was bound to be a sign somewhere.

That theory worked until I accidentally bypassed Beverley and started on the road to Hull. Nothing wrong with Hull, except that it wasn’t where I was meant to be going that morning. Anyway, I got to Hornsea in the end without being too late.

This won’t be like that because I know where Masham is, off to the left somewhere before Scotch Corner.

But for some reason there doesn’t seem to be a sign. How can that be when I saw one in my mind before setting off on this journey? And it is a journey-journey, just so that you know, not a tedious metaphor about life or anything, just a journey, just another journey to a destination of which I am certain.

As the miles to Scotch Corner diminish, I do spot a sign to Masham, but it’s on a road parallel to the one I am speeding along. That’s right, I need to be over there (gesticulates vaguely to himself in the car). It’s all fine, I’ll turn off in a minute, only those minutes mount and still there isn’t a way off this main road.

This won’t be like the time I drove to Helmsley, in the sure and certain knowledge that I knew where Helmsley was, having cycled there once. We were almost there without the help of the sat-nav when I took a left rather than a right turn onto the main road, in the sure and certain knowledge that was the way.

The human satnav to my left had her doubts but stayed quiet as I seemed to know what I was talking about (schoolgirl error there). In my defence it was very early on a Sunday morning and dark. We were meeting friends to take them to the start of a long charity walk back to their car in Helmsley. After panicked use of the satnav, we were only 20 minutes or so late arriving.

Some miles after I spot that sign on the other road, I come off and follow a dipping and diving road back towards Masham.

Why do we ignore things that might help us? It’s a mystery. Maybe men don’t like being told what to do; perhaps women think they know better than satnavs too. Or maybe it is just a boy thing.

On the way back, I press ‘home’ on the satnav. It takes me on a weird route. I ignore some of the suggested turnings – you’re sending me down there, are you kidding me, why would you do that? Then I know where I am anyway, and head for home.

 

Here is another episode in that long-running saga called Julian versus Boris Johnson…

A ‘super poll’ in the Mail asks many random questions, including whether Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer would be ‘best to go on holiday with’. I’d rather go on holiday with my wife, it that’s all right with you.

In case you’re wondering, Johnson won that one by 36% to 25%. I can’t imagine anyone worse to go on holiday with. He’d forget to book anything, drink all the wine without buying any, tell lies when it was his turn to cook, then deny it all in the morning.

Anyway, it’s a foolish question. Johnson only goes on holiday to posh places owned by friends even wealthier than himself who give him a freebie. He doesn’t go on holiday with you and me. And we surely don’t want to go on holiday with him.

Buried in all this nonsense was a question about what would happen if ‘there was a vote to leave the EU tomorrow’. This found that 36% of those taking part would vote leave and 45% remain.

For some reason this finding was not trumpeted by the Mail.

I just held a super poll with myself and can report that 100% of me still thinks that Brexit was always going to be a terrible idea, especially after Johnson got his clumsy hands on it.

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Johnson disappears on an apparent freebie at shit-hitting-fan time…

IT’S spooky how there’s always someone to carry the can or pay for the holiday when you are Boris Johnson.

Those loveable character quirks are pushed to the fore today as the damning 151-page report from MPs into what we have learned from Britain’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis is published just the prime minister happens to be sunning himself at a luxury villa in Marbella on the Costa Del Sol.

This handy and expensive hangout is said to have been provided by his pal Zac Goldsmith, who lost his seat as an MP and was instantly compensated with a comfy berth in the Lords. That seat was the gift of Boris Johnson, and now it seems that a week in the sun is the gift of Zac Goldsmith.

You would be sifting over these little details for a long time before concluding that our democracy is in fine fettle.

The timing of this newest freebie holiday raises a few questions. Was Johnson always going to be away as this report was due to be released? Or did he see the gathering clouds and ask around his rich pals for somewhere sunny to sit out the storm?

There’s always a room free at the You Scratch My Back Villa.

Anyway, that report is almost as important as trying to work out how Johnson always gets away with stuff, and always manages to duck out at an opportune moment.

One minute he was giving his ridiculous right-wing comedy turn at the Conservative party conference; the next he was dashing to the airport. Incidentally, isn’t it lovely the way certain Tories always rumble on about there being no right-wing comedians in this country when they are led by one.

Anyway, that damning report.

This morning’s newspaper headlines were shocking for the government – with the heaviest takeaway being that our early Covid response was “one of the UK’s worst ever public health failures”.

Ministers and scientists are said by the report to have taken a “fatalistic” approach that exacerbated the death toll.

Other criticisms include “groupthink”, evidence of British exceptionalism and a “slow and gradualist” approach that left the UK faring “significantly worse” than other countries.

The cross-party report is titled “Coronavirus: lessons learned to date” and was led by two former Conservative ministers, Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark.

At this point it’s worth remembering that their report was set in motion a year ago in response to Boris Johnson’s preferred official inquiry date of sometime or never.

Have lessons been learned? Well, we’ve learned again that Johnson is unlikely to be around at shit-hitting-fan time, much as he wasn’t around for five Cobra meetings about the looming pandemic because he had other things to do (finalise his divorce, dash off a book about Shakespeare, apparently).

There is praise in the report for how we introduced the vaccine, although our early bragged-about successes seem to have been overtaken by Europe, which is embarrassing for the Brexit evangelists.

Stephen Barclay, who has some third-ranking job or other (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, I just checked), was chosen to do this morning’s round of interviews, chuntering on about “the benefit of hindsight” and saying that we’d stopped the NHS being overwhelmed, when it’s overwhelmed still by Covid, years of cuts and covert privatisation.

Still, at least Boris Johnson got a holiday out of it all.

The Daily Mail, usually a Tory friend, takes the line that the “Elderly were just an afterthought”. While the i newspaper says: “Government delays and blunders ‘killed many thousands’”.

Will any of this make a difference or dent Boris Johnson’s lead in the opinion polls? Will the mounting post-Brexit chaos he caused before negligently lurching into a Covid crisis dent his lead?

Some days it seems that nothing will; some days sitting here and moaning about it all in a blog seems exquisitely pointless.

But there you go.

Some of us get free holidays thanks to the moneyed grace of our friends.

Some of us bash things out on a laptop thanks to not knowing what else to do.

 

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Through the Brexit Looking-Glass… an odd sort of place

IT’S 150 years since Lewis Carroll wrote Through The Looking-Glass. Yet on any passing day, you can look at the front page of the Daily Express and step through another sort of glass, a not-looking glass, perhaps.

The other day that newspaper said Boris Johnson was ‘losing patience’ with the shortage of lorry drivers. Both the Express and the Prime Minister somehow managed to keep a straight face while rolling out that old barrel of blubber.

From this side of the glass, it looked as if Boris Johnson was losing patience with Boris Johnson, and perhaps he is, for the rest of us are. And if you’ve not lost patience with the man but have accidentally been gathered up by my Boris-sweeping brush, well, hard luck.

This morning’s looking glass treat was the headline: “Don’t blame driver crisis on Brexit”. This one was based on a few quotations from Iain Duncan  Smith – sorry, I accidentally knocked off a ‘Sir’ there. Sir Iain Duncan  Smith, knighted for services to never being afraid to blather absolute bollocks.

Perhaps if you step through that glass, it all looks different. Perhaps on that side all those European drivers weren’t sent packing and told not to come back to Brexit-land as we didn’t need them in our sunlit uplands.

Perhaps on that side of the looking glass, all those European lorry drivers weren’t stuck on a runway at Christmas, homeless, foodless and without anywhere to shit. Maybe, you never know, those lorry drivers won’t want to come back here to help us out for a few months before being told to go home again.

Please excuse me, for an interjection on the Tories is coming in from Miriam Margolyes – “I think they are an appalling, incompetent, corrupt shower of twats. The cronyism and the prejudice and the bullying – I have never seen such a deplorable collection of people…”

Thanks, Miriam. She said that in an interview with Eva Wiseman in the Observer the other week, and not just into my ear or anything like that. Thanks to Eva, too, for an entertaining piece of journalism.

 

It’s been amusing to watch the Brexit faithful swearing on Nigel Farage’s beer belly, or whatever it is they put faith in nowadays, that nothing bad is linked to Brexit. It’s an article of blind faith.

Sometimes their logic can be hard to grasp.

The shortage of lorry drivers has nothing to do with Brexit, yet the government is offering temporary visas to foreign lorry drivers. If Brexit has nothing to do with it, why are we bending the Brexit restrictions to sort out a problem caused by Brexit?

The knotty maze where my brain used to be is a very confused place nowadays.

Some say all those problems are caused by Covid. Yet in a sense, the pandemic has acted as a blanket for everything that’s going wrong thanks to Brexit. Covid has provided a distraction, and hardly anyone in the media – or the Labour party – can be bothered to keep an account of what’s going or gone wrong with Boris’s Big Botched Brexit.

As for fuel, when is a shortage not a shortage? If you can’t fill your car with petrol, there’s a shortage whether it’s caused by Brexit reducing the lorry-driving workforce or by people rushing to buy petrol because everyone else is rushing to buy petrol. Or a bit of both.

The result is the same.

No petrol, no motion.

We’re off on a short holiday next week for the first time in a year, or we are if we can buy petrol. The two garages I tried today in York had run dry.

I’ll tell you what: if our holiday is cancelled, I will be blaming Boris Johnson.

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Proper British TV shows, pint glasses and gallons of nonsense…

Dad's Army

Here is a reminder, Dad’s Army started in 1968 and is 50 years old!

Hello – here is the sludge from the bottom of the culture wars bin. I did have to wash my hands three times afterwards, but there you go.

Among the miasmic waste is news that public service broadcasters in the UK will have a legal requirement to produce “distinctively British” programmes. Ministers, who in general don’t watch television, are said to be drawing plans for the sort of programmes the rest of us should watch in Batshit Brexit Britain.

Fleabag, Derry Girls and Only Fools And Horses have been cited as “distinctively British” programmes that would meet this obligation.

According to a report in the i newspaper, “Ofcom will be asked to draw up a workable definition of the concept.” Good luck with that, Ofcom.

Media minister John Whittingdale told a Royal Television Society conference that Dr Who, Downton Abbey, Great British Bake Off and Bodyguard were international hits that also reflected British values. Choosing a time-travelling intersex person, some posh-and-understairs semi-historical fluff, and a programme about cakes seems random, but then this whole idea is mad and a little sinister.

Somewhere along the way someone mentions Dad’s Army because they always do. Somewhere along the way someone mentions Carry On films because they always do.

Here is a reminder, Dad’s Army started in 1968 and is 50 years old!

How right-wing governments love to tip into this controlling behaviour, stirring up a milky tea British version of China banning reality talent shows and ordering broadcasters not to promote “sissy” feminine men on television.

Here’s are some suggestions for old TV shows that could be remade…

It Ain’t Half Woke Mum, featuring unfunny stereotypes as they bungle through life, armed only with puny puns.

Don’t Love Thy Neighbour Especially If They Are In Desperate Straits And Are Willing To Paddle Across A Dangerous Channel To Get Here (not a snappy title, I’ll admit).

Dad’s Brexit Army – those Europeans don’t like it up them, whatever it might be.

And so wearily on.

It’s almost impossible to define Britishness in this context. One argument put forward by Mr Whittingdale is that streaming services such as Netflix produce generic programmes designed to sell everywhere. Up to a point, but look at the lovely Sex Education, back any day soon for a third series. That Netflix hit is both British and international (a bit like sex, really).

We Are Lady PartsMy own leftfield pick for a wonderful British series would be this year’s Channel 4 comedy We Are Lady Parts, about a Muslim punk band, which is modern and multicultural, and funny and sweet.

From that sludge in the culture wars bin also is to be found news that Boris Johnson is to announce the return of imperial weights and measures. This would make it legal for market stalls, shops and supermarkets to sell their goods using only Britain’s traditional weighing system.

Wow, what an achievement in appeasing one or two recalcitrant market stall holders who object to using “foreign measurements”.

I am 64 and have lived most of my life using sensible metric measurements rather than complicated imperial measures.

Thanks to the weights and measures inspector Pippa Musgrave for pointing out on Twitter that: “The UK agreed, when it signed the OIML treaty in 1856 to move to a single system of measurement (S.I. units). Metric measures have been lawful in the UK since 1875…”

So, it’s nothing to do with Brexit.

Also in that bin are reports that our British pint glasses can once again carry the Crown stamp. Wow, what a freedom that is. A pint glass is and always was a pint glass, but now it can have a little Crown on it again.

A Brexit triumph, according to the increasingly potty Daily Express. Frankly my Brexit dears, I don’t give a damn what’s etched on the glass, so long as it contains good beer (British, continental, American – not fussed if it’s decent).

Once again, in looking forward we gaze over our shoulders, turning nostalgic about gallons and ounces and proper British potatoes sold by the muddy pound.

What a weird country. Still, at least grumbling about it all is thoroughly British.

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An axe? Some days Johnson looks as if he could barely wield a custard spoon

I’VE never seen the point of reshuffles, which is strange as my wife likes to play that game. Mostly she reshuffles furniture and kitchen cupboards.

Blithely choosing to sit where a chair is usually to be found is no guarantee you won’t end up on the floor.

“There was a chair there yesterday,” I might complain.

“It looks better over there,” she might riposte.

My wife likes to change rooms, putting familiar things in unfamiliar places, and prime ministers like to reshuffle their cabinets, putting familiar faces in unfamiliar places.

The ins and outs always exercise the media in a lazy, routine way.  Tired old metaphors are dusted off, allowing the Daily Mail to swing the one above – “At last, Boris wields the axe.”

The Times puts an axe in his hand too. Yet some days Johnson looks as if he could barely wield a custard spoon, never mind an axe.

Meanwhile, the potty old Daily Express blusters: “PM’s ruthless cull to deliver Britain’s future.”

Ah, yes that future, those sun-lit uplands. And another brick in the slogan wall, this one embossed with: “Build back better.”

You may have heard those words fall from the mouths of hapless ministers, shuffled or unshuffled, as they talk about anything and nothing. They probably say it over breakfast, muttering that they are building back a better breakfast with their cornflakes, or something.

It’s fair to guess that Dominc Raab won’t have been impressed about being removed as foreign secretary, especially on finding that Liz Truss got the job.

“Liz Truss! Are you f****** kidding me!”

Whether or not a hole was punched through the Downing Street wall is open to speculation, but Raab does appear horribly cross nearly all the time. He always looks one twitch from fury as his frown darkens and a blood vessel in his forehead throbs like an angry worm.

After Raab went on that holiday to Greece, having been warned Afghanistan was about to fall to the Taliban, he was hauled off the beach and later pictured at his FO desk holding a phone. And when I say ‘holding’, I mean grasping it with such determination he appeared to be weighing up its potential as a murder weapon.

Gavin Williamson was sacked as education secretary, an ejection thoroughly deserved – but how come he was allowed to hang on for so long? His replacement is Nadhim Zahawi, who steps over from a short spell as vaccines minister, coupled with being the go-to minister to appear on the media and bore everyone half to death.

Oliver Dowden is out as culture wars secretary, replaced for reasons of what – mischief, spite, just for the hell of it? – by the reliably appalling Nadine Dorries, whose brief will include the BBC and privatising Channel 4 (a terrible idea she will pursue alongside slagging off snowflakes and so on).

As for Liz Truss, she seems to have been promoted for trundling around the world and bragging about post-Brexit trade deals that were there already but have had a new label slapped on.

Michael Gove, a sort of cut-price Machiavelli in an M&S suit, has been pushed sideways by his old frenemy Johnson to housing, communities and local government, and has responsibility for the “levelling up” agenda, whatever that might be.

You may have noticed, incidentally – and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in York certainly has – that levelling up doesn’t count for people on universal credit who are about to have their £20-a-week uplift removed by Boris Johnson, who seems grotesquely pleased with this cruel move.

Anyway, according to his Twitter account, the prime minister and his reassembled pieces of cabinet furniture will be working “tirelessly to unite and level up the whole country”.

Oh, and yes, they’ll be building back better too, meaningless slogan by meaningless slogan. So that’s all right.

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