THE spine is frayed with age and tattered shreds remain from the book it once supported, A Century Of Detective Stories, with an Introduction by GK Chesterton.

This relic of a book, brown to start with, browner still with age, otherwise features a noir-style drawing of a detective wearing a trilby and holding a gun, and the name of the publisher, Hutchinson.

The gun is a puzzle in a way, as the owner of the book, my grandfather Bill Cole, was a peaceable man, a Methodist who spent the Battle of the Somme toiling through blood and mud as a stretcher-bearer.

Quite why a religious man who survived all that would have owned  a book of detective stories adorned with a man carrying a gun is one of those little mysteries, akin perhaps to how his equally religious wife, Eunice, loved the wrestling on TV. Just because you like one thing, or live one way, doesn’t mean you cannot like another.

When my grandmother died, we were asked by my aunt if we would like to take something from the house in Southampton.

We chose a rose from the front garden, successfully transplanted to York but long since withered and died, two small and roughly carved wooden figures of a man and a woman, bought by my grandparents on a holiday to somewhere, Switzerland or Austria perhaps, and still on a shelf, and that old book.

Many of the writers are forgotten to time, although some are indelible: Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, and Chesterton himself.

The titles are great: The Avenging Chance, Superfluous Murder, The Case Of The White Footprints, The Other Hangman. A story entitled A Lesson In Crime is by a couple called Cole – GDH & M Cole. GDH is described as a writer of economics “who has produced many novels and short stories in the detective vein. He is also a poet and a contributor to a number of important journals”.

Of his wife no other mention is made.

Still, it is pleasing that a man called Cole owned a book containing a story written by a man called Cole, and that his grandson called Cole would grow up to publish a couple of novels featuring detectives too.

I’ve owned this now spineless book for years but haven’t read all or any of the stories. Maybe I did but forgot, and it is past time to do something about that.

Our daughter has left home again and has her own house now, so we’ve been having a sort out (or my wife has, with variably able assistance). Now she has her own studio, I have my own study, and on the wall before me is the spine of that book. I’d been meaning for years to do something with that fragment, then my wife found a frame and popped it in.

The important things we keep from previous generations are often not the ones you imagine, the old furniture or whatever, and never mind what Alan Clark once damningly said of his fellow Conservative Michael Heseltine, that he was the sort of man who “bought his own furniture”. Don’t we all? Better that than inherit mouldy old furniture.

An online search of second-hand bookshops suggests this book is a 1935 edition which, if in good condition, is worth £37, and contains 45 stories of mystery and intrigue by the foremost mystery writers of the period.

My time-weathered copy is worth everything and nothing, and anyway it’s not for sale.

FEELING cross about Boris Johnson is a waste of angry breath, but don’t let that stop you.

We are used now to his chicanery, charlatanism and his carefully cultivated clownish image, the hair mussed up, the suit ill-fitting, and his posh, barking intonation, where the words crash into each other like cars parked without a care on a steep hill.

And then there are the lies, the cheap bricks on which he stands and bellows. Johnson was sacked from The Times in the late 1980s for making up a quote. Rather than act as a deterrence, that dismissal seems only to have emboldened him.

Sometimes it seems deliberate; sometimes he just can’t be arsed remembering whatever damn thing it was he said last time. It’s as if he exists in a continuous dishonest present, in which nothing he has said, or ever will say, really matters so long as he continues to shuffle down that corridor. Either he is lying, or he has weaponised forgetfulness, or a mash-up of both.

Thanks to the Health Service Journal, we now have evidence that this habit appears to be written into government communications policy.

You may recall that last week the health secretary, Sajid Javid, boasted about opening a new hospital in Carlisle. He faced much online criticism for this, as it wasn’t a new hospital at all but a new cancer centre in the Cumberland Infirmary.

As he headed north for the opening ceremony, Javid tweeted that he was “Looking forward to opening one of the new 48 hospitals today” – pledging to open that number of new hospitals by the end of the decade being a Johnsonian wheeze.

What the HSJ has uncovered suggests that telling such whoppers is now official policy. The journal has discovered a communications ‘playbook’ for the government’s NHS building programme. This orders health trusts that major refurbishments and new wings or units which are part of the scheme “must always be referred to as a new hospital”.

This is astonishing, or it would be under any other administration, but this tatty lot regard telling the truth with the disdain that their boss holds for his comb.

The HSJ prints this telling paragraph from the comms policy: “The schemes named in the announcement are not all identical and vary across a number of factors. However, they do all satisfy the criteria we set of what a new hospital is and so must always be referred to as a new hospital.”

Johnson made this barmy pledge, and now the comms policy is being wrestled into a shape that fits his narrative, if not the poor, downtrodden truth.

Part of this is just crazy. I don’t know if the government has realised, but people live locally and tend to notice things. They’d certainly clock if a new hospital was being built, as hospitals are often huge and employ many people.

It’s not as if you wander around your area and suddenly notice a new hospital that wasn’t there before. People will notice and they should call out this nonsense when they see it.

The odd thing is, the new units or whatever that are being built are a good thing, so there is no need to wrap them in Brexit-style whopper-tape.

Incidentally, Brexit seems to be collapsing all around us, causing food shortages and other forms of pre-told misery, only hardly anyone at the BBC has noticed.

Perhaps a memo has gone out about that too – “The sunny uplands of this new arrangement satisfy the criteria we set of what getting Brexit done is and so must always be referred to as a great British success story.”

How delightful that John Cleese will present a series for Channel 4 about cancel culture. You can never get enough of grumpy old comedians grouching on about stuff.

According to a report in the Guardian, John Cleese: Cancel Me will explore “why a new ‘woke’ general is trying to rewrite the rules of what can and can’t be said”.

There are a few problems with the notion of ‘cancel culture’, but before we put a toe in that stagnant pool, here’s a WhatsApp exchange with my mother …

“We have been wondering what woke means. Can you tell us!”

“It started in the US as a way of describing liberal people who are sensitive about how others feel. Now it’s been turned around as an insult for liberals. It’s basically become a lazy shorthand used by right-wingers to be rude about anyone who disagrees with them.”

I hope that’s roughly right, as it can be hard to keep up.

My mother isn’t alone in being in the dark. According to a YouGov poll in May, most Britons (59%) don’t know what woke means. And yet the media is obsessed with something their readers half understand at best.

Such phrases are a cultural tic and can be horribly addictive. Just think of how ‘political correctness’ put on big boots and stomped all over the world, before finding its life partner, “gone mad”.

You could put a cigarette paper between ‘political correctness gone mad’ and ‘wokeness’. Or you could if you could find one. Perhaps we need a new measure of ideological thinness.

As you will recall, to be politically correct suggests using words that avoid insulting or offending people who belong to oppressed groups. A decent desire, you might have thought, but soon everyone was chuntering about ‘political correctness gone mad’ before they tired of that and switched to droning on about ‘wokeness’.

Such responses become a reflex, so instead of pausing to think about something, you just hit the buzz-phrase of the moment. Trouble is, these phrases – could we allow the neologism ‘tongue-jerk’ phrases? ­– take on a life of their own to the point where what they are complaining about becomes more myth than reality.

And that’s the problem with ‘cancel culture’. That and the possible double meaning in those two words. Is this an instruction to ‘cancel culture’ or a description of an alleged movement that wishes to cancel all debate?

Well, it’s the second, in theory. But cancel culture, along with its fellow under the tangled bedclothes ‘culture wars’, seems to be mentioned all the time with few actual examples of what is happening.

There is a weird victim culture wrapped up in this, whereby the Conservative Party (nearly always in power) and their friends in the media play-act being poor, defenceless waifs in the face of a mighty left-wing gale. Only it’s more of a breeze at best.

Also, this government seems keen on cancelling those who disagree with them, by pushing anyone presumed to be left-wing from museum bodies (as banged on about here previously more than once), while packing institutions such as the BBC with its own supporters. Richard Sharp, the multi-millionaire who says he has donated around £400,000 to the Tories, was Boris Johnson’s choice as chairman of the BBC.

Sir Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC’s governing board and formerly director of communications to Theresa May, seems to be behind attempts to block Huffington Post UK editor Jess Brammar from taking up a senior editorial role at BBC News.

This has led to hysterical reporting in the Mail and elsewhere about why such an alleged left-winger shouldn’t be allowed to have such a role.

And you could call that cancel culture.

As for John Cleese, maybe he will discover something interesting as he sets out to meet those who claim to have been ‘cancelled’ for their actions and statements. The show’s not even been made yet, so we should give him a chance.

But I can’t help worrying it will be a dreadful exercise that could have been more interesting with another presenter. But the choice of Cleese got everybody talking, I suppose.

Are we really a “big-hearted country”? Foreign secretary Dominic Raab made this claim while addressing the Afghan refugee crisis.

Rumour has it he’d just been hauled back from Greece, to where he’d fled days before Afghanistan was about to fall to the Taliban.

No one saw that coming, apart from everyone not called Raab. And apart from the civil servants who told him to unpack the swimming trunks and stay at home.

Anyway, the papers are divided on the size of our heart. The loyal, never less than slobbering Daily Express has the front-page headline: “Big-hearted Britain to take 20,000 refugees.”

More sceptical, the Daily Mirror says this isn’t enough as only 5,000 will be admitted this year – “SAVE THEM” its headline pleads.

I’m with the Mirror on this one, but let’s rewind a moment.

Yesterday, Raab said that he and home secretary Priti Patel know from experience that Britain is a “big-hearted country”.

In his case, this refers to his Jewish father who came to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1938, aged, six. For Patel, this dates to 1972, when Idi Amin expelled all Ugandan Asians, and Britain accepted 28,000 refugees displaced in this cruel fashion, including her parents.

Raab and Patel, then, both have family reasons to admire Britain’s openness, although only when it suits them.

Patel’s family background has, for whatever reason, made her mean-spirited towards refugees. She has been happy to out-Farage Farage by exaggerating the problem and following his nasty pointing.

Now the unrolling mess of Afghanistan has forced Patel, Raab and Johnson to don the T-shirt of quick compassion. Much like that time the clown who isn’t really called Boris dragged an England top over his shirt and tie when football was fleetingly his thing.

Pretending to care about football, pretending to care about refugees – it’s hard to keep up.

In interviews, Priti Patel has said “we cannot accommodate 20,000 people all in one go”.

Funny, that – perhaps she should check in with 1972.

Patel also declined to say when the first refugees would be rescued: “I’m not going to give a date, to pluck one out of thin air.”

Funny, that – as thin air is what she relies on for most of her opinions on refugees.

Not all Tories agree with the government’s approach. Former Cabinet minister David Davis, always the maverick’s maverick, said we should accept “north of 50,000” Afghan refugees. Tobias Ellwood, a former Army captain, told the Daily Mirror: “This is a woefully inadequate response given the scale of the refugee crisis we are about to face as a direct response to our withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Those of us who celebrated Joe Biden not being Donald Trump are now left scratching our heads. Was the sound of banging doors in Afghanistan as the US scrambled out and the Taliban rushed in what we’d hoped to see? All right, it was Trump’s plan, but did Biden have to adopt it so wholeheartedly?

Parliament has been recalled as I write, so that the size of Britain’s heart can be examined. Johnson & Co are left in a bind by this situation, as the number of Afghan refugees we are prepared to accept is determined not so much by compassion as by what Tory backbenchers will tolerate.

Still, let’s end on a positive view of Britain, taken from Bill Bryson’s Notes From A Small Island. A lovely, hilarious, grumpy and wise book which I have just read again.

This comes towards the end…

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realised what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologising to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.”

Those of us fortunate enough to have been born here should remember that our presence on this small island was a matter of luck. Never forget that when thinking of those in trouble who need shelter here, stinging nettles, Marmite and all.

Dolly Parton and James Patterson Photograph: Courtesy of Dolly Parton

Country singer Dolly Parton is writing a novel, news to dampen the soul of struggling writers everywhere.

Yet publishing is an industry whose product happens to be books. And if you want to shift books, getting Dolly Parton to write one is a smart move.

Getting her to write one with James Patterson is an even smarter move.

Patterson is a one-man publishing industry, a mega-selling thriller writer who seems to enjoy these collaborations. Among many such side projects he has co-written two political thrillers with former president Bill Clinton.

Parton is a debut novelist, although she has written several memoirs, including Songteller: My Life In Lyrics. The many country-pop songs she has ‘told’ include Jolene and 9 to 5.

Her novel is called Run, Rose, Run and is said to concern a young woman who moves to Nashville to pursue her music-making dreams. Barely a skip from reality, but same goes for the Clinton/Patterson show.

Easy to feel sour about this, but pointless. Besides, Parton seems to be an admirable person, from what you can tell. She donated $1 million to the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. That makes her a modern heroine, although anti-vaxxers may disagree, as they like doing that.

Other causes she has supported include her own Dollywood Foundation, which aims to cut high school drop-out rates. Under the same umbrella, probably a frilly one with a cowboy-boots motif, she set up the Imagination Library to send one book per month to every child in Sevier County, Tennessee, from birth until their first year of school.

The list of her good deeds is too long to tote up further, but literacy is a common thread, inspired by her father, who could not read. A woman who wishes to use her power, influence and money to help tackle illiteracy is hard not to love.

Parton grew up “dirt poor”, as she has put it, and ended up a multimillionaire singer. It’s quite a tale (not a ‘journey’, for God’s sake, not one of those). As she is doing good with what she has squeezed from life, it’s hard to quibble.

She is knowing about the self-creation that is Dolly, a cheap and gloriously tawdry creature who enjoys her own brashness, while being astutely aware of what she is doing under that persona.

This self-awareness is clear from one of her best-known quotes – “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” If her book contains lines like that, perhaps it will be worth a read.

There is a trend for famous people writing books, with the publishers knowing they are likely to be on to a good thing. Richard Osman shows that, with The Thursday Murder Club.

I’ve not read his novel, a crime book at the cosy end of the spectrum. It’s super-successful, there’s a sequel (The Man Who Died Twice), and the publisher who had that idea hit gold.

Osman seems to be a witty and likeable man, so it’s hard to resent his success too. But if you wished to pucker your mouth, you could say he’s had all this laid on a plate.

My wife read The Thursday Murder Club and wasn’t that impressed, feeling it was only published because of the writer’s name and fame. A book-mad friend of sound judgment told me she enjoyed Osman’s novel. That isn’t enough to make me want to read it, but I heartily thank this same friend for also recommending Slow Horses, the first book in Mick Herron’s series of novels about a bunch of disgraced spies. It’s wonderful.

I had two crime novels published a while ago, and ever since have toiled on without a deal, happy to write, sad to see no printed book afterwards.

If Dolly and Richard have the world sewn up, maybe I should give up. Then again, no. Always writing, always hoping. Two novels are being written now in tandem. Perhaps one – or both! –will come to something.

Here is my favourite Dolly story. This concerns how she wrote two big hits in one day, Jolene and I Will Always Love You. Search online and you will find many people quoting this story. It’s a good tale, after all. But is it true?

One ‘fact-finding’ site gives the story a big tick, yet in a fans’ interview Dolly herself said she couldn’t remember. Years after the songs were released, she found the demos on the same cassette tape in her basement or somewhere. She thought it might have been the same day, week, or month. She couldn’t say for sure.

That story will probably stick around anyway, whatever Dolly remembers or doesn’t.

“Wow no cow!” as it says on the carton. And yet still a whiff of what a dairy-consuming sceptic might call bullshit.

Yesterday, Oatly lost a court case against a family-run farm in Cambridgeshire. Founded in the 1990s, Oatly produces a milk substitute made from oats – enhanced porridge water, if you like.

The firm sent the legal heavies after Glebe Farm Foods, saying their PureOaty plant milk took “unfair advantage”. A High Court judge disagreed, and Oatly was left with oat milk on its face.

Oatly make a big deal of being right-on and non-mainstream. If you look at what goes into their multimillion-selling ‘Oat Drink Barista Edition’, you may be surprised to find  sanctimony unlisted among the ingredients (“water, oats 10%, rapeseed oil…” – plus assorted minerals and vitamins found naturally in cows’ milk).

We have three types of milk in this house, milk-milk, soya milk and oat milk. The two that aren’t milk-milk are not allowed to call themselves milk, hence ‘oat drink’ and ‘soya squirt’ or something.

As the main consumer of milk-milk, being the family relic, I have one foot in a field of cows.

The barista oat not-milk is good in coffee, rich and creamy. I know this because I’ve tried it, before going back to milk-milk. What puts me off is not the taste but that sanctimony.

I have an empty cartoon before me now. “Shake me!” it invites, in the anthropomorphic way of modern advertising, where a thing becomes a person.

“Wow no cow!” it also says, as mentioned a moment ago.

Above those ingredients are the – frankly annoying – words: “The boring (but very important) side.” If this bores you, “flip the carton around and have a wonderful day”. It does and I did.

Then there is an extended joke about the carton being “upgraded to include the latest face-recognition software technology in order to upgrade user security…”

Gosh, I was chuckling over that for seconds.

“Powered by plants” it says on the other side – “What a cool thing to say…” There is more of this holy script, but you get the drift.

There is nothing wrong with all this. If you wish or need to spurn dairy, that’s fine (“Totally vegan,” the carton also says). It’s just that companies like Oatly pretend to be alternative and friendly, when they are just another massive corporation, prepared to bully smaller firms who edge into their shadow. They cash in on our conscience and adopt a “little-old-us” mateyness while churning out millions of those cartoon cartons.

During an earlier hearing in June, the court heard that Oatly had shifted more than £38m worth of that ‘barista edition’ oat milk, alongside £13m worth of other varieties of ‘not-milk’.

Clearly, they guard their trademarks carefully, but Judge Nicholas Caddick QC said it was hard “to see how any relevant confusion would arise” and dismissed Oatly’s case.

Philip Rayner of Glebe Farm Foods said it was “enormously gratifying… to see that smaller independent companies can fight back and win”.

On the BBC website report of the case, a spokesperson for Oatly wished Glebe Farm Foods “total success… moving forward” – funny, that, as the company had just failed in its bid to make the smaller firm move backwards. “We just think they should do so in their own unique voice, just like we do.”

And there was me thinking that it was only Boris Johnson’s spokespeople who are required to spout the most outrageous nonsense.

Right, I’m off to make a coffee using the stove-top espresso pot bought in Paris in the 1980s,  an age long before the words ‘oat’ and ‘milk’ ever snuggled up together.

Nigel Farage on Twitter

I HAVE never seen the point of Nigel Farage, that pimple on the bum of British life. Like the papule in that image, Farage is a painful presence.

Yet nothing seems to shake this awful man. If you must admire anything about him, and it really isn’t mandatory, you may concede that his self-belief is remarkable.

That and his way of diverting British life down narrow and nasty alleyways, like a pinstriped thug. Or standing on the cliffs at Dover and shouting at migrants, while dressed like a male model from the duller sort of leisurewear catalogue.

Still, I was clearly wrong in thinking those unkind thoughts about Nigel. Turns out that the point of Nigel Farage is as a fundraiser for the RNLI. Donations rose by a reported 3,000% thanks to his efforts.

The life-saving charity raised £200,000 in a single day after its boss hit out at Farage’s claim that the RNLI was acting like a migrant ‘taxi service’.

The way that Farage and other rancid-trousered anti-philanthropists have turned on the RNLI for rescuing migrants in the Channel marks a new low in British life. Never mind any number of moral wrongs in our national life, all the likes of Farage want to do is pick on the most vulnerable.

The way they flaunt their lack of humanity should shame them – but it doesn’t because members of that disreputable right-wing club leave their shame at the door.

More migrants may be trying to cross the Channel, but general migration in this country is down. Farage & Co (Purveyors of Nastiness to the Nation) like to rant about how migrants in the Channel should follow ‘legal’ routes into Britain. Well, basically there aren’t any for many of those fleeing conflicts. That’s why they risk their lives in overcrowded boats.

Fortunately, Farage had not reckoned on the bullish Mark Dowie, chief executive of the RNLI.

In a series of interviews, Dowie said that it was his charity’s moral and legal duty to rescue migrants in danger in the sea, adding that he was proud of this humanitarian work. As he should be.

In one interview, Dowie said that most people in Britain and Ireland, where his charity operates, were kind and decent and respected this rescue work.

The ‘kind and decent’ people seem too often to be cowed by the shouty, woke-bashing brigade, the nasties whose views end up having too much sway. Why do we listen to the most shouty men in the room or the TV studio?

Nigel Farage recently parked his mouth in a new barking bay at GB News, where he says the RNLI is “doing the wrong thing” by rescuing migrants.

It would be a dark day indeed if rescuing poor and afflicted people who hope for a better life became the “wrong thing”.

Still, Nigel Farage is quite brilliant at raising funds for the RNLI, so he does have one use.

THE man running along the pavement is young and fit and knows it. His body is lean and sculpted, with no unwanted flesh to encumber movement.

Off the bus comes another man, older and much less fit, with the weight that masses inconsiderately when you are not paying attention. The day is uncomfortable with heat and so is he, by the looks of it, red in the face and full in the belly.

The man on the bicycle sits somewhere between the other two, older than the first, slimmer than the second, with straggly hair that trails behind as he pedals along.

These men are linked by one sorry trait: they are topless in the heat, the young runner flaunting his perfect physicality, the older man flaunting his imperfect physicality, and the third man flaunting something in between.

These men were not seen at the same time, but I have gathered them here in clammy assembly, and I do hope you’ll forgive me.

The young man ran if to say, here’s what you get if you spend hours at the gym. I wondered about lifting my T-shirt in riposte, as if to say and here’s what you’ll get in 40 years’ time. But I carried on running slowly, trying to recover from a bout of T&T Syndrome. That’ll be tummy and tendon, the one larger than it used to be, the other too taut and prone to alarming twinges.

I’ve been walking briskly and running, then walking briskly again. The longer this goes on, the more the difference between the two paces will be eroded. Is this walking or is this running, I may well ask myself.

I can  understand, but not forgive, the young man, as he was proud of his body. The weighty man coming off the bus was something else. Other passengers had been forced to sit too close to his uncovered torso, and that can’t have been congenial.

It’s a weird thing to do. I barely even take my T-shirt off in the garden these days. As for beaches, remind me – what and where are they?

Keep your tops on, guys. No one wants to see your flesh, whether it’s sculpted or looks like a slowly melting pack of butter. Sweaty, unpleasant and, in some circumstances, threatening. Keep a lid on it, why don’t you.

There was a man used to run around these streets, older than me, slim and balding, with flyaway wings of hair. He never wore his T-shirt but carried it, as he sweated to wherever he laid his hat, and that unworn T-shirt.

“That’s gross,” my daughter said once when younger, as we drove past.

She wasn’t wrong. It was and still is.

That’s got that off my chest. A chest that’s otherwise staying covered.

A drop of water…

IS privatisation always bad? I can think of at least one example where it’s been a shit idea, but we’ll come to that in a moment.

The NHS Bill passed last week  raises worries about the acceleration of health privatisation. There has always been private provision under the NHS umbrella, so fears about privatising ‘our NHS’ die away after a while, as the process is incremental and, from the outside, everything seems the same, even if it isn’t.

One difference now is that some members of the party in charge dislike our NHS and want a US-style insurance system. Lord Hannan has long been one such critic, and for a while used to be a regular on Fox News in the US, where he popped up to denigrate the NHS.

Some in the US see the NHS as ‘socialist’, whatever that means in this context, and the likes of Hannan pander to that prejudice.

Will Hutton, the Observer columnist and academic, has a better description, calling the NHS a “a fairness institution”, adding…

“Illness is a piece of brute bad luck ­– you can pre-empt some health risks, with exercise and not smoking, but the big diseases like cancer are really bad accidents which could fall on any of us.

“In this sense, the NHS is a ‘protect me from brute bad luck’ institution. In my view, that is not socialism.”

A sound defence, yet if you dip into the acrid chatter on right-wing Twitter accounts, where the crud collects like the grease off a kebab, a common theme is that the NHS hasn’t handled Covid-19 well and should be replaced with an insurance system, even though the US system is much less fair than our own.

As you may recall, the pro-Brexit brigade promised us £350m a week rebate for the NHS if we left Europe, a pledge that evaporated as quickly as an off-the-cuff lie does from Boris Johnson’s slippery tongue.

Johnson praises the NHS with one forked tongue and invents huge investment and phantom new hospitals with the other – all while overlooking the years of austerity his party imposed, leaving the NHS a relatively weak position when Covid-19 struck.

Anyone wondering whether privatisation is good or bad will eventually fall over Margaret Thatcher’s sell-off of the water industry. And anyone who knows me, or must endure my grumbles for family reasons, will know that I hate the unnecessary use of ‘literally’ that people drop into sentences literally all the time.

But I will allow myself this exception.

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.

Last week, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson imposed that fine after the privatised water company admitted it had discharged raw sewage into some of the most delicate environments in the country.

It literally put literal shit in the sea because even that £90m fine was apparently a ‘better investment’ than spending money on sorting out how they dealt with our shit.

Since Thatcher privatised water, it is reported that firms have run up £48bn in debts to line the pockets of shareholders (analysis by Philip Inman, The Guardian, July 10, 2021).

To seemingly put shareholders above customers and the safety of the environment shows how privatising water was a terrible idea. And as it’s a monopoly, as you even can’t shop around for rival water.

That surely raises a concern that every time another part of the NHS is privatised or handed to an insurance company, there will be lines of shareholders who want their cut first. And queues of private companies looking to be indirectly propped up by taxpayers who fund these deals.

Has anyone ever totted up just how much privatisation has cost us all? And I haven’t even started on the railways.

FIRST, a muddy warning. Don’t turn to me to learn about football. That has always been the case, but here are some thoughts anyway.

I watched all the England games in Euro 2020. Last night’s final was frustrating in a manner I recall from down the years. Hopes were raised and dashed, and penalties were involved. To this occasional football tourist, these things are familiar.

Much less familiar is the nature of the England team, admirable young men working together and doing their best, even if their best last night wasn’t as good as it might have been (but it was the final and we were in it).

Yes, the result was disappointing, but nowhere near as deeply disappointing as the racist abuse on social media hurled at three players, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, who failed to score in the penalty shootout, resulting in a 3-2 loss to Italy.

In response to this mistreatment, Boris Johnson popped up on Twitter, saying the “England team deserve to be lauded as heroes, not racially abused on social media”, adding that “those responsible for this appalling abuse should be ashamed of themselves”.

Decent enough words, but still problematic, as this is the same man who condemned England players for taking the knee before their matches. Johnson wants it all where the England team is concerned. He nods to his backwoods backbenchers by being critical of players who support Black Lives Matter, as does his home secretary, Priti Patel. Then both don England shirts and gurn for the cameras while urging on the team.

Bizarrely, Johnson was shown outside Downing Street surrounded by England flags and England bunting, with the St George limply fluttering everywhere. He even unfurled a flag. I say unfurled, but he looked as if he was removing a letter from a soggy brown envelope.

This, remember, is the man who said once that he doesn’t do gesture politics – a statement to which you may wish to add your own gesture. This, remember, is the former columnist who loved to entertain his readers with racist jokes about watermelon smiles and the like.

Johnson has few candid moments, but not long ago he admitted that football meant little to him although he understood that the game was important to others. For once I thought, fair play to that man.

Yet as soon as England started doing well, Johnson was all over the team, wanting a bit of reflected glory.

Perhaps you can take this England team as a symbol of whatever you wish. To me it’s a symbol of a multi-cultural country in which the benefits and opportunities of immigration are represented by splendid young men such as Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, and that charming weaver of the ball, Raheem Sterling.

In the past, Sterling has suffered endless newspaper hostility, with the Sun criticising his “love of bling” and calling him “OBSCENE RAHEEM” in June 2016. A headline eclipsed by the more recent: “55 years of hurt never stopped us Raheeming.”

There’s praise for you, with a side order of hypocrisy. Pudding steamed both ways is a popular dish at the Ye Olde England restaurant. Around those tables, many proud Englanders sing the praises of the England team, while overlooking that most of the star players are black and arrived here due to immigration. Those diners have a sort of white-washed view of England that is hilariously undone by the nature of the team they support.

And then some of them turn on three young players who missed penalties and douse them in racist abuse. How charming.

Personally, I’d like to thank the all the players, white, black and any shade in between, for giving us a human-spirited team to be proud of, even if they stumbled at the end. They will have other chances.

England manager Gareth Southgate takes the blame for those missed penalties, as you would expect from an honourable man, saying he chose the penalty takers, so it was on him.

With such honesty, Southgate will never make a real leader. Just ask Boris Johnson. Find someone else to carry the can is his first rule of survival.

So, don’t turn to me to learn about football. Or tennis come to that. After all that sport, I am going to enjoy not being a spectator for a while.