DON’T go boring on about politics again, you know it’s not good for you. Sours your mood and puts you in the pickle jar, and nothing changes anyway.

So don’t go talking…

…but what do we learn from the Conservative victory in Hartlepool?

Sighing… well we learn that some people don’t know when to shut up about politics. And as with Brexit and Donald Trump, we also learn that what you don’t want to happen goes and happens anyway, so why pickle yourself.

But you see, Hartlepool was a result both surprising and unsurprising, and…

Sighing, go on then…

Surprising because this is a poor town in the north east that has always been Labour.

Surprising because the Tories cashed in so bountifully on a desire for change when they’ve been in charge for 11 long years; surprising because north-easterners whose lives have been made worse by Tory austerity happily embraced the party of Boris Johnson, voting for a man who’s as far removed from their lives as it is possible to be, yet they seem to like him.

Unsurprising because Hartlepool was Brexit central and Boris Johnson is Mr Brexit. Unsurprising because the government has been paying many people’s wages for a year; unsurprising because the pandemic has over-shadowed everything else, including the rapidly disintegrating world-beating benefits of Brexit (wait ten years and we might have an answer about that).

Johnson is an entertainer politician, a genius at campaigning and fooling everyone with his bumbling cheeriness – and a useless prime minister, because the job is boring and requires concentration when he prefers the fireworks of distraction.

What do we learn about whose fault this all was from scrolling through Twitter? Everything and nothing, but mostly nothing.

Some Labour supporters said it was all Jeremy Corbyn’s fault; others said if only Corbyn was still been in charge, this wouldn’t have happened.

Some said Sir Keir Starmer needed to put more distance between himself and Corbyn; others insisted he needed to be more Jeremy.

Please, no – but it’s all academic anyway. There’s no point fighting yesterday’s wars on tomorrow’s battlefield. And there doesn’t seem to be much mileage left in Starmer’s mea culpa act, insisting Labour needs to listen more.

No harm in listening but Starmer needs to define who he is, what his party believes in – and put the fight to Boris Johnson, laying out how Labour can connect with people and talk about what matters to them. No point earnestly muttering in the corner like a spurned boyfriend wondering where his sparkle has gone. Get out there and conjure some political magic.

The game has gone Johnson’s way for now and we’re stuck with him, perhaps until he falls into a scandal pit of his own making, toppled in there by his own bad behaviour.

And then…

You’re still talking about politics. Haven’t you got anything better to do, a book to read or something?

Yes, as it happens – and it’s not about politics at all.

What exactly are culture wars and do they have anything to do with live yoghurt?

Of course not, you fool. They’re skirmishes on the political battlefield that are more important than they seem.

Who likes to have these culture wars, then?

Boris Johnson’s Tories. They love a culture war because it summons up an enemy and makes them seem under siege from lefties and…

But they’re in charge…

Exactly. You’re getting the hang of these culture wars now. The idea is for right-wing politicians who run the show to put on the cloak of victimhood and…

Or the brogues of victimhood…

Yes, that’s a good one…

So give me an example then.

Well, for starters anyone who uses ‘woke’ as an insult is up to their creaking knees in the culture war. But here is a recent example. According to the Financial Times at the weekend, the chair of Royal Museum Museums Greenwich has resigned in protest at ministers “purging his board as a part of a culture war being waged by the government”.

Who’s that then – some sort of leftie?

No, it’s Charles Dunstone, one of Britain’s best-known entrepreneurs and the billionaire founder of Carphone Warehouse – and a man who has in the past donated to the Tories.

So what’s caused him to flounce out?

That’s unkind. He’s not flouncing out, but taking a principled stand because culture secretary Oliver Dowden apparently refused to reappoint a trustee who advocates ‘decolonising’ the curriculum. Aminul Hoque is an academic in education studies at Goldsmiths College – just round the corner from the National Maritime Museum, the Cutty Sark and the Royal Observatory run by the group.

Didn’t you go to Goldsmiths College?

Yes, but it was a long time ago and many more distinguished people have passed through since then.

Did he pull his weight then, this academic?

Colleagues at the Royal Museums Greenwich described him as a “devoted and conscientious” trustee, according to the FT. Hoque himself is said to be “shocked, disappointed and baffled” by the decision.

So Oliver Dowden – he’s really the Culture Wars Secretary then?

Yes, you’re getting the hang of this now. This has been called “culture cleansing” and the idea is to weed out people who don’t agree with the government line on things. Just remember those ridiculous Tories in the Common Sense Group complaining that the National Trust’s report into past slaving links was an “ideologically motivated endeavour” to rewrite history. Instead it was an honest attempt to write a fuller version of history, reflecting the bad as well as the good.

So they only like a Tory-approved version of history?

Exactly. According to a ‘leading Conservative’ quoted by the FT, there exists an “expectation that members of a board should have a similar attitude to that of the government”.

Do you have other examples?

How long have you got… Two female board directors of Channel 4 have been blocked. Dowden has just nominated Robbie Gibb, a former Downing Street director of communications and a well-known critic of the BBC, to the BBC board. Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail, is being touted as front-runner to become chair of Ofcom – even though he has no background in broadcasting.

Anything else?

Well, while we’re at the Beeb, the new director general, Tim Davie, is a Tory and a believed supporter of Boris Johnson. Some suspicious sorts to be found lingering on this ledge suspect Davie is making BBC News reluctant to criticise the government at all.

How come Davie missed that bit in Line Of Duty where Hastings had a rant about truth – “God, give me strength, a barefaced liar promoted to our highest office! What has happened to us? When did we stop caring about honesty and integrity?”

Perhaps that one was pushed through by writer Jed Mercurio before Tim Davie got the job. And, technically, he wasn’t talking about Boris Johnson.

But he was really, wasn’t he?

Shush – or Line Of Duty might become another victim of those culture wars. You know, what we have here are the people in charge pretending everything is stacked against them and twisting everything to their agenda, and making sure public bodies are run by like-minded people.

So how come they always win if everything is stacked against them?

That’s just one of life’s mysteries.

I LOVE that Boris Johnson says he loves John Lewis. It’s like he has a check-list of things that ordinary people like. Yes, I love – casts shifty eye along list handed to him – ah, yes, that John Lewis shop.

You know our politics has gone strange when the prime minister feels moved to say he loves a particular department store. I’d wage the price of a John Lewis cashmere jumper that he’s never even been inside the place. Unlike Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who popped into a branch to look at wallpaper in a lame political stunt aimed at mocking Johnson’s expensive taste in wall coverings.

All this is wrapped up in the costly renovation of the apartment in No 11 Downing Street (see earlier Ledge reports). Oh, and Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s partner, reportedly telling friends that Theresa May left behind a “John Lewis nightmare” that just had to be removed, whatever the cost.

Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, who is married to Michael Gove, went on the BBC Today programme to say that the prime minister couldn’t be expected to live in a skip. Not sure she was helping there, but that’s what you get when Mr and Mrs Macbeth lend you their support.

I really do love John Lewis, or I did until they decided to close the store opened in York to huge fanfare only a few years ago, after much whispering of sweet nothings in the council’s ear. Now they are off, just like that, leaving a jumper-sized hole and staff without their jobs. And, whisper it in the menswear aisle, those jumpers aren’t as good as they used to be.

As for furniture, we have three pieces that I can think off. The desk that transports me to this ledge. The sofa in the conservatory where I seek inspiration in a kip. And the coffee table still too new for me to put my feet on.

There would be more, but ordinary non-toff, non-prime-ministerial people can only dream of the more expensive furniture and those nightmare fitted kitchens, and all those cheap sofas that don’t cost a fraction of the £10,000 Johnson is said to have spent on one sofa. John Lewis is the place where ordinary people would go if money wasn’t tight.

On one level, this is a story about careless privilege and posh types who break things without noticing. But it is cast in a harsher light when you see the government shoving through a Fire Safety Bill that will leave many leaseholders, not developers, lumbered with the cost for removing dangerous cladding.

That’s a true housing scandal. What have those people done to deserve that; and why were the Tories so keen to ram this bill through? As the Daily Mirror points out: “It may not be a coincidence that property tycoons gave more than £11million to the Tories between 2019 and 2020”.

That’s why worrying about sleaze matters. Favours done behind the bottles of burgundy affect how politics is conducted out on the street. Never mind ‘cash for curtains’; it should be curtains to all that cash handed over by property tycoons amid a ripple of back-slapping.

ACCORDING to the front page of today’s Daily Mail, ‘self-drive’ cars will be in the UK this year. The only sensible response to this is to cling to the steering wheel and shout “no!”.

This is partly a matter of safety, partly a matter of language.

A hands-free car, or whatever category of madness this might be, is not a self-drive car. Those of us who have cars drive them ourselves, they are piloted by a self, the self sitting in the driver’s seat and counting the motorway miles to the next disappointing coffee in spiritless surroundings. It is us who owns the ‘self’ and not the car.

Admittedly this is a point to obsess perhaps only the few, but there you have it.

In the story itself, the Mail refers to “driverless cars” and this is an improvement, although only linguistically.

The report adds that ‘lane-keeping’ technology would take over, allowing the driver to “go on the internet or read a newspaper”.

And if this were available today, they might pick up their copy of the Daily Mail and exclaim, “Well that’s stupid idea” around the same time that the self-driving, lane-keeping car suddenly throws a  technological wobbly, and swerves into the path of an HGV whose non-driving driver is having a moneyed dream, having fallen asleep in the back after buying a lottery ticket on his mobile.

These stories roll around every so often, and usually they are not quite what they seem. The headline treatment suggests that by the end of the year, our motorways will be filled with cars driving themselves. My own foresight is blurred at the best of times, but I can’t see it happening this side of a far distant tomorrow.

Earlier this month in the US, a Tesla Model S crashed in Texas, killing two men. First reports suggested that no one was in the driving seat and the car’s Autopilot was to blame.

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and well-known tantrum on legs, wasn’t happy about the reporting. According to USA Today, he said: “This is completely false”, adding that journalists who suggested Autopilot was at fault “should be ashamed of themselves”.

The crash is still being investigated, so it’s hard to say either way, although the police officer who attended the accident told various media outlets that “investigators were 99.9% sure no one was behind the wheel when the vehicle crashed”, again according to USA Today.

Maybe one day we will all be driven around automatically, putting our feet up and leaving the car to become irritated by all those other automatic cars and their terrible driving. Until then, these hands are staying on the steering wheel, whatever Elon Musk says.

All of which is a diversion from having to think about Boris Johnson spending £850 per roll for wallpaper to renovate No 10. You don’t often see that in B&Q.

In a sense the row about who might have lent Johnson £58,000 towards the refurb seems a small matter compared with other Johnson-inspired losses, including countless billions on the test and trace system. Not forgetting a reported £53m on that Garden Bridge across the Thames (a fortune for something that was never built).

But sometimes smaller matters contain larger truths, and Changing Rooms: The Downing Street Edition isn’t going away.

As mentioned on this ledge the other day, Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, described Boris Johnson as a “vacuum of integrity”.

While he intended to suggest a moral void on legs, his meaning could be taken another way and used as an advertising slogan for Dyson vacuum cleaners. Buy this one, it’s a vacuum of integrity… our language is weird like that.

Still, the day I get a Dyson will be the day I pop into Wetherspoons for a pint in celebration of having brought a new vacuum cleaner.

DOMINIC Grieve neatly describes Boris Johnson as a “vacuum of integrity”.

The former attorney general’s remark suggests a moral void on legs that hoovers up old colleagues and alliances, ex-wives and sometime bits on the side purely for self-advantage. Or that’s my take on his words.

Grieve was speaking after the prime minister was asked to explain who paid for the expensive refurbishment of the Downing Street flat. Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s spurned special adviser, turned the heat up under that one by way of revenge. It’s tricky to take sides in Johnson versus Cummings, as the Brexit conniving of the latter is the main reason we’re lumbered with the former as our shabby prime minister.

Like flies on the sniff, potential scandals seem to buzz around Johnson’s head.

One concerns James Dyson, the billionaire producer of vacuum cleaners. At the start of the pandemic, Dyson’s company, which he relocated to Singapore, offered to make ventilators for the NHS – but his first step was to text Johnson and check that no one in his company would have to pay extra tax.

When this story leaked last week, Johnson blathered and bellowed about how he wasn’t going to apologise for trying to save lives.

A noisy distraction from the nub of the matter. Which is that any passing billionaire with the prime minister’s private number can hop over the usual barriers and go directly to the man himself to beg a favour. Seeing as Johnson is said to use his own personal mobile with a number he’s had for years, he probably first has to check it’s not an old girlfriend calling.

Here is your useful plot rehash: Dyson never did supply any ventilators; firms that knew how to make ventilators and PPE appear sometimes to have been overlooked in favour of those with Tory connections; and Johnson wasn’t saving lives at the time but endangering them with his chaotic handling of the pandemic.

The return of Tory sleaze is no surprise to those of us who caught that movie first time around. Few of us who fidgeted in the flea-pit of politics at the time will be shocked to learn that David Cameron has seemingly been up to something dodgy in an apparent attempt to become even richer than he already is.

But with Johnson, plenty of voters seem to accept that he’s a liar and a breaker of rules. With him, bad behaviour is factored into the deal, allowing apologists to shrug and say: “Oh, that’s just Boris being Boris.” Or even worse: “Boris is doing his best.”

Fooling everyone in this way is the only mark of the man’s political genius.

Two further examples of Boris doing his best surfaced this morning…

EXAMPLE ONE: The Tory-supporting Daily Mail today carries the astonishing (but anonymously sourced) claim that Johnson said he would rather see “bodies pile high in their thousands” than have a third lockdown. Did he really say that? Downing Street’s our-lies-versus-your-lies department insist he didn’t, although it does sound like just the sort of thing he would say. This afternoon, Johnson is insisting he said no such thing, as he would.

EXAMPLE TWO: The Guardian and the BBC report that Johnson’s government is pushing back against an inquiry into pandemic mistakes, as demanded by grieving relatives. Now is not the time, apparently. And now never will be the time so long as there’s a chance that Boris Johnson might have to carry the can for something.

CULTURE wars started by the uncultured are quite the thing. This is worth remembering in light of the National Trust’s investigation into how its properties were in part built on slavery and colonialism, and a similar study into historical slave links with Rowntree of York.

Apparently, and wouldn’t you just know it, more than 50 Tory MPs and peers belong to something called the Common Sense Group, whose members are dedicated followers of culture war fashion.

I like to see them carrying a shield of ‘common sense’ – more of a battered suitcase perhaps, stuffed with gin-stained pages torn from the Daily Telegraph – as they demand cosy history lessons and the veneration of colonial statues.

Those Tory MPs want the National Trust to concentrate on afternoon teas and old paintings and over-flowing borders. That is to tell only half the story, the prettier half. Anyone brave enough for the unexpurgated version should visit the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool – a necessary rather than an enjoyable trip.

After the National Trust published its Colonial Countryside report last autumn, those common sense Tories complained it was an “ideologically motivated endeavour” to rewrite history. No such thing, of course, but rather an honest attempt to write a fuller version of history, reflecting the bad as well as the good.

The academic behind the report, Corine Fowler, sees such reactions as a “menacing” attempt to politicise and censor historical research.

Fowler, a professor of postcolonial literature at the University of Leicester, speaks too much common sense for the Common Sense Group. “How can less history be better than more history?” she said in an interview with the Guardian in February. “Surely we should be deepening our understanding of history in all its complexity.”

More is better when leafing through history’s mildewed pages: more research, more depth, more understanding, more of an effort to see the flaws in that old diamond of our past.

Incidentally, my own leaky paddling pool of ‘common sense’ makes me wonder if any of the MPs and peers in that grouping have ancestors who benefitted from slave labour.

Prof Fowler’s report is interesting and well worth a read, although its 115 pages contain too much to share for a man hurrying along a ledge.

Here is my main takeaway: slave owners and their companies were handsomely compensated for the end of slavery, rather than those they helped to enslave; and the generous sums on offer led to what the report calls a “feeding frenzy” among certain sections of elite society.

The uppers were eager to grab unto themselves what they could. Then as now you might say, when glancing over at David Cameron.

Normally the history of Rowntree rests on good bricks of “civic philanthropy and social reform”. In its new report, the Rowntree Society looks back with wider eyes to explore the colonial context of the Rowntree company’s growth.

Matters considered include global supply chains, histories of slavery, forced labour, colonialism and racial injustice.

Such potentially shaming research does not detract from the socially minded work carried out in the past by Joseph Rowntree. Or from the work continued today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and accompanying charitable trusts, as they fight to end poverty and raise awareness about those living in poverty. But it does set Rowntree in the wider panorama of time.

The revelations are uncomfortable but not in a sense unsurprising, as even such a morally intentioned company operated in the world as it was, cruel imperfections and all.

An honest account of the past provides a better perspective on the present, although not if you are among the anonymous commentators who skulk below the line in the comments sections of the Press here in York.

An interesting and detailed report by Stephen Lewis into Rowntree’s past led to reactionary heckling from the usual suspects. Witness some classic drool about how slavery made this country great and “you woke types should learn to be proud of our heritage”.

Perhaps you un-woke types should remember that history doesn’t belong to you or to anyone.

IF you are not much of a royalist, this is a weekend to suppress your feelings.

But it is fair to wonder if Prince Philip’s own “no-fuss, no-nonsense” approach to life seems out of kilter with the intense coverage greeting his death.

Yesterday, all the BBC TV channels were swept clear of anything deemed unsuitable – and that was everything, MasterChef final and all, while the corporation’s radio stations spoke with one solemn voice.

ITV tidied away the usual programmes too, leaving Channel 4 to run long tributes, before returning to normal with Gogglebox (a proportionate decision, surely).

The BBC, in particular, will never please everyone. Any perceived slight will be magnified, making bosses nervous and inclined to defensive over-compensation, hence the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling tributes yesterday.

The relentless coverage prompted many viewers to complain, and the BBC kindly provided a page for their discontent. This in turn sent the stirrers of Defund the BBC off to Twitter for a whiny tantrum: “Disgraceful! The anti-British BBC has set up a form to encourage complaints about the volume of coverage of Prince Philips death.”

In this age of culture wars and dummies spat across rooms, that one deserves a statue all of its own. The BBC covers Prince Philip’s death with slavish, unstinting devotion – and for its efforts is accused of being “anti-British”.

Boris Johnson, meanwhile, stood accused of being anti-comb.

Bumbling out into Downing Street to make the expected statement, the prime minister was his usual dishevelled self, hair arranged like a mutant dandelion.

Here is your reminder that he does this on purpose, thinking it makes him a character, so we shouldn’t fall for it. Even when he is saying what the moment demands, that messy hair turns attention back onto himself.

After a short while listening to Radio 4, the coverage was all too much for me. Thank heavens the BBC hadn’t switched off the iPlayer, as it did with BBC Four, where an on-screen announcement sent viewers back to the news and that royal Groundhog Day of solemnly repeating headlines.

Today’s newspapers are filled with Prince Philip, as is hardly surprising. Take your pick depending on stamina. The Sun looks more sombre than usual, although its main headline dips into sentimentality: “We’re all weeping with you, Ma’am.”

Too saccharinely presumptive for my tastes. The Guardian is better, a full-page black-and-white photograph with the simple, factual headline: “Prince Philip, 1921-2021.”

Its coverage runs to 13 pages, one comment piece and a leader article. A puny effort next to the Daily Mail’s “Historic 144-page issue”. Historic or histrionic, you decide. The Daily Telegraph goes down the same road as the Guardian, only with a full page colour photograph.

Some commentary is deep-fried in hypocrisy. And, yes, we are looking at you, Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail. Thanks to Tim Walker on Twitter for putting Morgan’s fulsome tribute next to an earlier Philip-bashing column, as seen here…

There is no right way to do national grief but the assumption that everyone is upset seems foolish and inaccurate. Yet surely we can agree that Philip’s death, although unsurprising, is personally devastating for the Queen. That is the one important part of this story, and it’s a private weight of grief gathered at the end of a long marriage, not a public spilling of tears by those who didn’t know the man they are crying about.

Personally, I like to think of Prince Philip throwing something at a celestial TV screen, shouting: “Where’s Gardeners’ World – what have they done with Monty! This is a damn disgrace. Get me a fountain pen. I am writing a letter to the director general of the BBC. Dear pipsqueak…”

Philip certainly gave history a run for its money. Not bad for a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction. Lest you think me unkind, that was how Prince Philip once described himself.

AS any atheistic fool knows, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven; or something.

Quite where this cautionary parable leaves a ‘critical friend’ to the Archbishop of York being paid a fortune is another matter.

The job advert mentions a “competitive salary in the region of £90,000 a year”. This appears to be more than archbishop Stephen Cottrell earns himself, according to the ‘clergy pay and expenses’ section of the Church of England website.

There it suggests that the second most important churchman earns £71,470, although I am happy to be corrected if the archbishop happens to be near, although not many archbishops loiter on this ledge.

Seeing that job advert, I wondered for a minute about passing my own lack of religion through the eye of that needle. It does stipulate in the advert that you have to be a Christian, but times are hard for those of us without religion, too.

It’s an awful lot of money for an archbishop’s friend/chief of staff. Did no one think to say that this won’t look so good from a church that’s supposed to be big on modesty; did no one splutter out their milky afternoon tea or choke on their digestive when such a stupendous sum was mentioned?

Also, did no one remember that the previous archbishop, Dr John Sentamu, once said that top executive salaries “weaken community life”?

Speaking in November 2011, Sentamu criticised high salaries in the financial sector, saying: “Among the ill effects of very large income differences between rich and poor are than they weaken community life and make societies less cohesive.”

It is true that he was talking about company executives who wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning for £90,000 a year. But in the ordinary world of ordinary people shuffling by York Minster on whatever they can manage to earn, 90 grand a year is a fortune.

Small parish churches left to survive on a relative pittance may also be surprised that keeping the archbishop company is so handsomely remunerated.

Robert Beaumont, an old friend to this ledge, can be heard making this sensible point in articles for YorkMix and the York Press. As well as being an occasional lunch companion, Robert is churchwarden of St John’s Church in Minskip.

“Being brutally honest, I feel this is terribly ill-advised as some churches in our Boroughbridge Parish, including ours, are really struggling to survive and paying a massive Parish Share each month,” Robert says in those reports. “The C of E is weighed down by bureaucracy and has, I feel, got its priorities all wrong.”

Something else to discuss when that pandemic-delayed lunch rolls around. Perhaps we should ask the archbishop’s mate to pick up the tab.

SOMETIMES a cartoonist says everything you are thinking. So it is today with Ben Jennings in The Guardian.

His cartoon draws attention to Boris Johnson waving the flag as a distraction from the Covid-19 death toll. It shows the prime minister pulling a union flag over the memorial wall on which those who’ve lost loved ones have been drawing hearts.

The National Covid Memorial Wall, near Westminster Bridge, is a very affecting sight, thanks to the massed repetition of a simple heart symbol.

Thousands of red hearts have now been painted on this wall opposite the Houses of Parliament. A perfect memorial to those carelessly lost to Covid before the government got its head together. Now we are supposed only to talk of the relative success of the vaccination programme, putting the shocking toll of dead out of mind somehow.

This brilliant wall corrects the imbalance. If anyone spies a dishevelled blond man with a tin of white paint, call the police. You’ll probably find them guarding that statue of Winston Churchill, as they seem to prefer that to any other job.

TO stick up for the BBC is to turn yourself into a human dart board and I have the puncture marks to prove it. Sadly, this week the BBC has been trying my long loyalty on two fronts: one political, the other cultural.

The political annoyance comes with the BBC’s apparent refusal to carry any reports on the Mirror’s interview with Jennifer Arcuri, who has been spilling lurid beans about what she says was her affair with Boris Johnson during his time as London Mayor.

A certain squeamishness is understandable. Some things are best not imagined, especially all that blond blubbery bouncing, along apparently with a sock lost to passion.

Andrew Marr plum forgot to mention it while skimming the front pages on his BBC1 show last Sunday. Whizzing through a newsprint sheaf, he finished with the Sunday Telegraph, keeping his hand firmly on that front page, seemingly to ensure no one caught a saucy glimpse of the Sunday Mirror beneath.

Took me back to when my grandma would hover in front of the television if she thought anything sinfully inappropriate was about to sully the screen.

Over on BBC Radio Four’s Broadcasting House – one of my favourite programmes – the newspaper review also swerved the Arcuri/Johnson story. Was this just chance or had word gone out from on high that the unseemly business had to stay under the covers? It’s barely been touched by the BBC, apart from Emily Maitlis’s sweep-up prelude about lack of political accountability on Newsnight.

It’s tempting to wonder if the new director general, Tim Davie, a Tory and a believed Johnson supporter, wanted this story squashing. The Murdoch newspapers also sat this one out, with even the Sun more or less staying schtum on what in other circumstances would be the most Sun story ever.

People often talk about the liberal establishment. I’m still waiting for my invitation to join, but fear it must be lost in the privatised post. But with this story we seem to see the traditional establishment at work, making sure that an unsightly stain is covered up.

If this was only about sex, it would simply remind us of Johnson’s famed lack of fidelity; but we knew that already. The political side to this one is that Johnson is said to have officially backed Arcuri’s business during their affair, at a time when she received a £100,000 government grant.

If any other politician was tangled up in such a sofa shag of a story, you’d never hear the end of it in the newspapers and on the television. Yet Johnson always leaps free from everything, like that last slippery sliver of soap you can never grasp.

The cultural disappointment comes with the announcement this week that BBC Four is being downgraded to become an ‘archive channel’ – a posh way of saying a repeats bargain bin. This is a crying shame as BBC Four is filled with excellent arts documentaries, music programmes, quirky comedy classics such as Detectorists, and has introduced many of us to the murky pools of Scandi noir.

What a terrible waste. BBC Four is often first port of call in this house, especially when my wife has spotted an art documentary etched into the listings.

This decision antagonises natural supporters of the BBC, and is a terrible move, even though the BBC still does many things well. Tim Davie, if this is his idea, has shot himself in the foot here. Still, at least Boris Johnson might be able to lend him a sock.

A FRIEND was walking past our house the other day and we had an old-fashioned, face-to-face chat. He still works in the newspaper office where I parked my Doc Martens until a few years ago. Or he does when he’s not typing at home.

Offices are under threat as companies see the economic benefits of having people working from home. Newspaper offices are endangered for the same reason, especially as too many modern press companies never turn down an opportunity to squeeze the last blood from their anaemic stone.

Reach, owner of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, has just told most of its regional journalists that they will now be working from home. This may appeal to some, although it’s hard not to mourn the newspaper office, that crucible of creative gossip and busily tapping fingers. That home of good conversation and heated exchanges; of parried tips and shared sources; of great annoyance and good chats around the boiling kettle.

Young reporters who sign up and find themselves confined to their home will be missing out on learning from those around them, those padded with chat and old stories. Maybe they’ll see that as a narrow escape, but they risk being isolated in a job that’s all about people.

As a nomad of the late pastures, I’ve had a few assorted jobs now, and for the past year they’ve all been done from the study. This is both socially isolating and quietly congenial. If another office job ever comes along, my rider will be that I expect to be able to pick up my guitar through the working day, for a consoling strum; consoling to the strummer, at least.

My first newspaper office was small and sat above a shop in Greater Manchester. Other than that, there is not much to say about the six months spent there.

The second was large and sat above a shop in Deptford, south east London, adjacent to the pub where the playwright Christopher Marlowe is said to have been murdered in 1593. It was also next to the station and the office window offered a panoramic view of the platform. Of people coming and going, and waiting (some since 1593).

On climbing the stairs from the street, you were greeted by the switchboard lady, through whom all calls had to pass, as she plugged you into the outside world, goddess of a pre-digital portal.

We worked on typewriters, slipping a piece of carbon paper between two sheets, and the office rang to the clatter of keys, and stank of smoke and the sweet souring of afternoon beer, lunchtime drinking being the pastime of that lost age.

The editor was genial in the morning, a cheerfulness generally dissipated in the afternoon by too much midday Guinness. At his best, he was a campaigning editor who used his newspaper to stand against the National Front; at his second best he could spot a good job application submitted by a young man sitting above a shop in Greater Manchester.

Computers came in eventually, and not long afterwards another newspaper office was added to the collection, but only on Saturdays, when shifts were done on the Observer, which sat close to St Paul’s cathedral. A classic, old-fashioned newspaper office, until the paper moved across town to something swish with glass lifts.

After that there was York and three offices for the same newspaper, the most recent being the smallest, a parable in brick for the declining state of local newspapers, sadly.

Apart from that, I’ve worked in a newspaper agency office, shared a small university office, and roamed rootless at another university, sans office. And sat at home in the study, rooted but without companions (friendly Zoom coffee breaks making for a passable substitute).

Not everything is good about the office, but mostly it seems beneficial to be working away from home, to be mixing with your colleagues, to have someone to talk to who doesn’t have their looming Zoom face on.