SEVEN hours is a long time for Dominic Cummings to have given evidence to MPs, and it’s hard to remember such a savaging for a sitting prime minister from a recently exiled ally.

Your takeaway from yesterday is likely to depend on what you thought beforehand.

If you dislike this government and its underhand ways, you will still dislike this government and its underhand ways, only with more evidence for your convictions.

If you like this government, and a surprising number of people seem to, you will say it’s all about revenge and anyway it’s a Westminster bubble about nothing much.

If you are generally anti, you will have to swallow the boiled fact that former Downing Street adviser Cummings, once seen by your side as the devil in a baseball cap, is now the man handing out the ammunition. If he was awful back then, is he acceptable now?

Everyone will have an opinion about this, or maybe their opinion will be that it’s not worth having an opinion.

Instead of joining that noisy crowd, here is another aspect to this: it’s all about the source.

When giving journalism lectures, I like to include a session on where news comes from. This sometimes comes with a dad-joke explanation of the difference between sources and sauces.

This came back to me this morning when skimming through what the papers had to say/spit about Cummings.

The man himself said something telling about sources. This was as follows: “The main person really though that I spoke to in the whole of 2020 was Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, because the BBC has a special position in the country obviously during a crisis and because I was in the room for certain crucial things I could give guidance to her on certain very big stories.”

The social media haters will take this as proof that Kuenssberg is a witch in a pointy Tory hat. Such attacks misunderstand the nature of her job. She is basically a political reporter operating under the prevailing circumstances, where quoting anonymous government sources is the stuff of everyday political reporting.

Those unnamed ministers and sources are spilled all over this morning’s papers, as shown by the BBC website paper review.

In the Daily Telegraph, an unnamed adviser to a cabinet minister tells the paper Cummings was “quite selective on what he remembered”.

Over in The Times,  an unnamed cabinet minister – the same one; who knows? – tells the Times that Mr Cummings was after “vengeance”.

Also in The Times, there are quotes from several government sources, all questioning Mr Cummings’ credibility. One anonymous hit-person said the accusations were a “character assassination” that was “not backed by evidence”. Another says this was “revenge porn”.

Whoever said what, those anonymous cabinet sources are worrying – as too was Cummings when he was anonymously tipping off Kuenssberg.

Granting anonymity to sources for stories should be limited to those who need protection. Whistleblowers who could be putting themselves at risk by speaking out about something important need protection. This does not apply to cabinet sharks who remain nameless for their own Machiavellian purposes, while also leaving us uncertain about who is biting whom.

It’s always entirely possible that an anonymous source is made up – or is the prime minister himself. We just don’t know and that’s wrong. They should all be named.

At least The Guardian, the Daily Mirror and the i newspaper all picked the same directly attributed Cummings quote for their headline – “tens of thousands of people died, who didn’t need to die”.

Below you will see a different take from the Daily Express. It’s perfectly mad but I’ll just leave it here, as if dropped from a faraway planet. Which is a way it was…

THE six cardboard boxes lined up in the hall are gone, and along with them this job. Now it’s the following day and we’re all meeting to say hello and goodbye.

The jokes have been running for a while, about how we’ll come face to face and find ourselves saying, “You’re on mute”. Or about how we’ll be amazed to discover we all have bodies, not just faces flattened on a Chromebook screen.

One day one of us said “I’m six-foot-four” and the rest of us hadn’t guessed; hadn’t stopped to wonder who is tall and who is small; or who lands perfectly in between (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).

As census engagement managers, we’ve been working across the north east, an area that the Office for National Statistics deems to run from Hull to Selby and then all the way up to Northumberland.

Before this we’ve all done different jobs and we’ll be doing different jobs again.

York is where we’re saying hello and goodbye. As this suits me indecently well, I’ve arranged the venues.

First of all we are in the Maltings, which is near the station and easy to find. Two of the group are present when I arrive, and the others follow gradually, until everyone is here, knocking elbows before sitting at two tables to comply with the eased restrictions.

Real beer in a real pub, a mundane marvel nowadays, and that Turning Point beer was lovely (two pints down already, a lot for a beery lightweight).

Ninety minutes or so later, we brave the rain for another venue. The Judge’s Lodging may be grand but it looks dismal today, especially those dripped-on tables out front, barely covered by umbrellas.

“It’s all right, you’re not here,” says the young woman at the outdoor reception desk.

We are led through the building to a row of posh huts at the back, each heated and nicely lit. Again, it’s six-plus-six as those are the rules, but that’s fine and we chat and eat and drink, some of us more than is usually the case on a Friday afternoon (another pint down).

At one point I ask if anyone is ready for my walking tour of York, as the latest downpour clatters away, scattering cats and dogs.

But never mind the rain. It’s a lovely occasion and it turns out that you can get to know people you’ve never met before. Meeting only online may be frustrating, but it’s possible to reach out across that divide after all those digital coffee breaks.

Somewhere along the way, the human touch seeps through. There are in jokes and work moans, along with a sense that we’ve done a good job, and never mind the frustrations (or the spreadsheets, oh God the spreadsheets; I’d never spread a sheet before and don’t particularly wish to again).

After three hours, some of us leave and some of us step smartly across the wet road to the House of The Trembling Madness (another pint, then a shandy).

Eventually we are four, then I want to leave as more beer would be unwise. Outside on the pavement, bumped elbows give way to parting hugs, and the rain gives way to that peculiar climactic condition known as not-rain, barely seen this month.

It was a great leaving do and everyone seemed like their on-screen selves, only better, more rounded and less digital. Perhaps we’ll keep in touch, as there’s a WhatsApp group.

Being a manager for Census 2021 was the first job I’d done with no connection to journalism – all the way back to the lost horizon of 1979. I was relieved to discover I could do a different job, but if anyone wants me back as a writer, editor or occasional journalism lecturer, now’s your chance.

Or maybe even something different. After all, I know how to engage now.

CAN you imagine any other media organisation indulging in such woeful self-flagellation as the BBC?

Lord Dyson’s report into how Martin Bashir used deceit to secure an interview with the Princess of Wales in 1995 was ordered by the BBC board shortly after Tim Davie became director general.

A mistrustful person might almost wonder if Davie were an undercover agent, an anti-BBC mole brought in to undermine the organisation from within.

Lord Dyson’s findings do not flatter the BBC, but the coverage has resulted in a weird bout of corporate poking-yourself-in-the-eye-with-a-stick. The BBC’s media editor, Amol Ragan, seemed indecently eager to explain how terrible this was for the BBC in a breathless bout of wounding observations.

The self-harming was so intense, and so much in the mould of the BBC Talking About The BBC, that I turned off. This happens more than used to be the case. It’s down to the intense repetition of the news agenda, with every outlet shouting from the same hymn book (Brexit, Covid, endless stories about the Royal Family).

There are reasons to be suspicious about why this report was ordered and who benefits, as well as leaving a moment to wonder why we can’t stop going on about something that happened fully 25 years ago.

The royal family is surely content to see blame for Diana’s death palmed off onto the BBC and one of its reporters. That way a seething mound of uncomfortable truths about how the royals treated Diana, and about how Prince Charles treated her, might be overlooked.

This scandal also offers the BBC’s enemies a perfect opportunity to demand that it be changed or abolished, or at the very least bashed into unquestioning meekness.

Boris Johnson, no stranger himself to a cheating tongue, would be very happy to see unfavourable coverage stifled on the BBC (spoiler alert: it’s possible this has already happened).

While we are kicking that stone down the road, the latest Private Eye has a telling snippet about Robbie Gibb, the former Tory spin doctor who once said he hated the “woke wetness” of the BBC, where he has just been appointed to the corporate board.

According to the Eye, Gibb spoke to journalism students at City University a year ago, telling them that “99 times out of a hundred, the things you hear from ministers are truthful”, and that journalists should stop thinking they are cleverer that the people they are interviewing.

Bizarrely, Gibb also told the students that the Daily Mail and the Daily Express were more truthful than other newspapers – a statement so wrong it might as well be a statue.

As for the general hypocrisy, that hangs heavier than the outrageously expensive wallpaper Boris Johnson had pasted up on the Downing Street walls.

If hypocrisy has a sound, it is tabloid mouthpieces tut-tutting about the morals of the BBC.

The Daily Express, these days not much a newspaper as a government press release in flimsy disguise, said that “pressure grows to reform the BBC”.

That from the newspaper that has done more than any other to flog to death old stories about Diana, including such dubious delights as “Princess Diana was murdered…” from April 2017.

No, she died with her boyfriend in a car crash in Paris, leaving her young sons at home – something that isn’t always remembered.

For newspapers that have spent decades living off the ghost of Diana to criticise the Martin Bashir interview is like one raving hyena telling another to get better manners.

Prince William believes that Bashir’s deceit influenced what his mother had to say, and may have led to her death two years later. While such a comment is understandable from a grieving son, it’s hard to stand up. Diana was desperate to talk about her marriage and her feelings; if not Bashir it would have been someone else.

And to conclude with another dollop of that rank hypocrisy, the nastiest jelly on a plate you ever did see, we’re nearly all guilty of that. Anyone who’s read all the endless words about Diana is as guilty as those who wrote them. Anyone who gawped at that Panorama interview and lapped it all up, is as guilty as the reporter using low trickery to secure the interview.

One day we will all have to stop feasting off that tragedy.

Culture wars secretary Oliver Dowden is very keen on delivering sermons about what he’s not going to put up with. He was doing this again yesterday in the church of the Sunday Telegraph.

Dowden has been not putting up with a lot lately, and mostly he’s been not putting up with people pulling down statues, even though hardly anybody does.

For his latest discourse, and I swear this must be one of those repeats people are always complaining about, Dowden was once again not putting up with allowing “Britain’s history to be cancelled”.

You hear this a lot at the moment and, frankly, it’s a puzzle. No one wishes to cancel history and anyway, you can’t. It’s there, it happened, it’s been and gone. 1066 and all that? Oh, no – we’ve cancelled that. It’s not there anymore, doesn’t exist.

When Dowden says he won’t put up with people cancelling history, what he means is that he won’t put up with people who think differently than himself or the government about how to present the many shades and shapes cast by our history. Unless you agree with him, your ideas are not wanted around here.

In his sermon, Dowden also said we should “stand up to the political fads and noisy movements of the moment”.

Well, yes. Especially if it’s that political fad and noisy movement of the moment about pretending that history is being torn up by leftie woke elves. If that’s your fad, Dowden’s your man.

Anyway, the culture wars secretary has gathered together a new Heritage Advisory Board to discuss all this, and don’t be surprised if any board member who dares to disagree suddenly falls through a chute in the floor.

In an aside, his latest sermon contained a passage about how voters in Red Wall seats will replace “people from metropolitan bubbles” on the boards of British museums. This was designed purely to generate headlines and/or a reaction, so we shall step over that trap while whistling something from the opera; or Van Morrison.

We won’t, however, let this next one pass without comment.

In bragging mode, Dowden sang his own praises in relation to the £2billion Cultural Recovery Fund.

Fair enough, up to a point. Yes, this money is a vital raft for the arts and heritage, even if that’s just what governments should do in such a crisis. It’s simply their job. Yet Dowden can’t resist saying that “this offers further proof that it is the Conservatives who are the party of culture”.

Oh, come off it. It’s rich for any single party to claim that title, especially the Tories. Years of austerity tore into the arts, and many other aspects of life.

Anyway, perhaps Dowden should have a word with education secretary Gavin Williamson, who at this very minute is proposing to cut the funding of arts subjects at universities from £36m to £19m (see past rants…)

An allegedly culture-loving culture wars secretary shouldn’t have to put up with such behaviour from a member of his own party.

Culture wars are this government’s favourite hobby. They cause distraction, they stop people talking about other things, and they dupe pissed-off bloggers into joining the argument instead of staying sensibly away.

These invented battles are barstool banter elevated to government policy. I realise that Sir Keir Starmer has a lot on his plate, but he really needs to work out how Labour can defuse these silly culture wars.

Big hint to Keir – don’t just join in, but oppose and ridicule, and expose this culture war for the cynical conjuring trick it surely is.

As for Oliver Dowden, we really shouldn’t have to put up with him.

NOW seems a good time to catch up with David Cameron. We go back a bit, Dave and me, as the framed newspaper on the study wall suggests.

This is a mocked-up front page of my old paper, presented six years ago on my departure. Such pages are a journalistic tradition and usually contain in-jokes. A strap along the bottom of mine suggests turning inside for “Julian’s David Cameron tribute column…”

You see, I had a weakness then for boring on about appalling Tory prime ministers (some habits never change).

After he left Downing Street while whistling, having brought Brexit crashing around our heads, the never less than impressively smug Cameron composed an account of his time in power. He was paid a reported £800,000 in a deal with HarperCollins to write For The Record. Mostly what people remember is that he spent a chunk of his generous advance on a shepherd’s hut in which to explain away his actions and say how jolly well he’d done.

I’ve not read For The Record but do cherish a photograph showing an unsold pile with a manager’s special offer ticket – reduced from £25 to £3.

Skimming over the reviews just now, here is Cameron on the Brexit vote – “My regrets about what had happened went deep. I knew then that they would never leave me. And they never have.”

Well, matey you were responsible for that shitshow, breezily assuming you’d win the vote and land one on Nigel Farage.

Call Me Dave will also be remembered as the prime minister who said he’d end the “who you know” lobbying culture – only to find himself in a lobbying scandal of his own contrivance, and all because of who he knew.

Fate can be unkind; then again sometimes fate kisses sweet.

Yesterday, Cameron was hauled before a committee of MPs to explain why he sent so many pleading emails and WhatsApp messages to ministers on behalf of the controversial bank he worked for – a bank that went bust, without the state aid Cameron was seeking.

The reviews from MPs were not glowing. He was told he’d “demeaned” the position of prime minister by lobbying on behalf of Greensill Capital and that his behaviour had left his “reputation in tatters”.

Call Me Tatters was forced to deny his lobbying was driven by fears that an “opportunity to make a large amount of money was at risk”. He refused to say how much he stood to make from the bank, but told MPs he was paid “a generous amount, far more than I earned as prime minister”.

He also claimed he’d not done this for himself, but for the economy; otherwise know as the economy of me, perhaps.

This sweaty Zoom appearance offered other unflattering insights into a world of easy wealth piled upon easy wealth, of failure grandly rewarded. The one that sticks in the mind – and craw – is Cameron admitting he’d used the failed billionaire financier’s private jet to fly to Cornwall to visit his “third” holiday home.

He was hazy about how many times that happened, saying he did not have a “complete record”. Seeing as we’re drawing parallels here, I can tell you precisely how many times a billionaire’s private yet has whisked me off to Cornwall.

It’s foolish to envy other people’s wealth, but just how much money does David Cameron need? He was wealthy anyway, earned a good salary as prime minister, was paid a packet to write a book nobody much read, and still wants more.

So there he was yesterday, all sweaty and defensive, and exposed as needy too, an overprivileged man who went all the way from lobbying for the TV company Carlton to lobbying for a failed banker, with a spell as prime minister in between.

Still, we must all do what we can. While Cameron was earning a fortune for that book, I’ve eked out a freelance living, written books yet to be published, worked for two universities and the Press Association, then lost those jobs, and spent eight months working as a census engagement manager.

That census role disengages next week, then it’s back to whatever in a long stagger towards the finish line of retirement.

Still, at least I did get to write that David Cameron tribute column.

IMAGINE being the Queen and having to read out whatever Boris Johnson just scribbled on the back of a fag packet.

Her Very Patient Majesty had to recite some tatty words yesterday. Her ventriloquism act reminds us that we are governed by right-wing columnists who heard something from a friend who heard it from a pal who likes a drink.

Two important bills might almost be based on gin or Bordeaux-fuelled urban myths.

One is the proposal for voters to have photo IDs. Here is a view from a perhaps surprising source (Tory MP speaks sense alert!) –

‘It’s illiberal. It’s an illiberal solution in pursuit of a non-existent problem. If you’ve got an ID card, you’re putting a barrier in the way of people to exercise their own democratic rights, which is not necessary and shouldn’t be there’.

It’s unsettling to find yourself nodding along to David Davis, but he has a point.

There is no noticeable problem with voting fraud and no honest reason for such a plan. But there is a dishonest one and it comes from the Trumpian playbook.

This plan could, according to this morning’s Guardian and others, risk freezing out two million voters – many at society’s margins who are unlikely to vote Tory. This is self-serving and a nasty piece of work; and should you wish to borrow those words to describe a prominent political personage, feel free.

Incidentally, in a TV encounter Health Secretary Matt Hancock was told by a reporter that there had been only six cases of voter fraud. Gathering up his full pomp, he replied that was “six too many” – much in the way that one Matt Hancock is one too many.

Later on Channel 4 News, Hancock bristled at being asked about the lack of social care plans in the speech. As Gary Gibbon pushed on this, Hancock tried to remain his usual smarmy self while the muscles in his neck tightened at the indignity of having to answer such questions.

Favourite Tory urban myth number two… our universities are rammed full of intolerant students who silence anyone remotely right wing – hence today’s headline in The Times, “New laws to protect university free speech.”

Thanks to Phil Batty from Times Higher Education for pointing out on Twitter that the latest Office for Students figures “for the university sector in England show that of 59,574 events organised with an external speaker, 53 were not approved. Yes, that’s 0.09% of events”.

A big hammer for a pimple-sized problem.

Still, this protecting free speech lark isn’t half complicated. As Education Secretary Gavin Williamson hauls his proposal up by the scruff of its pinstriped neck, Culture Wars Secretary Oliver Dowden continues his attempt to purge museums of anyone who disagrees with the government (see past Ledges).

The latest distinguished exile is the science author Sarah Dry, who withdrew her application to be reappointed as a trustee of the Science Museum Group after, according to the Observer, being told “to back the government’s policy against the removal of contentious historical objects”.

She declined, saying that “only by remaining free of government interference can our museums continue to earn the trust of the public”.

So to recap: free speech is the freedom of right-wing people to speak at universities without being interrupted (which generally they can do anyway); while free speech isn’t the freedom of people who run museums to say that they might disagree with the government.

Telling footnote: Gavin Williamson wants to ‘protect freedom of speech’ at universities at the same time that he wants to slash the freedom to study on arts courses. Spending on non-science subjects is due to be slashed from £36m to £19m, with more cuts promised.

This proposal wears culture war armour. The tinpot explanation is that this will “target taxpayers’ money towards the subjects which support the skills this country needs to build back better”.

In case the former fireplace salesman of the year has forgotten, the creative industries earn a fortune for this country, adding £115bn to the UK economy in 2019.

And why do we have to back one side rather than the other? A country without culture would be poorer in so many ways.

Anyway, how about all that taxpayers’ money that was targeted at Tory-supporting business people who suddenly became interested in supplying PPE to build back better their bank accounts?

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.