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.

YOU can’t move without tripping over union jacks on the TV news these days. No ministerial Zoom call is complete without a flag the size of the average duvet.

All this is just another round in the culture wars. If, as Samuel Johnson suggested, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, there are a lot of patriotic charlatans around at the moment. When they’re not changing the law to protect statues, they’re flapping flags and suggesting that anyone who disagrees is some category of traitor.

The writer of this blog would like to make a confession. While typing this I am not wearing union jack underpants. Feel free to sue my unpatriotic arse if you wish.

An asinine row broke out last week after TV presenter Naga Munchetty “sniggered at the union jack”, according to a report in the i newspaper. She was later coerced into apologising for liking “offensive” tweets criticising a government minister for being surrounded by flags in his office.

If you keep your sensible head on, you will see that Munchetty was sniggering not at the union jack but at ministers wrapping themselves in the flag at every opportunity.

According again to that report in the i, BBC News bosses were angry that such sniggering “undermined the corporation’s major initiative to appeal to working class viewers”.

Oh, they should get over themselves and grant those working class viewers with a bit of nous. I am sure they can see when the union jack is being waved in their faces as a political distraction from other matters.

The BBC running scared of flag sniggering is run by Tim Davie. On Google, “Is Tim Davie…a Tory?” is the first suggested search. The answer is yes, he is a former Tory councillor.

In a surprise turn-around yesterday, the rightwards-tilting new director general was confronted by an indignant Tory MP during a bizarre Zoom exchange about the BBC’s annual report.

James Wild, possibly the oldest 43-year-old in the country, demanded to know why the BBC annual report featured only one or possibly no union jacks (honestly, I refuse to pay too much attention to such a twerp).

Davie pointed out reasonably enough that the union jack flew over Broadcasting House, adding that the lack of a flag in a report was “a strange metric” by which to measure patriotism.

You can be proud about your country without turning your face beetroot-red. And to be proud of your country in a sensible manner, you have to accept the bad along with the good. No country is 100% good and shouting that we’re the greatest is just puerile – and, if you ask me, not very British.

Then there is vaccine nationalism, using the union jack as a convenient sheet to pull over 130,000 deaths so far during the pandemic.

All this anti-Europe shouting has validity only in so far as the EU is being deeply inept in trying to come up with a vaccine policy. Our successful roll-out is a tribute to the NHS and to clear thinking very late in the afternoon. It doesn’t wipe away all the terrible errors. This nation, to quote from last Sunday’s Observer, “verged on criminal incompetence over its attempts to control the disease”.

What the world needs now is global co-operation and no sneering at the neighbours. To borrow a much-abused phrase, we’re all in this together, and gloating over the garden fence, or the English channel, doesn’t help anyone.

We’re not out of this until we’re all out of this.

Oh, and performing well on vaccination doesn’t suddenly make Brexit a good idea. That will still be a stinker long after we’ve waded through this pandemic.

ALLEGRA Stratton, Boris Johnson’s extravagantly paid press secretary, sure has to walk the irony plank. Perched there the other day, she came up with a good one about her boss.

“In the months and years ahead, as he perhaps rearranges his top team, he will be mindful of making sure that that cabinet looks like the British public,” she said.

On those grounds he’d be turfing himself out of his own cabinet. One thing you can say for certain about Boris Johnson is that he has zero resemblance to the great British public.

On the same occasion, Stratton also floated the charming idea that Johnson is a ‘feminist’ – a claim that allowed columnists to pull out a few of his greatest hits, including: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts.”

Perhaps he’d been quoting Germaine Greer or something.

Have you seen the new briefing room in which Stratton will strut her irony stuff? It is said to have cost £2.6m, a remarkable sum for a room that from the early photographs looks like the most expensive village hall in the land after an ill-advised, faintly fascistic makeover. I’d heard that Changing Rooms was coming back to TV but hadn’t realised the series had already started.

Who knew that so many union flags could be squeezed into one place? Like a fool I always thought that flag belonged to the country, but the Conservative Party appears to have bought the franchise when no one was paying attention.

How Johnson enjoys spending other people’s money on vanity projects. Two point six mill is an astonishing sum to splurge on one room so that Stratton can spin-wash the stains. Truly she is the biological washing powder of politics, guaranteed to remove all the mendacity skid-marks.

If you’re wondering how one room cost so much, that’s just how it is with Boris Johnson and money. Someone is always there to pick up the tab. His partner, Carrie Symonds, is reported to have blown £200,000 on decorating a flat in Downing Street – a pound or two over the usual £30,000 budget for prime ministers. A secret whip round among Tory donors is reported to have quietly sorted out that one.

Then there is the new Boris Bunker, a situation room for national emergencies that will come to a reported £9m. Clearly a bargain, as the only added cost will be a Winston Churchill fancy dress outfit in which Johnson can wander around pointing at things.

And while you are digging down the back of the national sofa, could Johnson please have £20m to investigate building a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Or how about the failed garden bridge project across the Thames, dating from his days as London Mayor? That span to nowhere cost you and me £43m, according a BBC report of February 19, 2019.

And did someone just mention £37bn on a test and trace system that seems to have been of little real benefit? Perhaps the blowing of such an incomprehensible sum explains why there is nothing much in the kitty to give nurses a decent pay rise.

Here, to close, is a trailer for another money-spraying venture. This is the No 10 documentary being heavily trailed on social media with the movie-like tagline: “Extraordinary. Unexpected. Fantastic.” A Beacon of Hope: The UK Vaccine Story.”

Does that sound like a white-washing exercise to remove all memory of all the earlier pandemic mistakes and one of the highest death tolls in the world, while washing away all talk of a public inquiry?

Over to you, Allegra.

YOU have to feel for those poor right-wing newspaper columnists, forced to toil unnoticed as an unfeeling world does them down.

Please lend your pity to Richard Littlejohn. All those years of ranting away in the Daily Mail and other unseemly locations. All those years of the world being against you. Just the other day, Littlejohn could be heard complaining again about that rotten left-wing plot.

“The vengeful Left is cynically using a rift in the Royal Family to launch an all-out assault on the British Press,” ran the headline above his column.

To misquote Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo, “infamy, infamy, those scheming lefties have all got it in for me”.

Just imagine the torment of being a right-wing columnist for all those years. Your side wins the elections, pulls the levers of power – and yet still those devious lefties want to spoil your fun with their liberal establishment and their wicked woke ways.

In this instance, the leftie avengers had ganged up on the misunderstood chief of the Society of Editors, Ian Murray. This is a journo-centric matter in a way, but stick with me. After Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they accused the British press of racism, Murray issued a tin-eared rallying call, declaring that there was no racism in the press.

Assorted journalists – many black, but by no means all – protested about this statement; assorted editors – some vaguely left-wing, but by no means all – protested about this statement. And Murray stepped down, clearly having erred.

Yet he was the victim of his own actions, not of the vengeful left. It’s telling the way right-wing columnists play the poor us card in order to make themselves the victims. They wilfully exaggerate the power of the lefties and the liberals, conjuring up an enemy far more powerful than the puny reality.

As for what Murray said, the newspapers don’t get to decide if they are racist. That’s for others to say. And the same observation does royal service with the Duke of Cambridge who, when ambushed by a reporter’s impudence, declared: “We are very much not a racist family.” What else could he say? Not much, but again that’s for others to say.

In case you should be wondering what a right-wing columnist might make of last night’s appalling scenes on Clapham Common, think no more. Sarah Vine is on hand in the Mail on Sunday to give her view on the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard, a death that lies heavy on the heart of York, where Sarah grew up.

To be fair to Vine, her column would have been written before last night’s appalling scenes in which women protesting about violence against women found themselves being manhandled – a word used advisedly in this context – by police officers.

But still…

“How wrong for Sarah’s death to be hijacked by men haters,” runs that headline. As for what lies beneath, I’ve not read it and have no intention of doing so. But I did read Littlejohn’s efforts, so feel free to cut me some slack.

Home secretary Priti Patel might say “questions need to be answered” over the police handling of that vigil in Sarah’s memory. But a wider question needs to be asked about her new Policing Bill that aims to extend temporary pandemic restrictions on protest marches.

Sadly, Patel is intolerance personified. She is also a publicly alleged bully whose reportedly intolerable behaviour cost the government – in other words, you and me – £340,000 to settle with ex-Home Office chief Philip Rutman.

Still, there’s probably a right-wing column to be written about how the ‘Pritster’ – to borrow the prime minister’s absurd nickname for her – doesn’t deserve any of this and has been set up by vengeful lefties.

PERHAPS one day all this will be over. Perhaps it already is and no one thought to tell me.

And maybe one day the memory will fade of trying to set up an online work meeting on two laptops at the same time.

The cause of this act of juggling is no longer worth recalling. Just imagine if you will a man watching himself on two separate screens, each capturing a different unflattering reflection, as he bobs between the computers.

It is rumoured that this man goes out running three times a week. If so, the belly captured on one of the screens seems unfortunate. No, really, that can’t be a true representation. It must be the angle of the screen or something.

For reasons best known to themselves, the two laptops are screaming at each other in a feedback shout-off. The man ducking between the two computers, while trying not to notice his belly again, decides the only thing to do is switch off one of the laptops.

Silence returns, there is only one of the man again, a definite improvement. Then the man realises he’s turned off the computer that made the invitation to the meeting, and now he won’t be able to let anyone in.

The past year or so has been like that for many of us, the office swapped for the study; human company replaced by the rattle in your own head. At least those of us with grown-up children haven’t had to home educate for great stretches of time, a free pass worth having.

But still, all this staying at home is kind of weird. The same four walls, the same two computer screens (plus the trusty old laptop with the sticking keys on which this is being written). The same two work phones (plus the personal mobile).

The office long ago rattled to noisy typewriters and chatter and smelled of smoke and afternoon beer. All that years later has been replaced by these four walls and the occasional smell of coffee.

At the time of tapping, I have done three different jobs within these walls. At least there is a window with a hopeful view over the garden, trees greening, the birds singing. And the bloody cat sitting on the printer yet again. Oy, missus, vamoose. Some of us have got what now passes for work to do.

Which laptop needs turning on first?