I see Boris Johnson is again saying that he’s “fit as a butcher’s dog”, this time after being confined to Downing Street. An odd saying to dust off, and one he used as recently as September.

The etymology seems to be that a butcher’s dog would be well fed on scraps of meat, possibly making it fat rather fit.

Johnson seems unlikely to boast that he’s fat as a butcher’s dog, although he could have laid claim to the fitness levels of a fiddler. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase& Fable, street fiddlers were thought to be fit because they moved around so much. It is not known whether Downing Street fiddlers move around that much, should such a fanciful figure ever slip past the eyes of the libel lawyers.

Johnson is much burdened by metaphors, as if he carried around a sack to hand them out like a crummy Santa.  Last week he said science had given the world two big boxing gloves to “pummel” coronavirus, but warned that a vaccine alone was not a “knockout punch”. Metaphors can be tempting, but really it’s a tiresome habit. Is that how he thinks ordinary people speak?

Should you not be keeping up, Johnson is self-isolating in Downing Street following a meeting last week with Tory MPs. Now six of those MPs, two political aides and Johnson are all in isolation.

From the short film clip the prime minister put out, he might be said to look as scruffy as the baker’s old mongrel, what with his hair being all over the place as usual. But Johnson boomingly reassured us he was “full of beans”, “hitting on all cylinders” and “bursting with antibodies”.

The prime minster said others should “follow the rules” if contacted by the system. Well, yes – but perhaps they should follow the lockdown rules before that happens.

All this mask-wearing and keeping your distance isn’t always easy, I know, but was it really necessary for those MPs to meet in Downing Street within, well, spitting distance of each other? Many of us live by Zoom, Google Meet or Teams these days, our work and even our social lives compressed into a low ceiling within a small screen. Was meeting Boris Johnson in person really that important?

The first of the visiting MPs to be mentioned was Lee Anderson, who later tested positive for Covid-19, causing Johnson to be shut up inside Number 10 in the latest twist in the Westminster soap.

Thanks to Martin Belham of the Guardian for pointing me to Mr Anderson’s website, where the MP hosts an eccentric “Best of British” quiz.

Here are some of the questions:

Do you think schools should fly the union flag?

Do our children know enough about our history and heritage?

Do you feel proud to be British?

Are you fed up with the media fuelled criticism of our country and the Woke Agenda?

And, lastly, are you now wondering why on earth you wasted a vote on me at the last election?

The words in one of those questions might not be 100% true as reading that list made my eyes go funny.

Mr Anderson is said to have lost his sense of taste after meeting Boris Johnson. Based on his jibe about the “woke agenda”, it’s possible he lost it before that.

Let’s hope he recovers well enough to lay claim to that butcher’s dog.

The Reuters photograph that was used everywhere…

Trump and Brexit barged through the same door, a pair of right-wing loudmouths intent on kicking liberal shins. Now one is being shown the exit, and the architect of the second was yesterday ordered to leave Downing Street.

Some say the departing Dominic Cummings is an evil political genius, but perhaps he is just a bully who got lucky by reading how the wind was blowing. He was doubly fortunate a year ago in his man being up against Jeremy Corbyn. Johnson would almost certainly have won, whoever had been pulling his strings.

It is reasonable to admit that Cummings is a smart coiner of the cynical political phrase – Take Back Control and Get Brexit Done being his two bestsellers. But shouldn’t there be more to politics than stringing together three conning words?

Various stories swirling around the Westminster drain today suggest different versions of the Cummings departure. You can take your pick, really. Did Boris Johnson get tough, giving his chief adviser a rigorous talking to before ordering him to leave? Or was it a friendlier encounter, a bit of political improv theatre to make the prime minister look strong?

Whichever version you prefer, the leaving of the arch Leaver was perfectly staged. That Reuters photograph of Cummings stalking through the festively lit front door carrying a cardboard box showed a man with more theatrical slap about him than a pantomime dame.

Earlier in the week, I joined in with those tweeting that no ordinary person should give a tired toot about the stormy departure of Lee Cain, the macho ardent Brexiteer who acted as Johnson’s director of communications.

A reasonable view to have on the day, but the further unravelling of the Downing Street y-fronts does suggest there was more to this story. In a little under a year, Johnson’s Downing Street operation was cocking things up endlessly, causing dismay among his own party, and earning a reputation for big-shouldered macho ineptitude.

But was Cummings the problem or was it Johnson himself? Johnson is the captain of this aimless ship, so he can’t escape blame for… oh, take your pick from the chaos tin of assortments, but do watch out for the Brexit Nut Cluster as there’s a terribly hard centre in that one.

Remember, too, that Johnson let Cummings become the dominant story of the past six months by refusing to sack him after that lockdown-breaking jaunt to Barnard Castle. Why such stubbornness when a short while later he’s prepared to send Cummings out of the front door? Incidentally, other Downing Street doors are available, so by choosing the front door Cummings continued to make himself the story while pretending not to, as usual.

It’s not always profitable to link one damn thing to another, although it can be irresistible. The Trump Thing and the Brexit Thing are, I’d suggest, conjoined by the manner of their arrival. Trump rose on a barrage of lies and self-made urban myths, much as Johnson started out years ago inventing urban myths about Europe for the Daily Telegraph.

The Trump Thing and the Brexit Thing depended on bullying people into the belief that this would be good for them. Both exploited a general feeling that life could be different.

Then there is the snake oil. Trump is what they used to called a snake oil salesman. The Vote Leave team fronted by Dominic Cummings slapped a snake-oil slogan on the side of a bus to convince people that the NHS would be £350m a week better off if we left the EU.

If a lie wins the day, what’s the point of trundling out the truth?

It’s comforting to think there must once have been a time when politicians won through the strength of their argument, rather than by being exploitative bullies.

Perhaps such a bright day never dawned. Still, the world feels more cheerful with the departure of Trump and the leaving of Cummings. At least my liberal shins will have a chance to heal at last.

IT’S hard to draw your eyes from the US. Such long drama, such giddy hope. All that and Donald Trump throwing a mega-tantrum, a three-year-old trapped in the curiously bequiffed head of an angry old man.

Until we know for sure, I’m going to leave him to it, content instead to savour something Philadelphia’s mayor Jim Kenney said yesterday…

“What the president needs to do, frankly, is put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge that he lost. And he needs to congratulate the winner.”

Isn’t that just perfect?

For now, I want to wind back to something Boris Johnson said as long ago as the week before last, an aeon in today’s Trump-trashed, corona-chaos-propelled world, I know.

In a message about public health, Johnson said: “It’s like sailing between Scylla and Charybdis.”

This caused Geri Scott, Westminster Correspondent for the Yorkshire Post, to tweet: “Maybe I’m exposing my own clearly inferior education but surely normal people have no idea what he’s going on about when he says this stuff, right?”

You are quite right, Geri. Normal people don’t know this stuff at all. Having studied English literature two-and-half aeons ago, I know a smidgen, so count as half-normal. Reading Ulysses by James Joyce is to blame for that. Joyce’s Dublin retelling of Homer’s epic features Scylla and Charybdis somewhere. As too, incidentally, does the Cohen Brothers’ film Brother Where Are Thou?

The short version is that in Homer, Odysseus and his crew have to sail between Scylla, a monster who lives on rocks, and Charybdis, a ship-sinking whirlpool. An updated stand-in might be “between a rock and a hard place”, a modern American expression with a bit of old biblical ink splashed over.

Fittingly enough, Johnson later announced that he would be making a speech from the Downing Street rock. The expectant crowd gathered and waited. And waited even longer. Eventually, Johnson clambered up that rock and announced the lockdown, by which time everyone was cold and even more disenchanted than before.

As for the hard place, for my money that’s the Home Office, where Priti Patel climbs up high to shout abuse at migrants.

So don’t worry, Geri. Boris Johnson’s supposedly superior education doesn’t seem to have equipped him well for the practicalities of life. And he should stop scattering Latin and Greek myths all over the place.

Yet I do have sympathy. For inside my Eng-Lit skull are to be found old literary fragments. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” from Shakespeare’s Richard II. “Water, water everywhere; Nor any drop to drink” from Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner (and please note that nor any).

TS Eliot in The Waste Land referring to April as “the cruellest month” (my wife disagrees, her birthday falls then). Or Eliot again, with Prufrock wearing the bottoms of his trousers rolled.

Or Andrew Marvell worrying that at his back he hears “time’s winged chariot hurrying near”. Oh, and that lovely Gerard Manley Hopkins line: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin…”

All this and more rests in the mental dust.

So, yes, many of us have fragments of this and that in the attic, but mostly we leave them up there. As for dragging poor old Scylla and Charybdis into a public health announcement, that suggests a man who should book his head in for a serious Eton declutter.

SOCIAL media loves nostalgia. Sometimes it is stirred into a boiled pudding with the wooden spoon of sweet regret. Sometimes it is hardened into a pointed stick. We’ve seen both sorts of reminiscence these past few days.

An unkind seam of sentimentality was uncovered after the footballer Marcus Rashford relaunched his free schools meals campaign. You couldn’t move on social media without falling over meals once eaten by people’s grandparents.

A typical example pictured a list of wartime food rations and the words: “My Nana lived through the war and raised 4 children to be healthy adults on these rations.”

Others said oats were cheap, let them eat porridge. One racist charmer clattered down his dinner plate containing a meal from the fag-end of a beef joint, saying we didn’t need “lectures about poverty from black footballers”. A Tory MP, rushing to join the saying stupid things queue outside the store of unrationed memories, wondered why poor parents didn’t just shop at M&S.

The wartime post was typical in suggesting that life was much tougher in the past, so get over it. It was also misleading, as assorted people complained. The historian Dr Charlotte Lydia Riley pointed out that the list of rations did not appear to be genuine, and the portion sizes were off.

She tweeted: “I don’t need to try to rebut this stuff every time but I teach WW2 a lot and man, it’s so tedious seeing it wheeled out like this over and over again.”

These ration stories are worthless, as poverty in the past has no relevance to poverty now. The comparison should be made with what people have today, and banging on about the past brings nothing relevant to the table.

Anyway, other countries had things much tougher. In the Ukraine, starving peasants were said to have dug up dead horses. There’s probably a Ukrainian tweet somewhere right now saying: “My grandmother brought up eight children on rancid horseflesh and it did them no harm.”

The history of rationing is fascinating, but shouldn’t be dusted off and used to berate people today.

Incidentally, a quick Google reveals that you can buy T-shirts with that suspect list of rations splashed across the chest. Tasteless and not true, but there’s money to be made.

Social media is full of old news dusted with the icing sugar of nostalgia. Newspapers love this stuff too, with some nowadays containing more memories than news.

Here’s a striking example of media weakness for nostalgia. Last week leading news outlets including the Mail Online and the Daily Mirror said Woolworths was re-opening. As Jim Waterson of the Guardian reported, this story was set rolling by a 17-year-old sixth-form student from York. It was “based on nothing more than a typo-strewn Twitter account with fewer than 1,000 followers”.

Waterson, who grew up in York, said the unnamed sixth-former had been practising skills learned while taking an A-level course in digital marketing. That lad deserves top marks. He accidentally showed that if you mix a weakness for wallowing in the mundane past with media laziness, a myth can be born without a fact being checked.

These days I no longer feel so nostalgic about nostalgia.

Marcus Rashford, Man United footballer, man of the moment and the nation’s social conscience, has managed all of that by the age of 22.

Assorted Tory MPs two or three times his age have been making dreadful blue arses of themselves while explaining why they voted against extending free school meals for children into the half-term holiday for children in England.

After Rashford campaigned on this for the summer holidays, the government refused to listen, then executed one of those integrity-burning U-turns they keep doing.

At the time of typing, Boris Johnson and Co are refusing to change their minds this time. Five Tory MPs backed the Labour motion, so they are not quite all dreadful blue arses.

The government argues it has put more money into universal credit, while also sending £63m to local councils to help people in hardship.

I put those reported facts out there in fairness. Now let’s have a fool’s auction of Tory MPs huffing and bluffing about how families should feed children, not the state.

Who’ll give me what for Robert Goodwill, MP for Scarborough and Whitby, who reportedly claims many parents kept their children out of school during lockdown to they could have supermarket vouchers instead.

Or what about Mansfield MP Ben Bradley, who tweeted his opposition to Rashford’s free school meals campaign, implying that in his constituency the money would be spent on drugs instead. Bradley then spent even longer blaming that old villain Con Text, claiming that he absolutely did not say what everyone thought he said.

Government blather-person Kit Malthouse went on the radio in his role as the Minister For Whatever the Government’s Just Put Its Foot In. He has a proper title which you are free to look up. Anyway, blather, blather, you don’t understand at all, he said. Or something like that.

I think my favourite must be the Shipley MP Philip Davies, always a strong contender in any he-said-what? contest. Mr Davies criticised a constituent who got in touch to complain about Tory MPs voting against free school meals in half-term.

She pointed out to her MP: “Almost 20,000 children in Bradford require free school meals, the city in which you live, the place with constituents you are meant to be working for, and today you voted so they’d go hungry over the holidays.”

Delightfully, Davies accused her of virtual-signalling, adding: “I take the rather old fashioned view that parents should be primarily responsible for feeding their children rather than the state.”

What he didn’t know was that his constituent was a 16-year-old sixth-former. When told of her identity and age, he remained unabashed, as usual.

Incidentally, Davies has for a partner the fellow right-winger Esther McVey. How delightful. I wonder if together they might breed attack puppies, training them to nip the ankles of anyone who signals virtue. Nothing much is surprising any more, although I did just make that up (I think).

In 2017/18, the independent Social Metrics Commission calculated that there were 4.8m children living in poverty in the UK. That is a dreadful indictment of this country, whoever is in power. Or if you are Paul Scully, the Minister for Something or Other – I just looked, he’s Minister for London (lucky London) – childhood poverty is just a Big Shrug Emoji.

In a BBC interview, Scully said “children have been going hungry for years”, blaming Labour governments too. “It’s their fault too” isn’t much of a defence – especially when what you’ve said sounds as if children living in poverty is just one of those things.

Let’s brush aside those shabby MPs and wind up with the words of Marcus Rashford, who is using his fame and his own childhood poverty to do good.

And they are fine words…

“These children matter. These children are the future of this country. They are not just another statistic. And for as long as they don’t have a voice, they will have mine.”

EVEN a man without faith who surveys the world from an imaginary ledge can see that denying Dr John Sentamu a seat in the House of Lords would be unfair.

That apparent snub was reported by the Sunday Times, and then went through the U-bend of government decision making to come out facing the other way round. As so many decisions do.

There are a few aspects to this latest Downing Street whoopsie-dozy, not least whether church leaders should be in the Upper House at all. But leading clerics do sit in the Lords, so stopping the progress of the widely admired former Archbishop of York would have been petty.

Was there a current of racism in blocking Dr Sentamu? Probably not exactly, but it could be seen that way – especially as Dr Sentamu has never been afraid to speak his mind about social issues.

The argument for blocking the admirable doctor was that the House of Lords was full. What outrageously floppy flapdoodle. Boris Johnson has just ennobled a ragbag of Brexit supporters, along with his own brother – 36 new peers, the second-highest number of new peers for 20 years. That’s 36 times £300 a day, plus expenses.

If the place is chocker, that’s why.

Today’s Daily Mail kicked off with a different clerical clash, saying that the prime minister is “set for war” with the five Anglican Church leaders. This is because they wrote a joint letter warning that the government’s Brexit legislation could set a “dangerous precedent” if passed in its current form.

In a comment piece, the Mail asks “what on earth” this has to do with the Church, suggesting clerics should stand for election if they want to dabble in politics.

It’s a point – and one sometimes muttered in the corner of this ledge. But if assorted prime ministerial pals can be shoved into the Lords as part of the chumocracy, without a vote but a flexible flick of the back-scratcher, it’s hard to see that the archbishops shouldn’t deliver the occasional unflattering political sermon.

When the clerics agree with governments, minister say how much they appreciate the heavenly good sense; when the clerics turn turbulent, they shout disgrace.

While the House of Lords is constructed as it is, knocked together from glittered scraps of history and shabbily bestowed privilege, I can’t see a problem with archbishops having their say.

It would be better to have an elected second chamber, rather than one packed with the chums of assorted prime ministers. Until that happens, which it won’t ever, let the archbishops speak. And let Dr John Sentamu speak. He won over many in Yorkshire during his spell as archbishop. Even a man without faith who surveys the world from an imaginary ledge will happily admit that.

I KNOW a few underemployed photographers. Perhaps they will be interested to learn that the Cabinet office has a job at around sixty grand a year.

An initial misreading of this story left me thinking Boris Johnson wanted a photographer to take more flattering photos.

He usually looks shiftily dishevelled in news photographs. Most men are smart in a suit even if they’d rather not wear one. Johnson contrives to be untidy in suits that never fit, bunching up in the wrong places, the trousers too long (or the legs too short; an affliction I share), the jacket buttons awkwardly skew-whiff.

A short stumble from Savile Row to the Oxfam shop.

Photographs of political leaders can themselves be political. Not so much in the shooting as in how they are used. A news photographer will fire off in rapid succession, hoping to catch the moment, combining their skill with a sixth sense for what might be about to happen.

Which photograph to use is then an artistic choice or a judgment about how the photograph fits the story. Or the decision will itself be political, as pictures can make a leader look good or bad, flattery or insult delivered by the same lens, seconds apart.

That’s what I thought was happening here, Johnson wanting someone to do a bit of brown-nosing with a camera. But I’d forgotten he already has a personal photographer in the shape of Andrew Parsons.

It’s surely a vanity project for a PM to employ his own photographer. It’s also pointless, unless he wishes to ban all other photographers.

Such a decree seems unlikely, although in truth it would no longer tick the box marked: “Well, I wasn’t expecting to discover that.”

Especially when you consider that Boris Johnson has just appointed his own press spokesman, the job going to the political journalist Allegra Stratton at a reported £100,000 a year.

A lot of taxpayers’ money for a spokeswoman to understudy the prime minister. Why can’t Boris Johnson just speak for himself? At a guess the foot-in-mouth potential explains that one.

Anyway, the Cabinet Office photographer is reportedly being hired to “promote the work of ministers and the wider government visually”.

If the photographer is too controlled, this risks being  another political vanity project. If they are allowed to photograph whatever they want however they want, the results could be interesting. But how likely is such freedom?

It is interesting how leaders worry about their image. All those photographs of Johnson looking dishevelled and knackered are not flattering. But they tell the story. They flatter not him but the moment – far more than a stage-managed shot of the Bumbler in Chief pretending to be statesmanlike. The strain is part of the story.

In the US, photographer Pete Sousa worked with the Republican Ronald Reagan and the Democrat Barack Obama. He expresses horror at the tawdry soap opera of Donald Trump’s White House. Interestingly, he also claims photographs of Trump working in hospital after testing positive for Covid-19 were “obviously posed pictures”.

Souza says that in one designed to show the President working hard while ill, he appears to be signing a blank sheet of paper. The photographer who took that was contriving in a lie as plain as the orange tint on Trump’s face.

Then again, Trump reportedly claimed $70,000 a year on hairstyling in his tax-avoidance wheeze. Even a reluctant baldie can see that’s quite a spend for hair seemingly spun from a bag of spilt sugar.

JUST where the north might be is a debate waiting to be joined by a Bristolian Mancunian from York via South East London.

My claim to be a northerner is one of geographical accident rather than legacy or lineage. But I have spent more time in the north than anywhere else. I even own a flap cap, although it is a Peaky Blinders-style baker boy cap, rather than a proper flat cap.

Hardened types from further north probably regard York as being virtually in the south. Such regionality even breaks down to parts of Yorkshire. One of the sub-editors at the Yorkshire Post, who I know, sent me an email regarding a feature I’d written about a furnituremaker of Husthwaite. He said it was a “lovely read (if a bit North-non-proper-Yorkshire)”.

I’m guessing West or South counts as more ‘proper’.

In a wider sense, the north is just that bit up there, you know, beyond the pale and too far away to notice properly. Or that’s the impression lately, especially when newspapers are tipped off about new government lockdowns or restrictions, saying that they will be happening “in the north”.

Perhaps we northerners (and fake northerners) can be picky, but narrowing that down a bit might help. The north is a wide geographical canvas made up of regions, cities, towns and villages. The people living in those places might like to know if this affects them.

Then again, Boris Johnson’s government doesn’t seem in a hurry to keep local politicians and council leaders in the know. Regional leaders from little-known corners of the north – you know, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds – say they aren’t kept in touch at all. The first many knew about the looming new restrictions was when they saw those geographically unhelpful headlines.

As Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, said on Question Time last night: “It does feel increasingly to people that we’re being treated with contempt in the North of England.”

The latest restrictions will see the forced temporary closure of pubs, bars and restaurants in coronavirus hotspots. Maybe this is sensible (doubts are permitted), but shouldn’t local politicians and local people be involved in the process, rather than receiving distant diktats from London?

On Twitter, the editor of the Yorkshire Post, James Mitchinson, said that we need to “confront the London mindset and embed a culture of national inclusion”.

In August in that newspaper, the veteran columnist Bernard Ingham, a man with whom it is almost impossible to agree, said something sensible when he described the government’s new post of Downing Street press secretary as a “constitutional outrage” designed to side-step Parliament.

You can see why the newly announced appointment of Allegra Stratton in that role appeals to Boris Johnson. It’s flashy and American-style and stops him having to address Parliament so often.

Bernard Ingham was once the thunderously displeased press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, so he should be listened to on this matter, if not others. Oddly, both Ingham and Stratton once worked for the Guardian.

Despite her spell on the Guardian, Allegra Stratton is well connected in Tory circles, being married to James Forsyth, political editor of the Spectator.

Still, having once worked on the Guardian, at least there’s a chance she may locate the north on a map.

As for this Bristolian Mancunian from York via South East London, I love the north and wouldn’t live anywhere else.

A young man turned up at a newspaper many years ago, carrying a letter of recommendation from his headmaster.

That letter described him as “a boy with very lively intelligence, possessing powers of original thought along with a very retentive memory. He is perhaps too impetuous at present, but will outgrow that…”

The newspaper in question was in Ashton-under-Lyne and I can still remember, if only dimly, the office above a rank of shops.

That bright boy was not me but Sir Harold Evans, the feted editor of the Sunday Times, who has just died. But the newspaper was the same, something I didn’t know until reading last Sunday’s Observer.

My spell at the Droylsden Reporter began after two interviews in Ashton-under-Lyne. I didn’t arrive with a letter from my headmaster but, on a Saturday shift, sat at a typewriter to bash one out to an editor in London. This was for a job on the South East London Mercury, close to where I’d studied at Goldsmiths College.

The editor later said it was the best job letter he’d ever received. His advert was written in the style of the Chas and Dave song Gertcha, so I wrote my letter that way. A good trick, but only used the once.

Anyway, that all happened at the dusty end of the corridor, long ago.

My journalism career started after I advertised myself in the UK Press Gazette trade magazine. The advert ran along Catch-22 lines. How does someone without experience get some, basically. That opened doors I didn’t want opening, then some I did.

Here are my papers and places. The Ashton Reporter, the Mercury, the Yorkshire Evening Press (later truncated to the Press), the Press Association, Leeds Trinity University and York St John University, plus freelance feature writing for the Yorkshire Post (the cherry on a now almost gone cake).

To that list can be added the Observer for three years in the mid-1980s, but only on a Saturday, when a senior colleague wangled me an invite to the editor’s lunch, where wine and cheese were served. The man in charge at the time was Donald Trelford, always portrayed in Private Eye as “small but perfectly formed”.

Trelford wrote a touching appreciation of his rival in his old newspaper last week, headlined, “The Harold Evans I remember was a great craftsman, a crusader… and a rival without peer.”

It wasn’t easy being the editor of the Observer when the Sunday Times was captained by Harold Evans, as Trelford mentions. Despite the inky rivalry, or perhaps because of it, the pair became great friends. Sometimes they were mistaken for each other, both being short working-class northerners.

Evans had a long career of journalistic greatness, notably his exposure of the thalidomide scandal. Trelford remembers his opposite number’s journalistic credo, and it is a good one: “Keep digging, the truth is down there somewhere.”

At Leeds Trinity, where I taught journalism part-time for four years until the contract shrivelled and died, I introduced the topic of investigative journalism, and gave honourable mention to Evans.

Well, we Ashton-under-Lyne old boys have to stick together.

Actors are said to be ‘resting’ when they have no work. Perhaps something similar should apply to journalists. Not that I am resting, having just finished my first week in a new full-time job that runs until May. Nothing to do with journalism and that seems odd.

I’ve enjoyed the training so far but won’t be saying much about the role as it’s the sort of job where you have to be more guarded than I am used to.

So, there will be less time for this ledge, but I don’t intend to stop altogether. You can take the boy out of journalism but you can’t take the journalism out of the boy, or something like that.

So that’s the story of Sir Harold Evans and me, a whale and a minnow in an inky sea.

BBC bias, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Although you may wish to substitute ‘eye’ for ‘shouting mouth and sweaty face’.

Tory MP Theresa Villiers was poking the BBC yesterday while appearing on the BBC (how kind of them). On Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, my favourite listen of the week, she said we needed a wider spread of opinions on the left-wing BBC, or some such flapdoodle. Thus undermining her own argument by freely expressing right-wing opinions on the BBC.

Accusations of BBC bias come from both ends of the muddy field. Plenty of Jeremy Corbyn supporters still blame the BBC for their hero’s demise. This is a dead argument and one not worth pursuing, except to point out that Corbyn surely shares some of the blame for two election defeats.

Mostly, the anti-BBC voices are now from the right. This vendetta, never dormant for long, was revived with the arrival of Boris Johnson and his basement demon, Dominic Cummings, who have long had the BBC in their sights.

The corporation had a ‘good’ pandemic early on, providing the quality journalism needed at a time of crisis. Unless you persist in believing Covid-19 is a put-up job and a conspiracy, in which case you may blame BBC news for reporting deep-state propaganda, or something equally potty.

At a time of crisis, the BBC is still seen as the national broadcaster, so Johnson and Cummings stepped away from the fight. Rumours that two former right-wing editors may be appointed to prominent broadcasting roles suggest they are back on the attack.

Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, is being touted as a possible BBC chairman – a worrying choice as reportedly he doesn’t watch television and won’t pay his TV licence fee.

Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail, made that newspaper especially right-wing, and served up endless hostility about immigration, while forever bashing the BBC. His reward is to be touted as head of Ofcom, the media regulator. If so, a flagrantly biased man would be in charge of determining bias in others.

Culture wars secretary Oliver Dowden said in media appearances yesterday: “I think everybody is getting a bit ahead of themselves with this.”

Dowden is right in that applications for both jobs aren’t open yet. But his accompanying remarks about “genuine impartiality” and his insistence that the BBC should represent all parts of the nation, “not just narrow, metropolitan areas – London, Bristol, Birmingham and so on”, suggest such appointments may well be made.

Representing the nation is a no-win game for the BBC as every time it reaches out to the regions, somewhere else pops up on the map to moan that it is being neglected (What about Little Piddle On the Wold?).

Have I Got News For You, the BBC panel show that is attacked for being anti-Tory (despite helping to promote Boris Johnson early on), fears it could be a victim if Moore were appointed, tweeting that today is the anniversary of its first show.

“So that’s 30 years then, but if Paul Dacre and Charles Moore take those jobs we’re unlikely to see another five, and nor is the BBC.”

Thirty years is a long run and that show is tatty on the edges now, but I still watch, through habitual fondness.

Also on Twitter, the writer and director Armando Iannucci tweeted: “The BBC isn’t perfect but it’s one of the most successful British inventions ever, enhancing our profile round the world and bringing quality drama, comedy, knowledge, analysis and comfort to millions at home. Seeking to destroy it is political self-harm.”

Sounds on the money to me, but Iannucci was pebble-dashed with abuse from the usual right-wing suspects.

BBC News will always face accusations of bias, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. Mostly, for all its occasional faults, it sticks to the middle of the road, with a tendency to tip to the right/establishment view.

At least, that how this beholder’s eye sees it.