A 16-year-old boy from Sudan drowns while trying to cross the channel from France to England.

The details are tragic. Two boys are reported to have set sail in an inflatable dinghy using shovels as oars. Their makeshift craft is said to have been little more than a toy. One boy was rescued, reportedly suffering from hypothermia.

You cannot consider what happened to the boy who drowned, and other migrants sailing to Europe across hostile seas, without taking stock of your own humanity.

Even the leader in today’s Sun says this is a reminder “of a human emergency, not just a political one”.

Having given humanity the nod, the Sun then takes its customary path. Labour is urged to “stop playing politics” and “throw its weight behind Home Secretary Priti Patel as she cracks down on the real villains of this piece: the evil people-traffickers”.

Patel has spent weeks playing politics by summoning up a ‘migrant invasion’ where none exists. She has clearly magnified a relatively small problem for political purposes and as a distraction from other difficulties.

You may not agree with this interpretation of her behaviour, and that’s fair enough.

But if it’s true, as widely reported, that the home secretary told Tory MPs that she wanted to change the asylum rules in a way that would make “the left… have a meltdown”, how else are we meant to characterise her behaviour?

Patel is also widely reported to have said that the asylum system is broken because “leftie Labour-supporting lawyers” send “legal letters every day to try to stop us removing people from this country”.

It has been pointed out by many, including the writer of this blog, that Patel’s hostility to immigration seems odd as her own parents were admitted to this country and allowed to flourish.

Yes, Labour should play its part – but Patel should stop using toxic language in a phoney cultural war.

Yes, too, the people-traffickers are “evil” but they are cruelly exploiting a situation which is itself immoral.

Why, for a start, do we not process migrants in France rather than leaving them to attempt hazardous channel crossings or trying to ride on or beneath lorries?

Why do we not act on our human responsibility to welcome as many migrants as possible instead of jabbing our fingers at ‘invading hordes’?

Perhaps it is just that some people consider one migrant to be one too many, while others fail to see why we cannot offer more help to those wishing to live a life less harsh.

Two new books published soon offer insights into migration. Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System is by immigration barrister Colin Yeo. At a guess one of those “leftie lawyers” Patel disparages.

His publisher’s blurb wonders how we would treat Paddington Bear if he came to the UK today…

“Perhaps he would be made destitute as a result of extortionate visa application fees; perhaps he would experience a cruel term of imprisonment in a detention centre; or perhaps his entire identity would be torn apart at the hands of a hostile environment that seems to delight in the humiliation of its victims.”

A wider historical perspective is offered by Professor Joanna Story, co-editor of Migrants in Medieval England, c.500 – c1500. This study argues that England has been shaped by “economic migration since medieval times”.

“People often do not realise that migration is central to English history throughout time,” said Story in last Sunday’s Observer.

We may be an island, but we have never been the insular Little England some would have us believe.

Tragically pointless to speculate now, but I like to think that under a kinder system that lost Sundanese boy would have reached the UK and flourished, as many have down the centuries.

PERHAPS one day there will be nothing to see from this ledge; no political shenanigans; no rubber-burning U-turns; no more appalling behaviour from Boris Johnson.

Then again…

My last piece, on the A-levels fiasco, was written as almost 40% of students saw their results lowered by an algorithm.

Johnson shrugged off the protests, saying: “Let’s be in no doubt about it, the exam results that we’ve got today are robust, they’re good, they’re dependable for employers.”

Turns out there was plenty of doubt and he made another U-turn. Those results weren’t robust and the algorithm was shown the door. Not so education secretary Gavin Williamson, who remains in post, with the prime minister’s full confidence.

Williamson doesn’t have the full confidence of the Tory-supporting Daily Mail, which today lashes him with this splash headline: “The man who won’t take the blame.”

Of course, the other man who won’t take the blame is the never knowingly blamed for anything man in charge. Those of us who’ve long suspected that Johnson is lazy, lackadaisical, chaotic and unfocused have been pleasantly surprised – by exactly how right we were.

Johnson and co love to blame someone else, everyone else, when things go wrong. Top civil servants are sacked or side-lined; public bodies are abolished over-night without debate. Williamson blames Ofqual for the exams chaos even though he’s the man in charge.

Newspaper front pages are only one metric, but with that caution in mind, let’s look at two more this morning.

Metro digs up ‘omnishambles’ – that splendid neologism coined by the writers of The Thick Of It – to describe the governmental chaos. And the Daily Star, not usually a stopping-off point for this reader, surpasses itself with a missing-man poster casting Johnson as “The Invisible Man” – “Last spotted, er, well it’s really quite hard to say…”

North of the border, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon still holds daily briefings on Covid-19, in telling contrast to Johnson, who emerges into daylight occasionally to splutter inanities at the TV cameras, before scuttling back into his burrow.

That Metro front page, with its “Omnishambles Britain” tag, combines Williamson, the missing man PM and the sudden scrapping of Public Health England.

PHE is to be replaced by a new body run by ‘failed Talk-Talk dud’ Dido Harding, according to Metro. She’s the Tory peer who always springs forward from whatever mess she’s left, including the government’s costly track-and-trace system.

Health secretary Matt Hancock launched the new body, called the National Institute for Health Protection, without much explanation, and leaving little doubt that PHE was being blamed for the government’s poor Covid-19 response.

The government has already called for a Covid-19 inquiry, possibly to be held sometime or never, and yet decided to blame PHE anyway in a shotgun divorce.

As long ago as April 29, almost in times of ancient history, I suggested scientists were being set up to take the blame. I only mention that again because it turned out pretty much to be true.

Why in the middle of a pandemic would you completely restructure a public health body, other than to deflect blame from yourself, cause another distraction or to pretend to be doing something important besides replacing one acronym with another.

In announcing the new body, Hancock said: “My message to everyone in the private sector is – join us.”

As feared, this government wants more private provision, even while companies such as Serco earn a fortune messing up with track-and-tracing call centres.

According to Professor Stephen Reicher in the Guardian today, “Serco’s telephone traces were around 50% successful in reaching contacts; public health tracers were over 90% successful.”

We should put more truth in local health bodies, not less.

Who could ask for anything more, to quote from that lesser-known George Gershwin song, I Got Algorithms.

We’re used to algorithms on the internet. Google something on one device and what you searched for pops up on another device, like a relentless stalker or a private detective rummaging through your bins.

Services we receive for ‘free’ – Facebook, Twitter, Google and so on – take our personal information as their reward, and we shrug because we enjoy social media and quick searches.

But using algorithms to decide the results of exams not taken because of Covid-19 is something else altogether, something darker and dystopian. It betrays our children’s future and is a disgrace.

Yes, there never was going to be an easy way to sort this out, but leaving algorithms to decide the A-level grades should shame the government – or it would if this bunch weren’t so shameless.

The price of entry into Boris Johnson’s cabinet is low: say Brexit was the best idea ever and you’ll be whisked through the door and never mind your talent.

Just look at Gavin Williamson, sacked as Defence Secretary by Theresa May and then chosen by Johnson to run education.

By the charter of columnists and bloggers, no word of Williamson is allowed to pass without mentioning that he once sold fireplaces in Scarborough. Or that he told the Russians “to go away and shut up” – a devious ploy only if the intention was to make Vladimir Putin die of laughter.

Useless people are often said to fail upwards and what must have attracted Williamson to Johnson is that the prime minister likes other people to make him look good. Others can fail upwards too, so long as they don’t fail upwards higher than him.

Williamson is likely to be canned for the hurt and anger stirred by the A-level algorithms. Such is the lot of lickspittles once their master sees advantage in their defenestration (stage direction: Dominic Cummings slides up the sash window and asks Williamson to step over for a minute).

But the blame should spread further than one man, as Williamson’s behaviour is symptomatic of the government’s high-handed carelessness, with policy being made on the hoof so often, they’ll soon be right out of hoofs.

The most alarming aspect of the A-level algorithms is the down-grading of results of pupils attending schools in less advantaged areas.

Almost 40% of results were lowered in this way.

Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham is considering legal action against the government over the results. He accuses ministers of the “single biggest act of levelling down this country has ever seen”.

Private schools have been less affected by these cruel and rigid algorithms. While the computer said no to many disadvantaged kids, it nodded the well off through (business as usual, nothing to worry about here), because of smaller class sizes and smaller subject groups.

The guilty algorithm was designed by Ofqual, the non-ministerial department that regulates exams. Oddly, the Royal Society of Statistics is reported to have recommended ways to make the algorithm fairer, but Ofqual rejected its advice because it refused to sign a no-disclosure agreement.

Teachers who have known their students for years were ignored, their marks and observations over-ruled by the computers.

Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian and Observer journalist who lives in the dark burrows beneath social media, tweeted to this year’s A-level students: “You have been robbed of your future by an algorithm. The tech dystopia many of us have been warning about is here. You’re it. Your data was used to profile you without your consent. This is not ok. Be furious. Fight back.”

Also on Twitter, Lisa Bradley, journalism lecturer at Sheffield University and author of the new thriller Paper Dolls, received much attention for tweeting:…

“So..my neighbour got a predicted A from her teacher, B in her mock…and was given an E. A kid from the private school on the next road got a C in her mock, a predicted B and was awarded an A*. Just..? Kids..you’ll be of voting age in the next general election. Remember.”

One-off examples don’t of themselves prove anything, but Lisa’s one-off is replicated all over the country, and the blatant unfairness is plain for all to see.

DO you remember the woman who shouted at a cup of tea? This was before lockdown so her anger wasn’t caused by confinement or the pubs being shut or anything.

Sue became agitated on Twitter after Rishi Sunak, who’d just been promoted to Chancellor, put out a photo of himself making tea for his team, while holding a mini-sack of Yorkshire Tea teabags.

This caused the sort of row that occurs when people have nothing better to do. Rishi the tea-boy Chancellor might have believed he was celebrating his work experience stint at the Treasury but plenty of people on Twitter thought it was a disgrace and vowed never to buy Yorkshire Tea again.

Those attacking Yorkshire Tea were mostly from my end of the political woods, left-leaning grumblers who instinctively dislike Tories.

Disparaging Tories can be a habit almost as ingrained as tea-drinking but some of those laying into Yorkshire Tea took everything a bit far. The company insisted it had not entered into a diabolical tea-cosy pact with the Tories, saying it had known nothing about the photo.

This wasn’t enough for Sue, who rattled and shook like an over-filled kettle until the social media people at Yorkshire Tea silenced her with a clever line: “Sue, you’re shouting at tea…”

This instantly became a meme. Good on Yorkshire Tea, even though I don’t partake. Are you even allowed to admit that in Yorkshire? I prefer loose tea spooned from the tin.

Now Priti Patel is shouting at ice cream.

I am sorry to bring the Home Secretary back into this blog’s cast list of deplorables, but it’s proving to be her week.

There she was, trying to out-do Nigel Farage in bellowing about migrants while standing on the shore at Dover, and thinking, my it’s hot, I could do with an ice cream, when the official Ben and Jerry’s UK Twitter account put her right off the idea (the ice cream, not being intolerant about poor and vulnerable people).

Ben and Jerry’s posted several tweets tagging the home secretary, beginning with: “Hey @PritiPatel, we think the real crisis is our lack of humanity for people fleeing war, climate change and torture.”

This was followed by others such as “People wouldn’t make dangerous journeys if they had any other choice” and “People cannot be illegal.”

Wow, more sense from the freezer section of the supermarket than from Boris and the Brexit Botch gang.

A Home Office source told the BBC Priti Patel was “working day and night to bring an end to these small boat crossings, which are facilitated by international criminal gangs and are rightly of serious concern to the British people”.

The spokes-waffler added: “If that means upsetting the social media team for a brand of overpriced junk food, then so be it.”

Two passing observations on that double-scoop…

ONE: Get a sense of humour, lightness or perspective and don’t shout at ice cream.

TWO: Stop saying “the British people” every time you want to excuse shabby behaviour. By accident of birth, I number among them and hate hearing that. The British people deserve better than being dragged in as backing vocalists to your nastiest tunes.

At least Foreign Office minister James Cleverly didn’t enter the debate by saying something stupid. Oh, hang on, he did, tweeting: “Can I have a large scoop of statistically inaccurate virtue signalling with my grossly overpriced ice cream, please?”

I guess Ben and Jerry’s won’t be on the menu at the next Cabinet picnic.

Home secretary Priti Patel went to all the way to Dover yesterday to snap a selfie. She didn’t use her phone but dragged along a Home Office video person seemingly just out of video training school (or possibly not yet admitted).

Patel moved in and out of focus as she said things like “the fact of the matter is…” which is rarely a good sign. Especially as the “fact of the matter” (© any passing politician on the make) is that all she was doing was helping to create a distraction.

Don’t look at the God-awful mess we’re making off Covid-19, or all those millions we wasted on useless PPE, just throw up your hands in horror at all these migrants invading our shores.

“We are committed to tackling this issue and working with the French government to make this route completely unviable,” said Patel. She was wearing her frown instead of her customary smirk and whichever you find more acceptable is a matter of preference; feel free to tick “none of the above”.

No reporter was on hand as this was a self-published report free from damn pesky questions.

As the BBC’s Daniel Sandford tweeted: “In the end it is up to the UK public to decide whether they want to see their politicians at times of crisis talking in self-crafted promo videos like this, or in a genuine engagement with the broadcast media like ITN, Sky and BBC News.”

Oh, never mind, Daniel – at least we got to meet Dan O’Mahoney, the UK’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander. Yes, he really exists! Not so sure, however, about the threat being clandestine. It’s there for all to see and the numbers are tiny when set against the population of this prosperous country.

Which brings me to my favourite Twitter exchange of the morning…

“This is an issue of national security.”

Nigel Farage.

“This is an issue of national insecurity.”

George Peretz QC.

Government ministers do love these selfies. Chancellor Rishi Sunak churns out movie-style posters bearing slogans such as: “A PLAN FOR JOBS… Worth up to £30 billion.” All come adorned with his signature.

This motivated Boris Johnson to get in on the act, although his first attempt wasn’t deemed acceptable – “A PLAN SCRIBBLED ON THE BACK OF A FAG PACKET – worth whatever Dominic Cummings just told me…”

Sunak’s signature is scrawled all over the Eat Out to Help Out campaign running this month. While this initiative has been welcomed by diners and pandemic-stricken restaurants, it’s an odd fit with Johnson saying at the weekend that it was a “moral duty to get all children back in school”.

Sunak is handing out money-off coupons, and Johnson is saying we might have to close pubs and restaurants to balance the risks raised in opening schools.

Fair enough, schools are vital – and I write that as a father to two primary school teachers. It’s reasonable to argue that schools are ‘more important’ than pubs; but it also creates just another Covid-19 confusion. On minute the government shoves us into pubs and restaurants, the next they’re saying they might have to close again. A made-up mind would help.

Over on the BBC Today programme, health minister Edward Argar was wheeled out to defend Serco’s handling of the track and tracing contract. Full marks to presenter Nick Robinson for pointing out that before he became an MP, Argar was Serco’s PR chief.

Clearly, Argar should have interviewed himself on his own radio selfie to avoid such impertinence.

Elsewhere in his Today interview, Argar said: “ What you’re talking about is an extrapolation of a subset”.

If you know what the hell that means, you’re a lot smarter than me.

HOW about we crowd-fund a channel crossing for Nigel Farage, a one-way ticket to France in a leaky, dangerous dinghy lying low in the water and liable at any moment to tipping?

It would be a relief to be rid of him. The man’s a pestilent boil on the bum of British life.

I’ll broaden this out in a moment and step away from the shouty smirk on little legs (he’s five ft six and a bit, even shorter than me).

Before moving on, let’s just consider how Farage – sans Brexit Party, sans cushy rent-a-gob job at LBC – has taken to pretending he is a journalist ‘investigating’ the arrival of refugees on Twitter with ‘headlines’ boasting: “EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE OF BEACH LANDING BY MIGRANTS.”

Without leaving my desk in the study, I can exclusively reveal that what this means is Farage stands on the beach and points his camera. Then fires off a tweet-rant.

Look, journalism has much to put up with nowadays, jobs going all over the inky shop, papers cutting back, TV companies emptying newsrooms. The last thing this trade needs now is a right-wing agitator pretending to be a journalist.

Farage is not a journalist, but he should be investigated by real ones. Who’s paying for these films; who else is behind the belligerent one-man band other than Farage on one-note trumpet and monotonous drum?

A sad truth in all this is that Farage has 1.6 million followers on Twitter – far more than many newspapers – so he has an audience for his noisy barrage of toxic tweets.

When tweeting about refugees/migrants trying to cross the channel, Farage pretends that he alone is valiantly ‘reporting’ on this matter. This isn’t remotely true as the crossings are widely reported elsewhere.

But as he has proved before, Farage is skilled at muck-spraying an issue until proper politicians – you know, the ones we actually elect – follow his lead.

Home Secretary Priti Patel is reported to want to send in the navy to repel the migrants.

Last week she told MPs this would be permitted under international maritime law. Not so according to the Ministry of Defence source who told PA Media the idea was “completely potty”.

Barrister Bella Sankey, director of Detention Action, described the plea to the navy as ‘hysterical’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘unlawful’, adding that “no civilised country” could consider such action.

In a bizarre twist, Patel announced she has appointed Dan O’Mahoney as the UK’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander. I can exclusively report today that soon she’ll be appointing an admiral to guard against the clandestine threat posed by mermaids.

Less satirically, although only just, Patel tweeted about taking back control of our borders – and said we needed the French to help us do that.

To which the French, possibly with a shrug, said: “Mais oui – but it’ll cost you £30m…”

There’s Brexit in a rotten, cracked nutshell: we are taking back control of our borders, but monsieur, I know we told you to piss off, but can you give us a hand?

Back to the channel where, thanks to the weather, an unusually high number of crossings have been attempted. Dangerous dinghy after dangerous dinghy contain people willing to risk their lives to smuggle themselves among us; women and children, pregnant women and children, men and women, people desperate enough to try anything to reach Britain.

People – not refugees, not migrants; people who see Britain as a fair-minded country of opportunity (and let’s pray it still is).

To those people I say, please come in. And ignore that man bellowing on the beach. He’s the worst of us. The rest of us aren’t that bad, or not most days.

WITH leaden predictability, the Sun this morning praises housing secretary Robert Jenrick and nicknames him “Rob the Builder”.

They say you should never trust a skinny chef, so perhaps you should also never trust a housing minister who only owns one measly house. As the owner of three houses, Jenrick is supremely well qualified for his role. The former solicitor has two properties in London – and Eye Manor, a Grade-I listed pile in Herefordshire.

According to a Times report of June 24, Jenrick was denied permission to extend one of his London homes after planning officials objected three times to his plans. The spoilsports said it would damage the character of the conservation area.

At a third try, a Tory councillor living in the same square is said to have intervened on his behalf, and the plans were approved.

The government’s housing plans bring to mind a previously unseen episode of Bob The Builder. In this one, Bob is looking worried because Dom the Wrecking Ball is tired of the view and wants to knock everything down.

As the signature tune almost puts, “Bob the Builder/Can we f*** this up/yes we can…”

In an earlier episode, Bob was worried about being asked to divide an unused office block into tiny flats. Dom the Wrecking Ball, emerging from one of his houses wearing a lopsided straw hat, told him not to worry so much.

“We need to shake things up,” said Dom.

“But you couldn’t swing a cat in those places,” said Bob.

“Ditch the cat then,” said Dom.

“I just worry that you can’t stand to see a thing without wishing to knock it over,” said Bob.

“Have you read the small print in your contract,” said Dom the Destructor.

Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s adviser, is surely behind these plans. As Bob the Builder astutely notes, he can’t abide structures put in place by someone else and instinctively wants to knock them all down.

What the government is vowing to do is fast-track the construction of “beautiful” homes across England. And if you believe that, you’ll believe that Boris the Wheelie Bin came up with this idea all by himself.

Saying you wish to remove red tape is always the first step on such occasions. Nobody much likes the sound of red tape, so cutting it is a winner. Until you remember that red tape isn’t necessarily red or tape, but a series of rules and safeguards put in place to protect people and the environment.

You can listen to Rob the Builder, or you can listen to Tony the Town and Country Planner. Tony’s association (TCPA) condemns the proposals as disruptive and rushed, adding that 90% of planning applications are approved, while there are around one million unbuilt planning permissions.

One worry lies in the dilution of democratic oversight, with local authorities having little or no say about what happens on their patch. The shorthand answer to that is that life should be more local, not less local. You might not always like what your local council does, but at least they’re round the corner – not 200 miles away in London. Or scheming up plans in one of their manor houses.

Anyway, all this brings to mind an even older episode of Bob The Builder. This is the one where Margaret the Menace suggests selling off council houses so that the new owners “will become one of us”.

As Bob said at the time: “But Margaret, won’t this lead to all sorts of housing chaos years down the line, as all the council houses will disappear and nothing will be built to replace them?”

“Stop fussing,” said Margaret the Menace. “And finish building that extension or I’ll revoke your licence to build.”

Years later, Bob the Builder saw a photograph of Margaret the Menace in a newspaper. The story was about the lack of council houses caused by selling them off as an electoral bribe. It said that Margaret the Menace started this, and everyone else just followed.

“I told the old witch but she just wouldn’t listen,” said Bob the Builder.

Perhaps I should have been one of the 22 per cent. They’ve got it sorted.

The 22 per cent don’t worry about President Trump gearing up to foul the US elections before they happen. They won’t fret about Trump rallying his supporters if he refuses to budge after losing in November.

They will be unconcerned by all the terrible things Trump says and does. Those sinister-looking federal security forces sent in to quell protests in Portland, Oregon, will not concern the 22 per cent.

The 22 per cent will not spit out their morning tea on learning of the dubious collection of people Boris Johnson has appointed to the House of Lords. Ian Botham should be remembered as a cricketer and the owner of a big mouth. He shouldn’t be in the Lords now or ever, but that’s where he’s headed, to the over-stuffed second chamber.

As for Johnson elevating his own brother, Jo, that surely is cronyism at its most nakedly outrageous. Or maybe not if you choose to ignore it.

None of this is to suggest that the 22 per cent don’t care. Perhaps they just find everything too distressing nowadays, and who can blame them. Even an addled old news junkie can sometimes pause to wonder where all this news leads us.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, news avoidance is on the rise. The institute is releasing a series of reports as part of its Covid-19 news and information project.

The eighth report, released on July 28, found that the 22 per cent now say they “always or often actively avoid the news”. It adds that “levels of news avoidance grew sharply in April and May”.

I still read the news on inky sheets. I watch the news on television. And I skim like a tossed stone across the surface of the news on Twitter.

I have written the news sometimes. Penned endless headlines, edited endless stories. Written features and columns. And bashed out more blogs than a normal person would consider doing.

Are we well informed know-nothings…

According to that Reuters survey, most of those who avoid news about Covid-19 say this is because “it has a bad effect on my mood”.

News of all shades can badly affect my mood, and yet there I sit on an uncomfortable stool at the news bar, daily swallowing another line of shots. Sometimes this habit leads to a headache, a news hangover caused by a surfeit of half-understood news.

This can lead the avid news watcher to feel that they are well informed and yet at the same time know nothing. Is that what we’ve become… well informed know-nothings who soak up the news and then wonder what it is that we have absorbed? This isn’t to get away from the tremendous amount of hard work that goes into providing all that news for us.

There is just so much news nowadays. If you glance over history, this can’t be because more things are happening now. It’s just that the means of production is so much more efficient, the world is so much smaller, and we can sit at home and peer into distance places on our flat-screen TVs.

News now is an uninterrupted flow, an endless supply of happenings that are reported and commented in a breathless rush that then passes over our heads.

I won’t be giving up anytime soon, but wonder sometimes what it would be like to do the news equivalent of Dry January. No-News November perhaps.

Solipsism is one of those words that has to be looked up. It means, as a quick search confirms, “the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist”.

A less philosophical meaning is “the quality of being self-centred or selfish”.

So how do we slip from solipsism to the government’s Fix Your Bike website crashing overnight due to high demand for £50 repair vouchers?

According to the BBC website, “the vouchers would typically cover the bill for a standard service and the replacement of a basic component such as an inner tube or cable”.

Whoever came up with those vouchers must last have been in a bicycle repair shop when they used to wobble off to primary school. Fifty quid doesn’t buy much oily-fingered expertise nowadays. My last service cost around £230, a surprising sum but one that performed a mechanical resurrection on an old but treasured bike that had become impossible to ride.

“It’s like a new bike but at about half the cost,” as the mechanic put it when he saw my face go white.

Solipsism comes into this because we have a prime minister who appears only to become interested in a thing after he has been affected by it. So Boris Johnson became a heartfelt supporter of the NHS after he was struck down with Covid-19; he became interested in fighting obesity because he discovered he was overweight; and he became interested in getting people on their bikes because he used to cycle to work when he was Mayor of London.

Oh, not forgetting how he looked at his own life and became interested in the state chasing down feckless men who father five or six children with different mothers (this one may not be quite right).

Worrying about obesity, loving the NHS and getting everyone cycling are all worthy aims, so long as new funds are genuinely involved rather than the shuffling around of existing money and the dusting off of old gimmicks.

Beyond this, though, it is possible to wonder if the Johnsonian solipsism suggests a deeper lack of empathy. After all, a leader should be able to see the size and shape of a problem without having encountered it personally. You shouldn’t need to have been treated by the NHS to appreciate its importance, although it probably does bring it home.

Perhaps we should ask him, although Johnson isn’t that keen on talking to journalists (even though, like Michael Gove, he used to be one).

According to Christopher Hope of the Daily Telegraph, Johnson is looking for someone to do the talking for him. Hope tweeted yesterday:

 “EXC Boris Johnson has launched the search for a new £100,000-plus a year spokesman to become the face of the Government in televised press conferences from this Autumn. A job ad asks for someone to ‘communicate with the nation on behalf of the Prime Minister’. Apply by Aug 21”.

Previous prime ministers used to speak for themselves but Boris Johnson wants us to stump up £100,000 or so he doesn’t have to. Why can’t he save money and do it himself?

Apparently the idea is that we should have a US-style daily political statement/show in which a TV personality speaks the government’s words.

How dispiriting, but I am under-employed at the moment. Perhaps that’s the job for me.

I DON’T know about you, but I reckon Boris Johnson is a bad advert for optimism. This is not a political observation, or not exactly, more an opening thought about the uses of cheerfulness in difficult times.

Other ministers and friendly commentators are always keen to emphasise the power of optimism as contained in the shambling form of Boris Johnson, with his lame jokes, booming intonation and confected air of larkiness.

Told once too often that a man is an optimist, you might want to kick the tyres to make sure (or closely inspect his scuffed shoes). Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, is the latest minister to roll out this leaky old barrel, yesterday telling Sky presenter Sophie Ridge that Johnson’s “optimistic fizz” would keep the United Kingdom together.

I tend to be optimistic myself, apart from when I’m not. The shorthand summary would be that I am a foolish optimist; a foolish optimist married to a wise pessimist, although those characteristics leave room for each of us to step into the other’s small arena, as it were.

My own optimism is being tested by events (the already mentioned disappearance of two jobs). Wider than that, the general national optimism is being tested by Covid-19, in small and large ways. Levels of anxiety are high, with the Office for National Statistics reporting in June that high anxiety had more than doubled since before lockdown.

In a sense you don’t need a survey to tell you that, although it helps. Anxiety thrums in the air around us, causing a sense of ill ease, as if we are waiting for something to happen, or waiting for life to resume its old shape, which even an optimist must admit seems unlikely.

And a prime minister whose main setting is blathering optimism doesn’t exactly fit the sombre mood, especially when his government has performed so badly, and so many have died.

We all have different ways of coping at this time and my strategies include losing myself in baking bread (a top sourdough yesterday to replace all those dispiriting discs of flat plasticine-like dough); writing blogs to keep my brain ticking over; and being cutting about Boris Johnson whenever the mood takes me, which it does perhaps too often.

As for Raab’s “optimistic fizz”, that is just the latest draft of stale bubbly. What does it even mean?

Perhaps it was optimistic fizz that got the government so keen on “air bridges” (Johnson does like a bridge, even if he has to make do with one made of air).

You may recall that these ‘bridges’ to supposedly safe countries would allow everyone to fly on off holiday this summer. That is what hardier and less broke Brits than me did in the past few days – scooting off to Spain, only to find that they would have to spend two weeks in quarantine on their return.

This, you see, is where unguarded optimism gets you. You rush off on to Spain, on a tank-full of optimistic fizz, only to see everything fizzle out overnight, leaving you with two extra weeks to take off work on your return.

Optimism is all fine and well, and I really do try to swallow a spoonful each day, but in the hands of politicians it becomes something else, a distraction, a shield, a worthless reason to like a leader.

In truth, I have no idea if Boris Johnson truly is an optimist, so being told that he is quite so often is off-putting. Besides, it’s almost certainly not optimism as such, just a show-off version designed to fool us.

After all, and I hate to bring this up, putting faith in Brexit, as this country narrowly did, seems to have been a decision based on misty-eyed optimism and stale grandeur. As the final deadline for a deal looms, we are still armed with nothing more substantial than Johnson’s optimism. If that brings to mind the optimistic captain of a sinking ship telling everyone that everything will be all right, you won’t get any disagreement from this battered optimist.