Take your pick today between the late-arriving Russia Report and Tory MPs voting down protections for our NHS. Oh, all right then, here’s how generous I am: you can have both.

The report from parliament’s intelligence and security committee eventually landed with parts redacted by persons unknown (any fingers pointing at Dominic Cummings surely won’t be far off the mark).

The shorthand summary is that Theresa May and Boris Johnson turned a blind eye to allegations of Russian interference in the Brexit vote. They just didn’t want to know, basically – fingers in the ears and humming la-la-la being about the size of it.

Committee member Kevan Jones said in reference to any possible compromise of the Brexit vote: “The outrage isn’t that there was interference. The outrage is that no one [in government] would want to know if there was interference.”

Jones also suggested that Johnson repeatedly lied over the reasons for not publishing the report before last year’s election.

Leave campaigner and backer Arron Banks has been shouting down theories of Russian interference for ages. Like his fellow malign nuisance Nigel Farage, he sees the report as an exoneration of his Leave.EU organisation. Not so hasty, those self-style Bad Boys of Brexit: the report doesn’t say there was no Russian attempt to influence the vote; it suggests no one in government could be arsed to discover if that had occurred.

The 42-page report is “supplemented with a substantial annex” that is not being published “in view of the current Russian threat”. So is the real meat of this being buried under the floorboards to moulder and sprout maggots? Sure looks that way.

We should know if Russian bots and trolls unleashed on social media affected the result of the referendum, but Johnson is declining to investigate further. And that leaves the Brexit question as unanswered as it was before, however loudly Banks and Farage bellow abuse.

The other big takeaway from the report is just how much Russian influence and money has been allowed/encouraged to flow into the UK – including illicit finance washed through what is known as the London “laundromat”. Russian money has also ended up in our political parties, notably in the Conservative coffers.

If none of this smells funny to you, it may be time to have your nostrils washed out.

Do you remember all those politicians, from Boris Johnson ‘downwards’, ostentatiously clapping for NHS workers? Now MPs have voted by 340 votes to 251 against supporting an amendment that would have legally protected the NHS from any form of outside control.

Among the ranks of Tory MPs voting down this protection from future trade deals were Cabinet members Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Grant Shapps, Alok Sharma, Chris Grayling and former health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Happy to clap one day, content the next to wave away protections that would have guarded the NHS against predatory foreign companies.

Johnson insists that the NHS “will never be on the table” in any future trade negotiations; sadly his words are but wonky legs to that table.

So take your pick. Do you want to be pissed off about the findings of the Russia Report or the lack of real protection for the NHS. Oh, why not go for both.

BREXIT isn’t the best blog opening word. There go my two normal readers already, leaving the door to slam.

As we know, Brexit got done or we got done, or something or other. On a wing and slogan, Boris Johnson got Brexit done. Got it done with help from Ian Botham apparently, as Sir Beefy is going to be made a peer in honour of all his Brexit batting.

It is well known that Johnson surrounds himself with Brexit toadies. Our government is comprised of Brexit lickspittles, rewarded for fealty to Johnson and Brexit.

Now Sir Beefy will join the nodding throng. I’ll explain why this is outrageous in a moment.

First, let’s admit that if you wish to hand out state baubles, it was fair enough to chuck a knighthood Ian Botham’s way in 2007. This was given for services to charity and cricket, including charity walks between Land’s End and John O’Groats.

God, just imagine if Botham spent the long tramping hours droning on about the evils of Europe. What an endless walk that must have been. Of many Botham’s Brexit speeches, let’s not forget the one where he said “England is an island”.

Perhaps being in his day one of the greatest all-rounders affected his sense of geography, as many of his pro-Brexit remarks reference England rather than Britain.

Later this month, apparently, Botham is set to become the ninth cricketer to knock the bails off a peer-hood – and all because of services to Brexit blathering.

What expertise does Botham have in politics and law-making? None at all, and this bit of popularism from Johnson has dodgy grass stains on its knees. What a strange sort of country where you are invited into the government without election and just because you were good at cricket and mouthing off about Brexit.

This sort of behaviour from prime ministers only adds muscle to those who say the House of Lords should be abolished. I’m not sure the second chamber has to go altogether, but Lords should be elected, not sent leaping there to do the prime minister’s bidding.

Brexit, the one that allegedly got done, is back in the headlines, partly thanks to the geopolitical scrapping between China and the US. Back in February the Financial Times reported that Donald Trump was ‘apoplectic’ with Johnson over allowing the Chinese company Huawei to play a part in out 5G network.

Johnson stood firm until as long as last week, when he changed his mind and, essentially, did Trump’s bidding. Now Huawei will be shown the door following security concerns and the harrumphing of certain Tory MPs.

So all our hopes of getting Brexit done with help from China are looking tricky now. Basically, we’re a tiny but proud mouse dodging between the thumping elephant feet of China and the US. If only there was, you know, some European organisation we could join for strength in numbers.

Never mind, at least we’ve got Sir Beefy on our side.

Let’s close with a squint at the headline in yesterday’s Sunday Express: “Don’t try to smear Brexit”. This refers to a fear that the Russia report, long delayed but due any day, might ‘spoil’ Brexit by showing how the Russians perhaps may have interfered in the vote.

I guess the obvious headline wouldn’t fit: “Don’t try to smear Brexit by telling the truth about how we ended up in the middle of this clearly not yet done shitstorm.”

Here begins a cautionary tale about the man who went on Twitter to speak up for journalism.

An alarming number of journalists are losing work. Jobs are going at the BBC, the Guardian Media Group, Newsquest, and at Reach, owner of the Daily Mirror and many regionals, including the Manchester Evening News.

Against this gloomy background, Lewis Goodall, policy editor at BBC2’s Newsnight, used Twitter to criticise “all of those commenting with glee about those in media organisations losing their jobs,” adding: “Whether you approve of their organisations or not, these are people with families whose lives are being turned upside down. Maybe keep your bile to yourself, just for one day.”

I can report that they did not but instead tipped a putrid pint over my bald head, after roundly abusing Goodall.

Here is what I added to Goodall’s tweet…

“As a journalist and lecturer who is soon losing both roles, I agree. Most of my working life has been in regional newspapers, helping to inform and entertain those who share my city. This Trumpian insistence on the rottenness of journalism leads nowhere good.”

Rarely have I encountered such hostility. My reply received a ridiculous amount of attention and at the time of writing, has apparently been seen on Twitter nearly 14,000 times, while 816 people are marked as having interacted with the tweet.

‘Interacted’ is short-hand for calling me an idiot, saying that I don’t know how to write, telling me that, like all journalists, I am rotten to the core and produce left-wing political propaganda, as evidenced by one tweet and nothing else.

Further, I deserve to be losing these jobs as there is no market for what I do (based on no knowledge and one tweet). On a more cheerful note, 84 kind souls liked my tweet, some adding worthwhile thoughts.

One member of the braying throng read a few of my blogs and concluded that I can’t write. I’ve been writing for a long time; sometimes I write well and sometimes I write less well; it’s what happens to people who write many words.

The same critic added: “A worthwhile journalism lecturer (oxymoronic maybe) would tell his students to swim against the tide.” Ahem, how do you know I don’t do that? Anyway, my Twitter account has a picture of me and my name; yours has a jokey pseudonym and no name or photograph, so it’s hard to know who you are.

At a time when journalists are tumbling, we have a government seemingly controlled by Dominic Cummings, a man intent on overturning many aspects of the state, including the BBC if he gets his way. Robust journalism has never been more essential; robust journalism is more important than whether you dislike a certain columnist (or blogger down on his luck).

But, hey. Haters left and right won’t see it that way. Funnily enough, much of my journalism involves the writing of softer features, carefully thought out profiles and interviews that remain respectful of the subject. But, hey.

I regret that tweet in a way, as my phone went hot in my hand as I scrolled through the abuse. It gave me a Twitter headache and a rough night’s sleep.

Perhaps I also regret writing “Trumpian” as that seems to have been the trigger. Then again, it is surely relevant that one of the most powerful men in the world has spent four years telling everyone journalists are scum, pushers of fake news and members of the lamestream media (often because they just asked him an awkward question).

To conclude, I’d like to wish well to all those journalists losing their jobs. They won’t be the high-profile columnists that annoy the press-haters; they’ll be hard-working editors or producers or news reporters or photographers (that’s if any remain). They will be ordinary good people who deserve better. Good luck to every one of them.

I just checked and the hateful scroll continues, slowly now. How prominent Twitter people endure this bitter tirade is a mystery. Perhaps I’ll be sensible next time and keep my head down. Then again…

Pictures BBC/Reuters/Andrew Parsons Media

SEPARATION seeps into the everyday language of lockdown and its sorry sequel, Hey That’s Not What I Call Real Life.

We wear a facemask to separate ourselves from other people – and them from us. We work remotely, at a distance from others and from daily life. This remoteness may be blissful solitude if productive introversion is your thing; yet it also raises the possibility of sadness or loneliness, of disconnection.

Office work can be dull round of doing the same thing in the same place with the same people, having pointlessly travelled there in the mass waste of time known as commuting. Yet it is work and routine, and offers a prop for a life: this is what we do and why we are here. Even commuting is a sort of supportive routine, now a masked routine as masks are required on public transport.

Today we learn that facemasks or face coverings will have to be worn in shops by a week on Friday. It’s probably sensible and other countries have been requiring this for ages now. But if it is sensible, how come we’re arriving so late to the facemask party? This is so urgent that you’ll have to start doing it by a week on Friday, unless Boris Johnson is bored with facemasks by then.

Well, a week on Friday I fully expect to see Dominic Cummings slink into a shop without a facemask. And then to insist he isn’t breaking the new rules but going shopping uncovered to test whether or not his breath smells.

I too am late to the facemask party, having worn one once to the hairdressers. Not exactly pleasant, but now a required accessory in Hey That’s Not What I Call Real Life. We will all get used to wearing them I suppose, even though they fog glasses and hide smiles.

As always happens, there are inconsistencies here. You will have to wear a facemask to the shops but not to the pub as you can’t drink while wearing one, yet the risks of virus-laden interaction are surely the same as in the supermarket.

Watching how people behave with masks can be illuminating. My favourite passer-by was an overweight, tattooed man on a hot day wearing a facemask but not a shirt. Never mind the face, cover your body, mate. Or the man with his Sunday newspaper who lifted his facemask to smoke a cigarette. Or the young woman at a bus stop who tried to vape, forgetting her mouth was covered.

A while ago only tourists from China regularly wore facemasks. This almost seemed like an insult: your air is so awful we are covering our faces; but wasn’t it really a habit formed at home because their air wasn’t so good?

Whatever the case, the facemask is no longer a rarity. Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have been photographed wearing them; Johnson days after Cabinet colleague Michael Gove spoke against making them a requirement; and Trump after months of ridiculing facemasks and insisting they were a plot against him (along with absolutely everything else).

Still, at least those masked bandits can’t speak with masks on.

To deflect to the personal, I feel remote lately. Remote from the office job I have been doing at home for months; and doubly remote because that job is ending soon.

Remote from my lecturing job which is also petering out. I checked my university email the other day and the only relevant message was one from the IT department telling me I was being disconnected.

Well, yes, tell me about it. Disconnection seems to be where I am at but there will be a way through. Perhaps it will even be one that sees me mixing again with the outside world. Even if I do have to wear a facemask.

Hey That’s Not What I Call Real Life.

HERE is another episode of bald man at the hairdressers, along with other post-lockdown thoughts (are we really now ‘post’; who knows?).

Although sparsely distributed, my hair where it grows is thick, dark and now grey at the wings. I know, bald, thick, dark and grey – what a winner in the hair lottery. Although I could buy a razor, I enjoy the visits to the local hairdresser, and managed to bag an 8am slot earlier. This was much needed as the thick, dark and grey bits were shooting out all over the place, and the bald pate bore a thin but rising frizz that blew around like grass in the wind. A facemask was required and on entering the newly arranged hairdressers, my hair was washed, which doesn’t usually happen. Then I was shown to the chair, where skilled use of the razors – a number two and a number one grade – removed the mad professor hair. It all took perhaps ten minutes and cost £11. Never has so much attention been lavished on such a small amount of hair. Afterwards I went for a run and swear I went faster without that unruly weight of hair at the sides and back.

Now to the pub…

At our local bar on Sunday, we were greeted at the door and shown to a table for two. Drinks were ordered, a white wine for my wife and an accidental half for me (rectified later with a full pint: Northern Monk’s Faith, a hazy pale ale and a favourite beer). The bar was well ordered, pleasantly full but not rammed, and the experience was enjoyable, if a little odd. The bar staff were still getting used to the new ways, and some customers ignored the rule about not standing at the bar. As required, we gave our contact details for tracing purposes. Three pubs, including one in West Yorkshire, that opened at the weekend have now shut, after drinkers tested positive for the virus. So this new normal isn’t all that normal yet.

The F*uck Boris loaf…

Here’s another post-lockdown story, a favourite as it concerns good bread and a provoked baker. Phil Clayton is the baker behind the Haxby Bakehouse and highly regarded in York. Phil is also a Labour supporter and not at all a fan of the government or Boris Johnson. So unenamoured of Johnson is Phil that he produced a fine sourdough bearing the floured letters “F*ck Boris”. Imagine Phil’s disdain then when he discovered last weekend that a photograph of him at his bakery had been used in a government campaign without his knowledge. The story found its way into the Guardian, where north of England editor Helen Pidd spoke to Phil. Helen later reported that the government had agreed to remove the advert, tweeting: “Teatime update: gov says it has pulled its advert featuring the baker who sold  F**ck Boris bread during the general election. ‘We recognise that this particular business does not wish to be featured and the image has been removed from the campaign’.”

Don’t blame me says Boris

Phil Clayton may wish to revive that loaf when he hears that the prime minister is going about the place blaming care homes and their workers for the high death rates. Johnson said in a TV interview: “Too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures.” Of course, nothing in life is ever his fault. When Johnson urged us all to wash our hands, what he really meant that he was washing his of all responsibility for anything.

To close, let’s be fair-minded about something the government has done with its last-minute rescue passage for the arts. Much needed, so well done – so long as it’s delivered before the curtain falls.

These are confusing times. So here is the Man on Ledge ten-point guide to understanding travel, pubs and other new normal mysteries…

1: If you wish to travel abroad, perhaps to Greece, it is worth finding out if you are related to the prime minister. Perhaps you might be his father. If that’s the case feel free to go wherever you desire. The rules don’t apply to you.

2: If you are Stanley Johnson, travel to Greece in breach of Foreign Office guidance. On arrival, if you are discovered by a local camera crew, just bumble, waffle and make upper-class hew-hawing, ahem noises as if you are coughing up a bit of octopus. Also talk in such a rambling manner that the TV crew might wonder if you are a little drunk. That’ll get you off the hook.

3: If anyone asks what you are doing in Greece, say you are Covid-proofing your holiday villa. Everyone’s Covid-proofing something or other right now, so that should do the trick.

4: Oh, and you’ll get away with it times two because you are wealthy and those rules were aimed at the hoi polloi. What would become of the world if the posh and the privileged had to obey the rules like everybody else?

5: If you are an Eton pudding of a prime minister and you are interviewed on the radio about your misbehaving father, make upper-class hew-hawing, ahem noises while smirking at your interrogator. That usually does the trick. If it isn’t smirking, it isn’t working.

6: If you advise the prime minister and are found to have broken the lockdown, just arrange a press conference in the Downing Street garden, look dodgy, refuse to admit any wrong and make robotic bleating noises about childcare. That should do the trick.

7: If you wish to travel to the United States in breach of foreign office advice, just pretend to be called Nigel Farage and say you’re a friend of Donald Trump. Sadly, this ruse does carry the burden of having to pretend Donald Trump is your friend. Donald Trump is nobody’s friend. He thinks as much of you as he does of those golf balls he inexpertly whacks.

8: When you arrive in the US, tweet a picture of your smug chops with a caption about being 24 hours from Tulsa. Then you won’t look at all like a loathsome twerp when nobody turns up to witness your Trump support act at the poorly attended rally, leaving you 24 hours from Tulse Hill.

9: On returning from your Trump tribute tour, don’t fret about quarantine rules as they are intended for normal people, not good honest right-wingers with mouldy old roast beef for brains.

10: When the pubs open, raise a pint to those smug chops and put the selfie on Twitter. Do this in the full knowledge that everyone who hates you on Twitter will point out that you should still be in quarantine. Congratulations – you have generated another storm in a pint pot. Better still, the police may become involved and you can act like a wounded unwoke knight in this cruel modern world all over again. It’s what you were made for, after all.

Sighing footnote one: We’re stuck with so-called Boris for four years, or until the Tory party realises he’s a hopeless liability. But why do we have to put up with Stanley Johnson as well? That’s at least one Johnson too many.

Sighing footnote two: One day Nigel Farage will be a footnote in the horrid history of British politics. If we ignore him – and it’s not easy, I know – he’ll become a footnote all the more quickly.

Happy travelling. Hope this advice helps.

What links Dominic Cummings reportedly convincing Boris Johnson to chuck half a billion quid into a struggling American satellite company and pubs opening on Saturday while theatres and music venues stay dark?

Let’s swallow an imaginary pint and find out.

Thanks to Brexit, we can no longer be part of the EU’s Galileo navigation system. Instead of admitting that’s a loss, in other words a massive mistake, our Brexit-blinded government want to invest £500m of our money in OneWeb, a US-based company.

Two newspaper stories on this are telling. The Guardian of June 26 reports that tech experts say “we’ve bought the wrong satellites”. That’s because these are low-orbit satellites, whereas all other positioning systems use medium Earth orbit.

The other, in the Financial Times of June 25, reports that critics have “dismissed the low-earth technology as unproven and fraught with risk”. Yet the FT also adds, almost as a throwaway, that the US wants Britain to have a low-earth navigation service as it would “complement the US system and offer extra resilience to US allies”.

I don’t know enough about satellites to comment, but doesn’t that sound like chlorinated chickens in the sky? Something we don’t want over here but we’ll get because of our post-Brexit need to crawl to the Americans.

While Johnson and Cummings can find £500m for a risky investment in possibly the wrong satellites, there seems to be no money at all for our earthbound theatres and music venues.

Pubs are opening on Saturday with the blessing of UK Treasury online ads for us to “grab a drink and raise a glass”. I’m looking forward to sticking a nervous nose into our local bar, but those ads are outrageous.

Never mind close on 50,000 people dying of Covid-19, let’s get pissed and forget about the pandemic. It’s true that we’d all like to forget about the pandemic, but what’s happening here is that the government wants us to forget about it.

Boris Johnson is tired of having to be serious and gloomy. Instead he craves woolly optimism and vague, blustering hot-air speeches full of gaseous images that float off into the rhetorical stratosphere.

Not much optimism at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, which yesterday announced that 65% of its permanent staff face redundancy. That is one of our great theatres, a fantastic space and generally a credit to everyone involved.

That theatre was devastated by the IRA bombing on June 15 1996, and had to close for two years before reopening. We can only pray that Covid-19 won’t finish what the IRA failed to do.

At the other end of the country, the Plymouth Theatre Royal announced last month that 100 jobs were at risk because of Covid-19. Any theatre you care to name between these two will be facing similar cliff-edge decisions. As for music venues, they’ve been told they can open but without performances: how upside down is that?

Oliver Dowden, the deeply uninspiring culture secretary, tweets today that he understands “the deep anxiety of those working in music & the desire to see fixed dates for reopening”. He says he is “pushing hard” to “give you a clear roadmap back”.

What an inspirational man: they should put him on a stage so that an audience of theatre directors, actors, musicians, technicians and so on can show their appreciation via the medium of air-borne rotten vegetables.

The furlough scheme has helped prevent economic chaos, although what will happen when that ends is anybody’s gloomy guess.

But we should never forget the importance of culture and the chances offered to escape and learn about ourselves, to connect with humanity, to open eyes and hearts and to feed our brains.

And if that’s over the top, you can lock me in pseud’s corner and throw away the key.

We are good at culture in this country and the thought of our cultural institutions hitting the rocks should worry us all.

I’ll whistle you a cheery tune in a moment, but first here is what brought it to mind.

Perhaps bored with his karaoke Churchill act, today Boris Johnson comes dressed as President Franklin D Roosevelt. That’s the depression era US president who launched one of the most expensive US government programmes after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Like FDR, Johnson is promising us a New Deal, in his case for post-coronavirus Britain. Where FDR built schools, hospitals and dams in the most expensive US government programme ever, Johnson is mending a bridge at Sandwell in the West Midlands.

He’s doing a bit more than that as he pledges to “BUILD BUILD BUILD” in capital letters and without any commas by way of mortar.

But of the £5bn being waved around, some has already been promised – and the rest isn’t as generous as it seems.

With FDR in mind, Johnson says he wants a government that “puts its arms around people at a time of crisis”. Yuck to that for an image, I’d say.

Professor Anand Menon, of the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank, isn’t impressed. “The notion that he’s going to turn himself into FDR seems absolutely fanciful,” Prof Anand says today in the Guardian. “FDR surrounded himself with experts, and drew on what they had to say in a way that Boris Johnson so far as not.”

Well to be fair, he has surrounded himself with experts in sycophancy, nodding dogs to a man and woman.

Anyway, onto that song.

On his early album Into The Purple Valley, Ry Cooder sings a catchy little calypso song called FDR in Trinidad. I’d assumed it was his own song, but Cooder is a musical archaeologist who unearths old songs, and this one was written by Fritz McClean to commemorate FDR’s trip to Trinidad in 1936.

Below are the lyrics of the song, subtly rewritten but keeping the hummingbird for the sake of the rhyme (if not for the sake of West Midlands reality)…

“When Johnson came to the Land of no hummingbird

Shouts of welcome were barely heard

No hummingbird, no hummingbird, no hummingbird

His visit to that region is bound not to be

An epoch in local history

Definitely not marking a bold new era

Between Dudley and not America…

Struck by his immodest style

We weren’t much intrigued by the unreliable Johnsonian smile

In fact hardly anyone was glad

To welcome Johnson to not Trinidad…”

As the next line mentions being privileged to see FDR, “With his charm and his genial personality…” this re-scripting exercise is now officially doomed.

Still let’s turn instead to a couplet based on something Johnson said this morning when asked about raising taxes to pay for all he promises…

My friends, I am not a communist

And if you thought that you must be pissed….

While the gloomy doomsters of the IMF defy Johnson by forecasting that the UK is on track for one of the worst economic downturns in the G7, Johnson insists “we will not just bounce back, we will bounce forward”.

Such gravitationally uncertain words sound like they belong on the election trail. Basically, he’s bouncily campaigning for the job he’s already got. And repeating that thumb-smudged line about levelling up – sticking to his standard routine: say something often enough and it might just be true.

Well, I’m sorry not to swallow those cheerfulness pills Johnson is handing around, but I’m inclined not to believe a word.

Theresa May promised much the same, then Johnson snatched that baton from her and he’s still waving it about today.

And the thing is, banging on about FDR’s New Deal (revisited again) only impresses people who know their political history. And even they aren’t going to be fooled by Johnson’s latest karaoke turn.

BORIS Johnson was doing press-ups on the front page of the Mail on Sunday yesterday. And I was doing press-ups on nobody’s back page while sketching out this blog.

The accompanying sub-heading on the MoS began: “As PM says he’s ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’ (and proves it) and is helping with nappies and night feeds…”

According to the Phrase Finder online service… “The allusion to a butcher’s dog is to a dog that would be expected to be very well fed from scraps. Why that is considered to epitomise fitness isn’t clear, as it might be thought more likely that the dog would be overweight than fit…”

When plucking that phrase from the drawer of characterful old sayings, Johnson was being truthful in a way he perhaps didn’t intend. Not so much fit as spoiled and over-indulged. And who on earth says things like that anyway? Only a man pretending to be someone they aren’t; but that’s Johnson all round.

We don’t know how many press-ups Johnson managed or how well he did them. I speak as a 30-a-day man. I saw a physio once about some uncooperative joint or other and he asked to see my press-ups. “Well, that’s one way of doing them,” he said dryly, without elaboration.

I’ve just looked at online videos and, well, I don’t share much with Boris Johnson, but being rubbish at press-ups may be one similarity. At least Johnson didn’t go the whole Putin on us and ride his bicycle without his shirt, moobs on the wobble.

According to the Daily Mirror Sir Keir Starmer joked about doing 50 press-ups during PMQs this week. You have to admit that Starmer looks more capable of pulling off that feat than Johnson: but, guys, does it really matter? You’re meant to be politicians, not Joe Wicks.

The MoS interview appears to be a bit of buttering up: PM gives interview to favoured newspaper, and favoured newspaper returns favour with unctuous coverage (and accompany photo of the prime ministerial bum in mid-rise).

Times Radio launched this morning with what it claimed was Johnson’s “first sit-down broadcaster interview since the start of the coronavirus lockdown”. That’s opposed to his first press-up newspaper interview only the day before.

It was telling, though, that the BBC-averse Johnson should choose to help launch Times Radio. His lockdown-busting adviser, Dominic Cummings, is said to have long wished to dismantle the BBC, and pushing Johnson onto Times Radio fits.

It had seemed the BBC would be safe for a while after its Covid-19 coverage, especially the focus of those working within the NHS. But Cummings is not a man to be deflected, so the Beeb had better watch out.

Further proof of Cummings getting what he wants can be seen today in the departure of Sir Mark Sedwill as cabinet secretary and chief security adviser. Another leading civil servant defenestrated after months of hostile anonymous briefings from Downing Street – backstreet muggings with cowardly words rather than fists doing the damage.

Anyone who doesn’t stick to the cold testament of Brexit is booted out. Johnson surrounds himself with like-minded types who all come from similar backgrounds – and who all swear fealty to him and Brexit (or really to Dominic Cummings).

We’re stick with a Boris Brexit now, even though nobody has a clue how it will turn out; particularly not the man doing press-ups on the front of the Mail on Sunday.

ALL those people flocking to the beaches in Bournemouth and elsewhere must be bonkers. The headline writer in Metro captures it well over a photograph of human sardines dipped in a suntan lotion dressing: “Where isn’t Wally?”

Nothing would convince me to go to that beach or any other while we are still in a pandemic; nothing would convince me to go even if we weren’t in a pandemic. Too many people; too much sweaty proximity. A sand dune hollow on a quiet beach with a good book, yes please; a zero social distance scrum in the over-populated heat on a mounting hill of litter, no thanks.

People keep asking how Covid-19 might change us. To judge by all those people crammed on the sand, the answer may be not a lot. Yet while those sunseekers might, in Metro-speak, all be Wally, in a sense it’s easy to see how this happened.

Our weather is inconstant and a sunny day will draw us to the beaches. In relatively peaceful York, the streets are becoming rowdy as people misbehave in the sunshine; late at night from our attic bedroom we have been disturbed by shouting and partying.

Then consider this. All those beach sardines basically have Boris Johnson’s blessing. Only the other day he told the public to come out of “our long national hibernation”, adding: “I want to see bustle and I want to see activity.”

Well, Mr Johnson, you got bustle and you got activity. All those people obeyed your instructions to go out and enjoy normal life again. And then were pilloried in the newspapers and on the TV for doing as you suggested. And told off by your health secretary who said he might have to close the beaches.

This was denied by the talking head of the day – checks notes, oh, George Eustice, whoever he might be; and no it’s not worth checking – who said the government would be ‘reluctant’ to close beaches.

I don’t know if Downing Street employs a weather forecaster. Maybe there is one and the holder of that rainy post is under orders to predict Great British sunshine every day.

Boris Johnson could at least have checked the forecast before announcing a great unbottling of society in a heatwave. Instead he shook the bottle, popped the cork with a cheery hurrah, and told everyone to bustle off. Those people fighting for space on the beaches were fools – but they were doing what the prime minister said.

We’re all being told to call on that good old British common sense by a man who doesn’t have any himself.

The ending of lockdown was never going to be easy. But arranging for everyone to rush to the beaches in a heatwave within virus-spitting distance wasn’t the smartest idea.

I’d like to say I’m surprised, but my sense of surprise stopped worked weeks ago. I do hope that’s not a symptom.