I just read Sarah Vine so you don’t have to. The viperish columnist was splashed across yesterday’s Daily Mail with a headshot and the quote: “To erase our history, good or bad, makes me fear for our future.”

The main story below had the headline “TOPPLING THE PAST” and was a follow-up based on the statue of slave trader Edward Colston being dunked in the Bristol docks last Sunday.

Sarah Vine’s column was the usual anguished hand-wringing over the state of the nation. As is often the case, it wasn’t quite as hard-hitting as that quote made it appear – or as focused and coherent. It was far from my taste, but it was the way that quote was highlighted that ignited over in Twitterland.

Anyway, take a deep breath, Sarah, and calm down. None of what you complain about is erasing history. You are intentionally muddling history and the past. You can’t erase the past because it’s dead and gone: history is a living art that attempts to interpret the past – and let me say that as one non-historian to another.

Over in the Guardian, Charlotte Lydia Riley, a proper historian, makes the point well today, saying that historians are not worried about the threat posed by rewriting history. “This is because rewriting history is our occupation, our professional endeavour. We are constantly engaged in a process of re-evaluating the past and reinterpreting stories that we thought we knew.”

If you only tell one side of those stories, you end up with a one-sided version of history. If the history of the British empire is told only as a glorious progress that made this country great, you miss all the mess of misery, suffering and indeed lasting geo-political chaos we left strew across the globe’s carpet.

And if the history of slavery is told only through those who benefited from it, then the suffering and inhumanity remain unknown.

As for your worries, Sarah, about rubbing out history, that phrase “history good or bad” is a convenient get-out clause – as mostly we just like to hear the good: how we were saints for abolishing slavery rather than devils for ruthlessly pursuing it; how we point to countries we ‘made better’ by the Empire rather than the great cruelty wrapped up in Empire, and so on.

Over again to Charlotte Lydia Riley – people “want it both ways: to be free of guilt for historical sins, but to be proud of what they see as historical achievements”.

It’s not fair for others to always bring up Michael Gove whenever you erupt into print, Sarah, but there you go. Lots of things in life aren’t fair, including me having to read one of your columns by way of research.

As a leading Tory politician, your husband has been keen to reshape the teaching of our history as he sees fit.

At one time he wanted to imposed a curriculum for English schools based on the achievements of British national heroes – “history as celebration” in a shared national past, forgetting that many students in modern Britain come from different and often excluded cultures.

Tories like your husband love the notion of teaching our history by using imperial role models as national heroes: it fits their image of Britain, whereas the dragging down of statues does not.

That’s why we have statues to slave traders but not in general of slaves. Since 2007, however, the Museum of Slavery in Liverpool has tried to redresses the balance. It’s an excellent museum, but a tough visitor experience – as it should be.

Perhaps Mrs and Mrs Gove should arrange a family outing one day.

DUNKING slave trader Edward Colston into the Bristol docks certainly stirred up opinion. The longer I pondered this lawless act, so flagrantly recorded on the TV news, the more I came down hard and thought: well, good for them.

That statue caused an impressive splash. The ripples spread so far that the noted slavery expert Nigel Bloody Farage (it’s his official name, you know) inserted his dirt-twitching nose into the debate. Gloriously, he ended up looking like a tit, more of which incidental happiness in a moment.

It’s not that I favour toppling statues as such, although a statue is a curious tribute, so often put up in praise of the undeserving rich and powerful. It’s more that this was the wrong statue in the wrong place.

The statue was contentious because Colston was a slave trader who transported into slavery some 84,000 Africans, around 19,000 of whom died, their bodies thrown to the sharks that followed slave ships.

Oddly, the statue was erected in 1895, more than 170 years after Colston’s death and more than 60 years after slavery was abolished in Britain.

Allowing the statue to remain prominently on show in a multi-racial city was asking for trouble. People in Bristol had been calling for years for the statue to be removed, but there it stayed until last Sunday’s Black Lives Matter march held in protest at the death in the US of George Floyd.

If he’d been tucked away somewhere less prominent, Colston would never have ended up sleeping with the fishes, as the historian David Olusoga puts in the Guardian today.

Olusoga also writes: “…this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were”.

Fine upstanding words. But what now to do with that sunken statue? A ragbag of right-wing protesters on the TV news said they were going to haul it out, but they didn’t.

Perhaps the bronze statue could be rescued and put on display in an installation about slavery, the scars and damage left on shown as part of the story. There must be an imaginative way of restoring the statue but not its dignity.

As to the wide matter of Black Lives Matter, far too many ageing white males like to put their oar in on that topic, so I shall withdraw. Sadly, Nigel Farage is never reticent about where he shoves his oar. Up he popped on GMB this morning with Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, ranting about “violent anarchic mob rule”. He also said Black Lives Matter was like the Taliban and that Edward Colston had just been a philanthropist.

Thankfully, two smart women, the historian Dr Kate Williams and the activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, were on hand to deliver a slap of diminishment.

Dr Mos-Shogbamimu chipped in with the words every sensible person wants to hear: “You are full of such nonsense…”

Dr Williams, a TV natural, took Farage down with: “Saying that Colston was a philanthropist is very disturbing. Jimmy Savile was seen as a philanthropist. Jeffrey Epstein was seen as a philanthropist.”

Oh, can this please be a new TV format – pitching Nigel Farage against pin-smart women who know so much more than he does. It has great potential.

Incidentally, not all statues of historical figures are bad. The one outside Huddersfield station honouring Harold Wilson is sturdily fine.

Doubt ate my words so the first version of this went in the bin. I was worried about the self-pity, you see. Here’s a second try. Hope it’s better.

Five years ago the newspaper where I’d worked for 27 years made me redundant; many tiles have been blown off that roof. My first dislodged year was spent freelancing. Although I was paid for writing features, you couldn’t call it a living. So I started two part-time jobs, one in newspaper production and the other as a journalism lecturer.

With the freelancing, occasional lecturing at another university, bits of copywriting and editing, life was thinner but OK. Now my two main jobs are going, bringing back memories of that first redundancy.

I’ve known about the editing job for a while, as the contract I work on isn’t being renewed. The possibility of other work has been mentioned, but everything has been pushed back by Covid-19.

It is the loss of the main university job that stings. That’s because I never thought I could stand in front of a roomful of students and do that job, but I did and loved it.

I did half-worry that Chief Inspector Course might interrupt a lecture one day and ask what I was doing in there.

I am from the proper lecturing police and would like you to accompany me to the academic station…

Here are some snatched images from four years of teaching…

One creative writing student on a feature writing module wants to jump ship to English. The course she is on isn’t for her, she says, but mine is the only module where she’d learned anything useful all year. I go home with a glow that day.

I like your class best because you get to write a lot, is a common line from students across those four years.

It is good when students grow in confidence. Some write great pieces because they are smart and work hard; some write great pieces because you’ve shown them how to.

It isn’t all encouraging. Some students sit and natter to their friends during lectures; or they don’t turn up half the time and then throw a massive hissy fit about their portfolio deadline, shouting, crying and shoving a wheeled chair across the room at speed.

Well, that only happened the once but it was quite the scene.

Universities are struggling and I half-suspected it might be over. The end was still a shock . It came in a brief phone call: nothing personal, it’s not about your work, everybody likes you, the other lecturers like you, the students like you.

“I’ve worked with you and I like you,” the man making the call said. Two minutes later he rang off, and that was that. Apart from an email from the HR department – “Hi Julian, please find attached a letter about your contract not being renewed.”

On Twitter you will often find a thread from academics, usually but not always young, about the casual nature of their work, the lack of security, strung along on annual contracts, promised this and promised that.

My experience of teaching for a university was positive and enjoyable, until it ended in the blink of an accountant’s eye, without a thought for where that leaves me. Even small cogs have feelings, you know.

I do not remotely claim to be an academic, just someone who likes to teach; someone who writes often and enjoys showing others how to improve their writing; just a man who bats words around and has a life’s worth of wordy tips and tricks up what threatens soon to be his frayed sleeve.

If you hear of any work suitable for an ageing man of words, a page-designing, article-writing, blog-pushing lecturing man, do let me know.

At the moment I am feeling fairly useless, to be honest. Drifting towards the end of next month and wondering what happens when we go over that waterfall. I always think something will turn up, fate will provide, but sometimes even a foolish optimist can see the limits of cheerful buoyancy.

WHAT the scales show when Donald Trump steps on them isn’t necessarily the same as what the world sees.

Trump’s weight, along with that of Boris Johnson, is a political as well as a personal matter; what you or I weigh is purely personal, although dear family members might notice or pass comment.

According to the delayed release of his medical report, Trump pushes the needle to 244 pounds.

The report was due out in April but has only just been released. You do wonder if Trump, ranting about lamestream doctors and fake medical news, sent it back until his doctor came up with something less embarrassing.

According to the report, the 73-year-old president weighs one pound more than a year ago; and if you believe that, you’ll swallow anything, including that hydroxychloroquine Trump took to ward off Covid-19.

According to his slick-note, Trump took the anti-malaria drug “safely and without side effects”. Unless, that is, one of the side effects is the spouting of inflammatory nonsense and hijacking bibles.

Trump’s weight and health are political in that they frame his literal fitness for office; his mental fitness for office cannot really be measured, although we can gauge that for ourselves.

One side effect of this delayed medical report can be found on Twitter, where people are having  fun mocking the medical. Some tweets show Trump, who claims to be six-ft-three, standing next to Barack Obama, who happily owns up to six-ft-one, and they appear to be the same height. That suggests Trump’s height/weight ratio isn’t correct – even if you accept the given weight.

Other tweeters put pictures of muscled baseball players and the like who are the “same” height and weight next to photos of Humpty-Dumpty Trump on the links, golfing trousers pulled up tight over his round belly.

We should try to steer clear of anything close to fat-shaming, as plenty of people are unhappy about their weight; but at least they tell self-deceiving fibs about what they’ve eaten that week, rather than get a White House doctor to tell weighty fibs on their behalf.

If we accept that Trump is the height he pretends to be, his numbers suggest a BMI of 30.5, “which is technically obese”, according to the Daily Mail.

Those 244 pounds convert to nearly 17-and-a-half stone, and here’s a funny thing. According to a report in the Sun on May 15, Trump and Boris Johnson weigh the same, but Johnson is only 5ft 9inches tall.

Pulling myself to the full to 5ft 8inches, I’ll happily swear that just looking at Trump and Johnson tells you they can’t possibly weigh the same. One of them is telling whoppers and on this occasion it isn’t Johnson.

The prime minister is said to worry about his weight, believing that he was more badly hit by Covid-19 than “thinnies” like Matt Hancock, according to the Times of May 14.

Johnson is said to have lost a stone since being ill, but that would still leave him with a BMI of around 34 – with anything above 30 being regarded as obese.

According again to the Sun, the “NHS says that a man his age and height should be aiming to weigh between 8st 13lb and 12st 1lb”. As someone one inch shorter and a few years older, I weigh a little under 12 stone – which is too much, but that stomach has a mind of its own (is it lunchtime yet?).

Johnson decided to launch a ‘war’ on obesity after returning to work, perhaps to distract us from his government’s failings over Covid-19. Whatever, it was a typical bit of solipsism, in that he only sees the problem because he’s suffering from it.

But the one good thing you can say about Boris Johnson is that at least he isn’t Donald Trump.

As a proud son of Bristol (other locations may be involved, from Cheadle Hulme to south east London and York), I am loving the third series of A House Through Time on BBC2.

After Liverpool and Newcastle, the programme has moved to Bristol, where the British Nigerian historian David Olusoga now lives. Olusoga is happily into his stride with this lovely project.

When first met he seemed so laid back, so soothingly unruffled, that it could be difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. But he worked his presenter’s magic on me ages ago and now I willingly submit to being led through history’s dusty lobbies and kitchens by this unhurried man. I’d consider paying the licence fee for this programme alone.

Like many good ideas, this is as simple as they come: take one house and trace the history of its most significant, or sometimes most significantly unlucky, inhabitants. One house and many histories.

Number 10 Guinea Street is a Georgian house in a small row built in 1718 by Edmund Saunders, a wealthy slave-trading sea captain. As always, in the first episode we meet the present owners, in this case a couple who have lovingly restored a house that contains many original features, including a flagstone and wood-panelled hallway on which the camera often lingers. The house seems calmly set aside from the world, yet stands next to a block of modern flats, having narrowly survived wartime bombing (spoiler alert: that episode is yet to come).

Both Liverpool and Newcastle have clear links to slave-trading, and the cruelties of the past cast a long shadow in Bristol, a city much shaped and, to modern eyes, tainted by slavery. The opening episode dwells on Saunders and his slave-trading, yet also brushes past piracy, an abandoned baby, an escaped household slave, and the rise of the abolitionist movement.

Last night’s episode stepped forward to the 18^th and 19^th centuries, swiftly introducing new residents, including a young teacher who died in Bristol Lunatic Asylum, and a servant whose abuse at the hands of her husband garnered lurid newspaper coverage.

We also meet John Haberfield, spotted by Olusoga on the electoral roll as the 19-year-old son of new tenants in 1804. Haberfield went on to become Mayor of Bristol (six times, I think Olusoga said) and was in charge of the city’s civic response to the uprising of the Chartist movement.

The riots of 1831 are not remembered as widely, perhaps, as the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, yet were, as the historian Tristram Hunt has argued, “the bloodiest battle on mainland Britain since Culloden”.

The cause was parliamentary reform for working-class males as Bristol had only 6,000 voters for an adult population of 104,000. Such complaints causes disturbances elsewhere, but “in Bristol the fury was particularly keen”, as Hunt has put it, with troops sent into Queen Square to quell the rioters, in some case with cruel literalness. According to the government, 100 people died, while radicals claimed 250 died on the third day alone.

Olusoga swept through this episode efficiently – he does a lot of sweeping, as his historian’s broom sometimes has too much dust to gather in a short time – and referred in passing to the Newport Rising eight years later. This Chartist rebellion against authority popped up in an edition of Who Do You Think You Are, featuring the comedian Jack Whitehall and his comically grumpy father.

A House Through Time is a calmer, less messy version of Who Do You Think You Are, more focused with its attention on the inhabitants of one house, rather than chasing up the random strands of historical DNA attached to one famous person.

Last night the distant cruelty of what happened to people marching for the right to vote ran slap bang into news from the US of the Black Lives Matter over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. In Bristol the army was used against the people; and in the US President Trump threatens to do the same.

Sometimes history gives a tap on the shoulder, a reminder that past horrors can be present horrors, and present horrors can find their echoes in the past.

If you were God you’d be thoroughly pissed off with Donald Trump. And if you weren’t God you’d probably feel the same.

As the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police spread across the US, the President retreated to his bunker in the White House and sent out vicious and inflammatory tweets. One bit of digital phlegm included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – a clear reference to a white police chief cracking down on black protesters in the Civil Rights era.

He then held a conference call with US governors and ranted that they risked “looking like jerks” if they didn’t control the civil unrest – said to be the most widespread in the US since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

Today he declared himself the “law and order” president in a Rose Garden speech worthy of a tinpot fascist, swearing to set the US military on the American people to quell the unrest.

At this point, Trump grabbed a Bible bearing the words “God is Love” and hijacked the All Mighty for a photo-op.

What he wanted to do was stand outside St John’s Episcopal church, one block from the White House, the traditional place of worship for presidents. A sea of peaceful protesters impeded his way so they were forcefully parted by police firing teargas, allowing Trump to walk between the dispersed masses for his shameless publicity stunt.

Seeing the ungodliest president of them all brandish a Bible like that must surely be enough to bring on the heavenly vapours.

For if God is love, Trump is hate.

When an agnostic on the safer side of the Atlantic can feel outraged by this mugging of God, what must a religious American feel? Thankfully, another bishop is on hand to speak common sense, following our own Bishop of Ripon only the other week.

The Right Rev Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, told the Washington Post: “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.”

She added that Trump’s message was at odds with the values of love and tolerance espoused by the church.

Still clearly annoyed when she spoke to CNN, she said: “Let me be clear, the President just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.”

You’d like to think that Trump was mutually incompatible with the teachings of anyone, divine or otherwise. We’ve had three-an-half years to come to terms with the worst man in America being elected president.

Perhaps his racially inflammatory attitude towards protest – black rioters bad, white rioters toting guns “very fine people” – will deny him a second term.

What the US needs at a time of Covid-19, economic collapse and social breakdown is a president who can speak to his people with calm wisdom and authority. What they’ve got is a petulant septuagenarian toddler who can only sniff potential personal advantage in any situation, however dire.

Trump may pretend to be the “law and order” president when sounding tough appears to be to his advantage, but he will never be that. He is the disorder president; the hateful president; the open-his-mouth-and-a-lie-rolls-out president.

And as the law Professor Robert Reich just tweeted: “The President of the United States is deploying the military to perpetrate violence against their fellow citizens ­– because their fellow citizens are protesting unjust violence at the hands of the state.”

Many worried Trump would want to start a war; now he seems to want one against his own people.

Only she wasn’t…

Boris Johnson always looks like he’s just been pulled through a hedge-fund backwards.

In his Zoom-funded appearance yesterday before the Commons liaison committee, he wore suit, tie and trademark smirk. As usual his hair and pasty demeanour revived memories of the last time you rolled out of bed with a hangover.

This powerful committee has the right to summon prime ministers two or three times a year. This was Johnson’s first appearance, something he only agreed to after installing the Tory MP and Brexit brother Bernard Jenkin as committee chair.

Johnson presumably thought that behind-the-scenes fix would give him an easy ride; happy to report that this was far from the case.

May, Cameron and Blair always turned up having done their homework (even lazy boy Cameron, for heaven’s sake); they all came with answers for the questions they were likely to be asked.

Johnson prepared only for a spot of improv politics – make it up as you go along, bluster, stutter and blunder, charm the pants off the boys and girls on the committee; job done, go home for a lie down. It was lamentable, careless and disrespectful.

God, and to think the Boris backers told us all how great he’d be, a natural-born charmer and wit, a spot of fun after old wooden-legs Theresa.

Turns out he’s useless, barely able to string a coherent sentence together, like the lead actor in a play who tells the director he’d not bothered with the script as learning scripts is for girly swot actors.

Johnson was asked about his shameless aide but dismissed an inquiry into the way Dominic Cummings broke lockdown rules with that 260-mile drive to Durham. His response was essentially “move along now, nothing to see here”.

Cummings, given the Downing Street rose garden and a trestle table to make a statement, droned out his own version of that tatty tune: all those lies the newspapers printed about me were true but if you’re expecting an apology, you can whistle.

All hail Labour’s Yvette Cooper for accusing Johnson of “putting your political concerns ahead of clear public health messages” to protect Cummings (whom Johnson only ever referred to as his ‘adviser’: is he jealous of all the attention Cummings has been getting?).

Over at the BBC, some committee of faceless bosses issued a statement condemning one of its own flagship news programmes.

Tuesday’s Newsnight had opened with Emily Maitlis giving a crisp summary of the programme and the state of the nation, saying that “the country can see” Cummings had “broken the rules”.

The BBC said the programme’s staff and been reminded about its guidelines and added that it should have been made clear the remarks were “a summary of the questions we would examine”. The thing is, pusillanimous BBC bosses, that was perfectly clear to anyone with a few brain cells rubbing along together.

Did the BBC make this statement after pressure from Downing Street? No one is saying, but it seems likely, as this government has a Trump-like disdain for the media. Stories about the pandemic often receive what Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s head of investigations, this week called treatment that verges on “trolling via government press offices”.

Maitlis is one of the BBC’s stars and deserves better treatment than she received. Although the woman herself tweeted that she’d asked for the night off and was happy to see Katie Razzall present the show.

Surely the BBC could have quietly ticked off the show’s editor and announced that it was reviewing that edition of Newsnight – rather than rushing out a statement seemingly designed to appease right-wing commentators.

Whatever the case, I hope the BBC keeps hold of Emily Maitlis as she is a great journalist and a pin-sharp presenter. If they don’t, she’ll be snapped up by Sky or someone else.

In films and novels, an unreliable narrator is an untrustworthy teller of a story. In politics it’s Boris Johnson passing around a plate of inedible porkies.

His performance at that Downing Street briefing yesterday united assorted bishops, the Guardian and the Daily Mail, legions of angry and sometimes sad people on Twitter, a number of affronted Tory MPs, and my wife spitting feathers on the sofa next to me.

It’s not often you’ll hear me say this, but today’s Mail splash nails it. Beneath a sub-heading speaking of Johnson “brazenly” backing the “sevegali” who flouted his own strict lockdown rules, the headline asks: “What Planet Are They On?”

Johnson twisted morality and logic to support his abrasive adviser Dominic Cummings. There we all were thinking that breaking the lockdown to drive 264 miles from London to Durham in search of childcare was a shameful betrayal of the rules imposed on everyone else – often at great emotional cost.

But, no, our unreliable prime minister tells us Cummings acted “responsibly, legally and with integrity” – words so far from everybody else’s lips, they might as well be on the moon.

Just as you are thinking that Cummings driving 264 miles from London to Durham after suspecting his wife had caught Covid-19  was wildly irresponsible, here’s Johnson saying the exact opposite. What’s this, some weird new word game – Unreliable Scrabble in which all the words you use must mean the exact opposite?

As it happens, Cummings’ wife did have Covid-19, he caught it too – so why not do a spot of uncaring and sharing around Durham?

Johnson also insisted Cummings had been following his “instinct” as a good father to a young son. That parenthood line as a supposed clincher seems horribly cynical. Sure, Dominic Cummings would be worried about his child – but so was everybody else with children, parents, friends; worrying about those you love is natural, but it should never be a free pass to behave as you wish.

To give this a twist, last time I looked having a child doesn’t get you off a murder charge – or even possibly a hefty speeding fine.

That responsible parent line makes their child more significant than all those other children being cared for, possibly by single parents trapped in tower blocks – single parents who may have caught Covid-19 and have no escape at all.

Those rules should apply even if your parents have a huge house outside Durham and your wife’s family own a castle in Northumberland.

I watched this story develop on Twitter, where angry tweets assembled into a disbelieving chorus. First up government ministers tweeted the official line: “Caring for your wife and child is not a crime”, a slippery ball set rolling by Michael Gove, the most slippery bowler of them all. Other ministers piled in with blank-eyed loyalty, under orders to tweet – but from whom, Johnson, Cummings himself?

There is not space on this ledge to include all those tweets about people who couldn’t visit loved ones as they lay dying; parents who couldn’t comfort dying children, and other stories too awful to contemplate.

Here to represent them all is Kate Bottley, the vicar who used to be on Gogglebox: “To the man who’s wife I buried, who wasn’t allowed to hug your daughter at her mum’s funeral. To the mum who had to FaceTime to see her daughter’s coffin. To the son, who wanted to shake my hand but didn’t, after you said goodbye to your mum. I’m sorry.”

But let’s not leave without this observation on Johnson from his days at Eton, seen before but shared again by ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who digs up a letter a master at the school sent to Stanley Johnson about his son… “Eton spotted it in 1982: ‘I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else’.”

Unreliable then, unreliable now.

Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley (picture from Twitter)

Bishops and bloggers find common cause in disliking the language used to talk about Covid-19. Helen-Ann Hartley, the common-sense propelled Bishop of Ripon, popped up on Twitter yesterday to tick off Boris Johnson’s boast that the UK will have a “world-beating” virus tracing system ready by next month.

“Why do we need a ‘world-beating’ anything?” Bishop Hartley asked in a tweet. “If we’ve learnt anything in recent weeks it’s how important collaboration is, between communities and nations. It takes humility to work with others, grace and wisdom to know when to ask for help…”

Boris Johnson’s government is far too keen on such Brit braggadocio, rummaging through the dressing-up box of old uniforms and dragging out Second World War metaphors by the scruff of their khaki collar.

As Bishop Hartley says, we don’t need a world-beating anything. More important, I’d have thought, to have a Covid-19-beating system. ‘World-beating’ means nothing, but is the sort of empty boastful phrase some politicians cannot resist.

The Daily Express, a newspaper that seems to live in that dressing-up box, is at it this morning with a splash story bearing the headline: “We must win obesity war for the sake of the NHS.”

The paper maintains the prime minister is leading by example as it features a photo of him in “workout gear” – otherwise known as shorts and a T-shirt. He also appears to be carrying a laptop, so whether he is working out is open to question.

Whatever, drop the war metaphors. You can’t have a ‘war’ on obesity. Instead, to use the modish phrase, you nudge people towards making better choices; it’s a long slow process of gentle education, not a bloody war.

War metaphors are easy, and war is a typographical convenience, a very short word for something that often takes a long time.

Still, my attempt to shed a measly half-stone or so looks set to take as long as a war, as three runs a week are making little impression. And bless my legs bishop, but those runs take longer than they used to.

Sometimes it is the job of bishops and bloggers to point these things out. More widely, of course, it is the job of journalists to point these things out, although the government and its supporters aren’t at all happy when journalists start asking awkward questions – even though that is their job.

In Ireland they call this self-serving call to put country first “putting on the green jersey”. It refers to Irish governments covering things up with that patriotic jersey.

Boris Johnson tends to pull out a union jack jersey, and a hurt face, whenever journalists ask penetrating questions. Donald Trump shouts “fake news” at reporters and calls them horrible people.

Both leaders use chaos and distraction as a way of diverting eyes from difficulties. Trump’s favourite method is to come out with some outlandish statement – “I am sticking golf balls up by ass to guard against Covid-19”, or some such – so that all the journalists run off and write about that instead of whatever monumental cock-up he has just made.

The Tories have in the past used what is known as the “dead cat strategy” when a minor distraction is introduced to turn eyes from something important.

Attacking journalists is understandable sometimes, especially when partisan political editors invent bogus stories about Labour leaders, as explored here the other day.

But in a broader sense, journalists are working tirelessly in this crisis, producing newspapers, TV news shows and radio news magazines under tricky circumstances.

Politicians such as Boris Johnson might not always like the questions reporters ask, but they’re only doing their job. As too sometimes are bishops and bloggers.

Is the Mail on Sunday off its rocker and can smoking offer protection against Covid-19? The connection here lies in newspapers.

Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday carried a supposedly damning report about Sir Keir Starmer, headlined: “Man of the people? New Labour leader owns land worth up to £12m”.

The story begins: “He was always been keen to play down his privilege and play up his working class roots…” but Starmer owns “seven acres of land that could be worth up to £12m, The Mail on Sunday can reveal”.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal what it likes, I guess, but that ‘could’ is a giveaway. It provided the hook on which to a hang the story, written by Ian Gallagher and Harry Cole. Incidentally, deputy political editor Cole (no relation to deputy ledge dweller Cole) is said once to have been in a relationship with Carrie Symonds, who is now shacked up in Downing Street with Boris Johnson.

That last fact is mere tittle-tattle, but does suggest movement in certain circles.

The greenbelt land in question lies behind the Surrey house where Starmer grew up. He bought the field in 1996, according to the MoS, when he was working as a human rights lawyer.

It turns out that Starmer acquired it as a home for donkeys his parents rescued and looked after. When his mother became disabled, losing the ability to walk, the donkeys were moved to the field so that she could still see them.

The supposed value of the land is purely notional as it has no planning permission, and Starmer reportedly has no plans to sell, although he is selling the house and a small strip of land.

So the gist of this story – supposed socialist is a hypocrite owner of land worth millions ­– is a malicious little fiction, as without planning permission that land is worth nothing much.

The undercurrent is a real shocker: what a bastard, Sir Keir Starmer buys a field so his disabled mother can look after rescued donkeys.

As an attempted stitch-up, this grubby little effort backfired on that detail. At a socially-distanced glance, Boris Johnson probably contains more scandal in his little finger than Sir Keir Starmer does in his upright body.

Incidentally, according to a Sunday Times report of February 16 this year, Chancellor Rishi Sunak, married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire, owns at least four houses, including a mansion here in North Yorkshire. Sunak and his wife, Akshata, both 39, “share a property portfolio spanning the UK and America that is collectively worth about £10m”, according to that Sunday Times report.

Surely, plenty of Tory MPs own lots of houses, as do some Labour MPs. Owning lots of houses seems to be an incidental benefit of representing people who own one house or none.

But that MoS story was nothing but a grubby little stitch-up.

David Hockney is almost as famous for smoking as he is for his art. Journalists sent to interview him sometimes come away having learned almost as much about tobacco as painting.

According to my long-ago colleague Geordie Greig, once a trainee on the South East London Mercury and now editor of the Daily Mail, Hockney claims he wrote a letter to the Guardian saying that smoking offered protection against Covid-19, using as an example Greece. Deaths there have been low and this, according to Dr Hockney, is because lots of people smoke in Greece.

He told Greig that the Guardian refused to print his letter, although the Guardian said it never received it.

David Hockney’s art is invariably uplifting; his unfashionable views on smoking less so.

According to the World Health Organisation, smokers are in fact more likely to be at risk from Covid-19 as their lung health may be compromised. Looks like Hockney is wrong on this one, but his pro-smoking rants are almost an art in their own right.