It’s not often you’ll hear me say this, but there was a good story on Mail Online the other day.

It didn’t concern a celebrity semi-clad in a bikini. Or Piers Morgan spitting out his dummy about some humdrum aspect of modern life and then saying, look at me, I just spat out my dummy, aren’t I the clever irritant.

No, it was a story about a man using a mobile phone in a pub.

Oh, come on, get your story radar fixed, Julian.

Look, that wasn’t just anyone using a mobile phone in a pub. It was Humphrey Smith, the eccentric owner of Sam Smith’s brewery in Tadcaster. That Humphrey Smith. The one who bans mobiles in his pubs. The one who shuts down pubs because he hears someone using the F-word. The one who’s binned credit and debit cards. That Humphrey Smith.

James Tozer’s report features a photograph of the seldom-seen brewer staring at his phone. He is sitting in a Wetherspoons pub in Heywood, near Manchester (boo to Brexit-backing Wetherspoons; boo to hypocritical Humph).

Perhaps he has installed an app to track the use of the F-word. If someone swears in one of his pubs, a bleep alerts him to the profanity. And before the landlord can say mine’s a half, his pub has been shut down, he’s lost his job and his home and giant boulders are blocking the car park.

That bit about the app is playfulness on my part, but the boulders are real enough. One of my commutes goes past two silent Sam Smith’s pubs where boulders are as lively as it gets.

In High Petergate in York, in the shadow of York Minster, you will find the York Arms, a nice old pub in a lovely building. But you won’t get further than the door at present. Humphrey Smith has shut that one too. As well as the Buckles Inn on the A64, and doubtless a few others too, especially if the clientele is prone to profanity.

The pub where someone swore is the Fox and Goose, in Droitwich. Other pubs where cussing occurs may be available; or shut.

All this explains why Humphrey Smith using a mobile phone in a Wetherspoons is a decent story. Humphrey Smith swearing because the wifi is rubbish would be an even better story.

Samuel Smith’s has pubs all over, including many in London. A survey in the Evening Standard last May listed the 15 best Sam Smith’s pubs in the city. In at number one was Ye Old Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street.

We young reporters from Deptford liked to visit, perhaps to smell the ink or something. It was dark and Dickensian and wood-panelled, with sawdust on the floor. Maybe Humphrey has a thing about carpets, too.

The pub’s sign bears the legend “rebuilt in 1667” as the building was erected again after the Great Fire of London, as started by a mobile phone (perhaps Humphrey is right after all).

“It’s a slice of London history and a fantastic place to spend time ­– if you’ve never visited this London drinking institution, you’re really missing out,” says the Standard. Forgetting to add, for “but for f***’s sake don’t swear or whip out your mobile”.

As for working in Fleet Street, the nearest I got was three years’ worth of Saturday shifts on the Observer. In those far-off days the newspaper was in St Andrew’s Hill, near St Paul’s Cathedral. The offices almost sat above a pub whose name escaped me, until Google obliged with The Cockpit (pretty sure that was the one). Went in there a few times, too.

FOOTNOTE: Incidentally, the famously incommunicado Humphrey Smith is high on my list of people to interview. If you’re reading this, Mr Smith, I apologise for all the swearing jokes and would love to hear your side.

Harry and Meghan are buggering off and the Daily Telegraph is being snide about Labour leadership hopeful Rebecca Long-Bailey. There’s a link here somewhere.

The ins and outs of the royal family don’t ripple my pond. That attitude is not shared by former Daily Mirror editor (and national irritant) Piers Morgan. The decision of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to step back from public life set the Good Morning Britain presenter off on one of his Twitter tirades.

Morgan said the departing pair were “the two most spoiled brats in history”, adding that the death of his mother Diana did not give Harry “licence to treat the Queen so appallingly”.

Even glancing over my unrippled pond, I can see that Harry and Meghan don’t behave like other royals.

For a start they don’t go on television and blather on about not sweating while trying to excuse their friendship with a convicted sex offender (deceased). But they did appear on ITV once to grumble about their lot in life, or so I heard.

What links the departing Sussex pair and the Telegraph’s unnecessary rudeness about Rebecca Long-Bailey is the attitude of the media towards certain topics.

With the royals, the traditional newspapers wear two faces. The first doffs a cap while spouting lickspittle hymns to a great British institution, blathering on about history. The other wears an inky frown and puts the boot in with ‘offending’ royals.

In two short years, Harry and Meghan have received both style of treatment, moving from sparkly modern royals to spoilt brats. Praised and fawned over not long ago, now they are getting the rough treatment.

Both styles of reporting have their roots in the royals being good newspaper box office. And errant royals are the ‘best’ box office of all.

While the Daily Mail often produces loyal gush, its columnist Sarah Vine is ready with her hatchet, writing two days ago: “The woke, somewhat humourless and very entitled Harry we see before us now is almost unrecognisable as the rumbustious fellow we knew and loved.”

Oh, come off it! You liked him when he was mixed up and misbehaving, fancy-dressing up as a Nazi while suffering the long fall-out from the death of his mother when he was 12. But you don’t like him now he’s trying to untangle his life at the age of 35.

Should you wish to go looking, there is plenty more of this stuff from Sarah Vine (perhaps being married to Michael Gove puts you in a mood).

Even a shrug on legs such as myself can see that Meghan has put up with much media hostility laced with undercurrents of racism – while admitting in the same breath that she and Harry do carry on in a high-handed hurry.

Maybe if no one reported anything about the royals, they’d all just, you know, fade away. Sometimes it seems that the Queen is the only true royal glue and she can’t hang around for ever.

If newspaper attitudes to the royals are fixed in this country, the approach to Labour politicians is much the same. All the newspapers bar the Mirror and the Guardian are anti-Labour to various degrees of hostility.

I don’t wish to rehash that one right now, but it is worth pausing over the Telegraph describing Rebecca Long-Bailey as “looking like the love child of the Roswell alien and Mrs Merton”.

Not sure she’s the right choice for Labour leader thanks to the heir-to-Corbyn baggage, but that really is an appalling description.

Snooty, dismissive, rude and public school snarky.

On the day of the election, the editor of the Yorkshire Post, James Mitchinson, received much support for a front-page leader in his newspaper. In this he wrote: “The people of this country must never again be asked to navigate a maelstrom of misinformation in order to decide who will govern them.”

Rarely off Twitter, Mitchinson was on it again to comment on that Telegraph slur to RLB. Fair to say he wasn’t impressed. That maelstrom is still whirling.

Two or three minutes out of home, and the journey nearly ends.

As it says somewhere, the Book of Common Prayer perhaps, in the midst of life we are in… bloody hell, would you take a look at this idiot.

Missing from the above is the word ‘death’, unless you are reading the Book of Clint Eastwood, when the quote is “In the midst of life we are in debt…” (The Outlaw Josey Wales).

The afternoon’s outlaw is driving some category of Honda, the Honda Death Star at a guess, and is propelling himself towards me on the wrong side of the road.

A short way from home, this road leads to a commuter village on the far side of the ring-road. Mostly the road is straight, but there are a couple of bends, and as I emerge from the first of these, the Honda is busy overtaking three or four cars and a tractor.

There is not much to do, apart from pray to that unfollowed God, and touch the brakes while hoping not to touch the sky. The hurtling car hurtles closer. At the last second, and there was one of those otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here tapping out these words, the driver pulls over, but not before I have blown that last trumpet known as my horn.

The Honda Death Star slips in front of the tractor, and the driver acknowledges my dismay with a cool little no-worries wave, what’s a near death crash between friends, and off he goes.

Before that I’d been wondering what to write the next time I sat down on this ledge. I’d just remembered the pocket atlas, the one I took with me for subbing shifts on The Observer all those years ago. The world in a small book, ideal for those who mistake Iraq for Iran, a distinction as important now as it was then.

I also went armed with a pocket dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Only the writers’ book remains, a useful work of reference, but so old it predates the internet and all the chaos it unleashed.

When I did those shifts, I knew even less than I do know, so that small atlas was useful for sticking masking tape over geopolitical gaps. Such gaps remain and lie behind a reluctance to be confident about the world now.

But I am happy to suggest that any world in which Donald Trump seems happy to assassinate the military leader of another country is not a safer place than it was before he ordered that hit.

Did Trump have Qasem Soleimani killed purely to deflect attention from his own troubles, and to boost his chances of re-election? It seems likely, but it’s hard to be sure about the wider world when you are still trying to untangle events in your own country.

Many of the newspapers here blindly support Boris Johnson. The Mail on Sunday said at the weekend that the prime minister was “jetting back” from his holiday – is that the same as routinely flying home from your pampered Caribbean break when the holiday ends, only with a flattering slick of urgency? Oh, who knows?

And the Boris-parading Sun proclaimed Trump’s ‘bravery’. Yeah, very brave to order a hit by a robot assassin while sitting in your country club, one rogue drone talking to another.

Those are all the opinions I have going spare, apart from a few choice observations about idiots who overtake dangerously.

All drivers are idiots sometime or other, but I am too cautious about overtaking to be that idiot.

One film took place in a galaxy far away; the second concerned a family far away in time, perhaps, but spinning still in fresh tumult.

A family trip on Christmas Eve took care of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, while a quartet who won’t see 60 again joined up for Little Women yesterday.

The comparison of entirely different films is a fruitless exercise, but if pushed I’d happily say Little Women is the better film.

With JJ Abrams in the spinning director’s chair, the Star Wars film wraps up the latest trilogy of the spacey opera, making nine films so far. It was everything the average obsessive requires – and seemed to please the ardent Star Wars fan in our midst (31 going on eight).

To the eyes of this fan by family proxy, the film was slightly underwhelming, Star Wars by numbers perhaps. The plot made as much sense to me they ever do, but I’ve learned to just sit there and swallow.

Good battle scenes were undercut by moments when odd things just seemed to happen (Kylo Ren’s dead, oh no he isn’t, he’s back again, and so on).

As usual, the story concerns fractured families, or that’s my guess, and characters hover between good and evil. Daisy Ridley is great as Rey, wielding her girl-power lightsabre, and mostly carries the film, along with Adam Driver as Ren. Sadly, John Boyega is given almost nothing to do this time around.

You might have thought that the last thing we needed was another version of Little Women, Louise May Alcott’s timeless book about the March girls. Such a scandalous thought is blown right away by Greta Gerwig’s tumultuous version.

The actor turned director clearly loves the book and honours the story by using much of the original dialogue. Yet she also gives this tale of four girls growing up in the aftermath of the Civil War her own vigorous spin.

I’ve not read the book(s), but our quartet included two women who have, and they both loved the film.

Clever editing sees the story of the girls as children cut into their lives as young adults, and the interplay between the two levels keeps the film moving fleetly and heightens the emotions.

Also, towards the end, Gerwig cleverly goes a bit meta, weaving in elements of Louisa May Alcott’s own history. This mostly concerns Jo March/Louisa May Alcott (Saoirse Ronan) outwitting a publisher to retain the copyright to her book, and then seeing the novel published. A beautiful scene shows the making of a book, the stitching of the pages, the cutting of the leather cover, the gold title being embossed, the unnecessary flakes blown away.

Another fine scene occurs slightly earlier. Having abandoned her beloved writing – “I don’t do that anymore” – Jo takes up her pen and spends endless hours writing in the attic, laying out all the pages on the floor.

This is a highly affectionate film, but not a sentimental one. The difficulties the March girls face, personal and more political, are urgently of their own moment and our own.

All the cast is strong, even Emma Watson, but Ronan takes the honours, being fantastic and lovely and heart-breaking as Jo.

Florence Pugh is magnificent too as Amy, usually seen as the brat of the bunch, yet here filled out as something more: another young woman trying to work out her place in the world, and not that different in her way to Jo.

It’s a beautiful looking film too, and this littlish old guy quietly lifted his glasses to shed a tear or two. Women won’t need much encouragement so see this film, but men should go along too.

Incidentally, we went to the Hyde Park Picture House to see Little Women, and what a fabulous cinema that is. Built in 1914, it sits on a street corner, its prow-like frontage a relic from the golden age of film.

Everything is plush in the old and slightly shabby sense and gas lamps still putter on the walls.

This proud old cinema is closing soon for a full renovation lasting a year or so , plus the addition of new facilities, including a second screen.

It all sounds exciting… we’ll be back.

If someone ever asks what you think about the honours system, they may have a hidden motive.

That’s what happened to me two years or so ago. A friend asked with deceptive casualness what I thought about honours.

Perhaps I glimpsed what lay behind his question, as my reply was bubble-wrapped in waffle. Later my friend told me he’d just been offered an MBE and was wondering whether to accept.

He did and now carries those letters after his name. A deserved honour for a good man and you’ll get no argument from me about that.

But honours still stink sometimes. And we’ll get to that bad smell in a paragraph or two.

As it happens, my view then as now is that the system offers proper recognition for those who deserve the honour – and shabby elevation for those who don’t.

According to a report in the Daily Mirror a couple of days ago, between 1951 and 1999, 277 people declined an honour, as confirmed by the Cabinet Office in 2012.

Early refuseniks included film director Alfred Hitchcock and children’s author Roald Dahl. More recent decliners include French and Saunders, David Bowie, Paul Weller, Danny Boyle, Ken Loach, Alan Bennett, Jon Snow and Benjamin Zephaniah.

The TV cook Nigella Lawson also turned down an OBE, reportedly saying: “I’m not saying lives and I’m not doing anything other than something I absolutely love.”

A rejection as finely sieved as her flour.

Most of this year’s honours went to ordinary people for the contributions they have made to society – people such as my friend.

That seems perfectly fine.

The problem comes when the recipients are already famous, such as the singer Sir Elton John or the cricketer Ben Stokes, both honoured the other day. No doubting their respective greatness in field or on piano stool, but they don’t really need an honour, do they?

Honours to sports stars such as Stokes are often made in a burst of over-excitement about some victory or other. Fair enough, but to use the Nigella Formula, they’re not saving lives, just doing what they love.

Sometimes your view may depend on how you regard the person being honoured. Favourable in my case for the cookery writer Nigel Slater OBE, a long-time kitchen friend; horribly unfavourable in the case of the Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith, proud Brexiter, benefits slasher and all too public picker of his nose (anyone could be guilty of one of those, but not all three).

Granting a knighthood to the architect of universal credit is just outrageous. Only last April the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that universal credit disproportionately reduced incomes among poorer adults. A cruel system introduced by a man of casual cruelty (oh go on then, slap an ‘allegedly’ in there if you must).

That is the main reason Duncan Smith should never have been given this honour. Other disqualifications should have included his charmless interventions in public life, his rank air of superiority, his preening uselessness, that wanky sports car – and all those times he makes me swear at the radio.

I will hand over to the financial broadcaster Paul Lewis, who tweeted:

“Iain Duncan Smith gets a knighthood as long as he applies online at a public library, declares his and his wife’s income and capital, gives up two of his four children, and then waits six weeks for it. If he fails to meet targets his award is downgraded to a CBE for 12 months.”

Ruder observations were made on Twitter, but I like that one. Duncan Smith is a man without honour who didn’t deserve one.

A good improvement to the honours system would be for all serving politicians to be denied honours. The partisan backslapping involved in political honours really does this country no favours.

Politics out. Here instead are a few thoughts about what has passed before these occasionally boozed softened eyes over Christmas.

The unexpected treat has been catching up with Paddington 2, just the perfect family film: genuinely hilarious and made with beautiful visual wit. Ben Whishaw (“voice only”, as it says in the Radio Times) does a lovely bit of ventriloquism as Paddington, the lovable, chaos-cuddled bear.

In this outing Paddington ends up in the clink, where he is befriended by “Knuckles” McGinty (Brendan Gleeson, wrapped in a duvet beard). Hugh Grant has a ball as the villainous thespian Phoenix Buchanan, the man responsible for sending Paddington down.

The new A Christmas Carol adaptation from Steve Knight, the writer of Peaky Blinders, stirred up a blizzard of indignation, most of it from Peter Hitchens boiling his kettle dry in the Mail on Sunday. Here is the beginning of his column…

“The BBC plans to rewrite Charles Dickens tonight, complete with the f-word and a scene showing a character urinating on a grave. It has no right to do so.”

Here, with apologies, is more: “…most of us have been clobbered into submission by the Corporation’s revolutionaries by now. Either we take what we are given, or we know better than to watch in the first place.”

Boy, Hitchens was cross, but then you don’t get a column in the Mail on Sunday unless you are perpetually pissed off about something or other, preferably the BBC.

As you might expect he trundled out that battered old line about how good Alastair Sim was in the film Scrooge. Peter, that came out in 1951, we can’t stay frozen to that interpretation for ever.

“Don’t watch this poison,” he spluttered towards the end of his column, possibly before going for a lie-down.

What nonsense. This was a thrilling adaptation, a little slow to settle it is true, but the third instalment was a brilliant arranging of all the broken pieces.

It beats me why people become so cross about everything. There is little point in putting on A Christmas Carol unless you do something different. Otherwise you might as well show that old Alastair Sim movie and give Peter Hitchens a security blanket.

Guy Pearce offered a different Ebenezer Scrooge, younger than is usual, good looking and charismatic, yet a cold nihilist too, a venture capitalist who weighs capital in souls.

A Christmas Carol is such a robust and good story it can take any number of interpretations. By the end of this one, Scrooge had been transformed into a good man, even if the Cratchits were wary of the change in his personality.

Visually this was astonishing at times, especially in that last episode, with Tim Cratchit falling through the ice in the ceiling above where Scrooge sat in his lonely house. And don’t tell Peter Hitchens, but 10-year-old Lenny Rush was the best Tim there’s been.

This Christmas Carol also attracted criticism for casting a black actor, Vinette Robinson, as Mary Cratchit. The usual suspect whinge-buckets lined up to groan about political correctness, almost certainly having gone mad.

Here are two ripostes to that charge.

One is that such mixed-race marriages did exist in Dickens’ time, a point well made on Twitter by Kate Lister, of Leeds Trinity University and the Whores of Yore website. Kate helpfully ran a series of historical photographs of such couples.

The second is that with artistic licence, anyone can play anyone; it’s all artifice anyway, and so long as an actor can pull you into the story, what does it matter?

Vinette Robinson was wonderful in a key role, a woman abused and belittled by Scrooge, but who then exacts a surprising revenge. Her scorn alone was worth the price of entry.

The return of Gavin & Stacey was watched by nearly 12 million people and most of them should have left feeling happy. Not everyone gets this sentimental comic drama, but once acceptance arrives, it is hard to resist, and this return after 10 years was as sweet and sour as ever.

Gavin and Stacey, always bit players in their own story, are going off the boil romantically after three kids, but then find their spark again.

Smithy returns to Barry for Christmas, trailing a posh and frightful fiance, but not before old romantic habits trip him up. Nessa emerges briefly from that brutal shell she constructs in order to hide her true feelings. But it all ended with those true feelings being spoken.

I admit that the thought of having to watch James Corden again put me off, but it all went down sweetly in the end.

Brexit battered and bewildered, Boris blitzed and buggered. Such alliterative abuse of the first consonant shouldn’t be allowed, but perhaps my editor won’t be paying attention.

This isn’t really about politics, as it’s all been too much. This is about politicians rounding on the BBC in the kicking fields of Westminster.

As it licks its deep wounds, Labour scowls across at the BBC, complaining that the corporation’s reporting played a role in its electoral defeat. And over in the smug seats, the new Tory government raises its own chorus of threatening belittlement.

They’re both unhappy so we must be doing something right – that’s the traditional BBC response to such double-headed assaults.

The BBC’s coverage of the election was far from perfect, but only because it just never can be. Closer study than a glance from one man on a ledge will decide this one. As a snap judgment, I’d say the BBC is sometimes pro-government in outlook, and as the Conservatives are so often in power, that gives an impression of being pro-Tory.

Despite that, Johnson the victor is threatening to cramp the BBC by turning it into a Netflix-style subscription service, something apparently long favoured by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s semi-hidden adviser, a man who lurks in the shadowy gutter of national life.

The government is also refusing to appear on the BBC Today programme, in response to what it regards as anti-Tory bias.

This is childish or chilling or maybe both.

Two incidents are thought to lie behind this threatening behaviour.

One is Andrew Neil fronting up Johnson about his refusal to be interviewed; the other is said to be the BBC’s extensive reporting of that interview with the local reporter who asked Johnson about the boy being treated on a hospital floor (an ITV reporter mind, but they don’t seem to get it in the neck like the BBC).

To risk harming what, for all its problems, remains one of the most trusted institutions in Britain, and around the world, is just rankly irresponsible.

This is doubly so as the Tories get most things their own way in these matters. Nearly all the newspapers were slavishly on side for the election, kissing Johnson’s fat Etonian arse, while kicking Jeremy Corbyn’s skinnier behind all down the street and back.

With bias in mind, the veteran BBC newsreader Hugh Edwards wrote something interesting on LinkedIn earlier this week (I know, interesting and LinkedIn – remarkable!).

Looking back on his 35^th year at the BBC, Edwards said that the BBC now faced “toxic cynicism and accusations of bias (from all sides)”. He added that the “real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion”.

Edwards said much else besides that is interesting, so do seek out his words.

Here is one section ready plucked and put on a plate for you…

“It’s not ‘biased’ just because you happen not to like it. And here we have the real poison of the social media age: there is a refusal to entertain an alternative point of view; there is a desire to embrace only those sources which confirm your own ‘worldview’ or ‘groupthink’; in short, it’s ‘biased’ if it challenges your own bias. It’s unhealthy and profoundly damaging.”

How true, Hugh.

The best comment I’ve seen from the other side is this from Chris Bryant, Labour MP for the Rhondda – “politicians who complain about their portrayal in the media always seem like fishermen complaining about the sea. Our whole task is to navigate choppy seas”.

In the spirit of supporting the BBC as it faces down Boris Johnson, I tentatively nudged open the door to the Today programme. That door shut two minutes later when Dr Liam Fox, the arch Brexiter, filled the airways with the usual nonsense.

Back to BBC Radio Three, for beautiful music, gentle chat and a minute’s worth of news about once an hour (just enough).

To borrow from an unlikely source, I’ll be back. But for now, Brexit, Boris, Trump, Corbyn – and the rest – are testing the patience of this lifelong news junkie.

I boiled my head in social media for two days until it was a sweet, sticky mess. Then I shook off the hateful detritus and wondered what to think.

Boris Johnson won an unexpectedly large majority because he had a simple message: Get Brexit Done. Never mind it was a lie (we all know it won’t be done for years). Never mind that he did as much as anyone to stop Brexit getting done under Theresa May.

Johnson persuaded traditional northern Labour areas that he offered bright new hope. They looked at him and said, “Life is shit, we’ll give you our vote” – even though life was shit because of his party.

He persuaded Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson to go for an election date of his choosing, when they should have strung him along.

Tony Blair warned Corbyn that agreeing to an election before Brexit was sorted was an elephant trap. But Blair is the devil incarnate in Corbyn circles, even when he’s right.

Johnson gamed the election with cynical brilliance, using fake social media posts, lies and deceptions, bluster and bullshit. He gamed it by refusing to do interviews. He gamed it by doing what his handlers told him to do.

Oh, I don’t know how he did it. Sometimes there is something in the air. Or the political molecules have a new charge. Sometimes people want a change, even if it’s more of the same but with a different clown at the wheel.

I boiled my head in social media for two days until it was a sweet, sticky mess. Endless comments from disenchanted Labour voters like me; endless self-serving comments from Corbyn supporters who still don’t get it.

Elections are won and lost for many reasons, but the shorthand here is simple: Labour lost because of Jeremy Corbyn. I know that’s hard for his most ardent followers to accept. But it’s true.

You can blame Brexit. You can blame the crooked establishment media. You can say as Corbyn’s sons did in a touching letter to their father that they’d “never known a politician to be smeared and vilified so much”. Oh, I don’t know – you could always check in with your dad’s friend Diane Abbott, more vilified than just about anyone.

You can say that your manifesto trended well. You can scrabble statistics and say Labour did better than it seems. Or you can just accept you lost. That you lost disastrously. And that you lost because of Jeremy Corbyn’s weakness as a leader.

Corbyn’s ridiculous Brexit fudge was impossible to swallow. Johnson’s liar’s toffee was as sweet as a new-born lie.

As for the charges of antisemitism, they may have been designed to harm him. But Corbyn’s lack of action failed to remove that stain.

Even in retreat, Corbyn can’t just say, yes, it was down to me. Even as he apologises today for Labour’s heavy defeat, he says he remains proud of his party’s campaign (you know, the one that was such a disaster). More denial, more dithered exclamations of, “Yeah, but…”

It is true that many sections of the media behaved appallingly towards Labour. But they always have and always will. A Labour leader needs to know how to play them at their own game. Not sigh and look exasperated.

Politicians can be lucky in their opponents and Johnson was lucky in his. Corbyn was lucky in Theresa May last time around. But he didn’t win then; and he didn’t win this time either. Everything is meaningless unless you win elections.

I boiled my head in social media for two days until it was a sweet, sticky mess. And here is something. After his 1992 loss, Neil Kinnock said: “I accepted blame because I was to blame. I don’t think you can lead a party to two successive electoral defeats and consider yourself to be free of blame.”

There’s a lesson for Jeremy Corbyn in there.

As for his party, they should elect a woman next time, but not Jess Phillips (as much of an egotist as Johnson). And probably not Rebecca Long-Bailey (too much of a female Corbyn). Angela Rayner would get my vote if I had one: not too extreme, a good life story to tell, an opposing pole to Johnsonian privilege.

One final piece of advice to Labour fanatics (as opposed to humdrum Labour voters such as myself): don’t expend so much energy on hating factions on your own side – it’s the other lot you need to worry about.

Nobody loves a journalist at election time, but here are my journalistic heroes from this depressing election.

Let’s start with Daniel Sheridan, a young reporter from Leeds. Strictly speaking, Sheridan doesn’t belong in a list of political heroes as he was just doing his job. He wrote the original story in the Yorkshire Evening Post story about the four-year-old boy being treated while lying on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary.

The story of Jack Williment-Barr went viral and became something of a political football after it was splashed across the front of the Daily Mirror.

The ITV reporter Joe Pike tried to show Boris Johnson a photograph of Jack on his mobile, but the prime minister refused to look, grabbed the phone and popped it in his pocket.

Johnson made himself look like an empathy vacuum and Joe Pike is therefore another of my heroes, for persistence in the face of blustering bullshit.

Next up is James Mitchinson, editor of the Yorkshire Post. When the story of young Jack went viral, a loyal reader wrote to him expressing her sorrow that he’d fallen for a fake story. She’d seen social media posts claiming the story was a set-up.

A series of identical posts attributed to different names claimed the story was faked. The Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson even tweeted that paediatric nurses had told her the photo was “100% fake”. Oddly, her source seemed to be the same faked post. A level of research that would have got young Daniel into trouble.

Mitchinson politely pointed out that the story had been checked in the usual fashion. As he later wrote in his newspaper and the Guardian, “our original story was sucked into a vortex of disinformation that would make Orwell blush”.

Mitchinson makes my list for defending local journalism. And for today’s front-page leader column under the headline, “Call for urgent electoral reform.”

In a long and balanced piece, Mitchinson says: “The people of this country must never again be asked to navigate a maelstrom of misinformation in order to decide who will govern them.”

This brings me to an unlikely bedfellow. But this dreadful election teaches us that sense can be spoken by those on the ‘other side’.

Peter Oborne is the true political hero of this election. This lifelong Conservative has always voted Tory. Until recently he has written for publications on the right, including the Telegraph, Mail, Evening Standard and Spectator.

He is an old-fashioned Tory who now says in a comment piece for the Guardian: “Boris Johnson wants to destroy the Britain I love. I cannot vote Conservative.”

Oborne argues that under the tutelage of his adviser Dominic Cummings, Johnson is attempting to “destroy Conservatism”. He writes: “This is why during his brief term as prime minister Boris Johnson has attacked parliament, mocked the rule of law, abused the monarchy, and shown a total disregard for the truth.”

He also says of the party he once supported: “Something horrible has happened. The Conservative party lies. It cheats. It bullies. It’s not the wise, gentle, decent party of the postwar era.”

I might quibble with gentle and decent, but his argument is copper-bottomed.

That’s not why Oborne is my political hero, or not wholly why. No, he earns that honour for being the only commentator to point out that the political editors were passing on government propaganda by quoting unnamed government or Downing Street sources.

And he earns it again for his website chronicling Boris Johnson’s shaky relationship with the truth. It’s well worth a read at boris-johnson-lies.com

Also in my hero list is Pipa Crerar, political editor of the Daily Mirror, leader of her paper’s unstintingly sharp election coverage. Being banned from the Tories’ election bus seems to have done her a power of good.

And a last word for Marina Hyde of the Guardian, just named political commentator of the year in the British Journalism Awards for being “clever, innovative and consistently on the ball”.

To be so acridly witty all the time about everyone and everything is quite the achievement. Marina has made this election a little more bearable.

Footnote: The politest possible heckle on Facebook points out that John Crace of the Guardian has been overlooked. How did I manage that oversight? Crace is a brilliant political sketch writer who manages to pull witty nuggets from the daily slime bucket of politics. Happy to put that right.

Boris Johnson was interviewed yesterday in Grimsby fish market. He was kippered by a reporter called Pike, a pleasing conjunction.

The ITV Calendar reporter Joe Pike asked the slippery haddock about a photograph on the front of yesterday’s Daily Mirror. This showed four-year-old Jack Williment-Barr being treated on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary.

With his usual bullshit bluster, Johnson barged the question away and started regurgitating the Get Brexit Done script he’d been force-fed by his handlers weeks ago. Waffle-waffle, record NHS funding, blather-blather, burp Brexit.

Pike stuck to his question: “I’m talking about this boy, prime minister. How do you feel, looking at that photo?”

Johnson declined to look and bumbled: “Of course. And let me tell you … I haven’t had a chance to look at it.” Pike asked Johnson if he like to look at the photograph now. Johnson said: “I’ll study it later.”

Pike didn’t give up, but Johnson was sellotaped to his script: “If you don’t mind, I’ll give you an interview now. What we are doing is we are taking this country forward, and we are investing in the NHS.”

In a bizarre turn, the empathy-free zombie from No 10 apparently snatched the phone out of Pike’s hand, shoving it in the pocket of his own coat.

The doughty Pike said: “You’ve refused to look at the photo, you’ve taken my phone and put it in your pocket, prime minister. His mother says the NHS is in crisis. What’s your response to that?”

Johnson always gets his interviews and his monologues muddled. He thinks an interview is where he spouts off uninterrupted for five minutes.

The prime minister having a bad day cheers me up at a time when not much else about this dire election does.

The story of the four-year-old patient on the floor took a few more weird turns. Health secretary Matt Hancock was sent to Leeds General Infirmary, where the Tories claimed that one of Hancock’s aides was “punched” by a left-wing protester.

The political editors at the BBC and ITV tweeted about the punch, having been tipped off by unnamed Tory sources. This “punch” was later shown on video footage to involve the aide walking into the protester’s outstretched arm.

Johnson later flourished an on-the-hoof policy about abolishing the BBC licence fee as a distraction. And it worked. The faithful newspapers this morning avoided the embarrassing interview and put the BBC licence fee on their front pages.

The bad day unfolded at great speed on Twitter. First came all the retweets for Joe Pike’s clip of the embarrassing interview, said to have been viewed 2.3m times in three-and-a-half hours.

Then later in the day, the Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson claimed the story of the four-year-old boy was false. She said paediatric nurses had told her the photo was “100% fake”. The same claim using the same words under different names then spawned across Twitter and Facebook, suggesting the setting up of fake accounts to spread this version of events.

The conspiracy theories popped up on the other side of the fence, too. The commentator Craig Murray suggested the story wasn’t trending on Twitter thanks to some sort of shady deal under which tech companies avoid paying much tax. Yet at that very moment, Jack Williment-Barr was trending. I’d spotted the name and clicked out of idle curiosity.

Jeremy Corbyn flourished the Mirror story at a rally in Bristol. This plays well to his NHS theme, yet there was something routine about his anger, as there has been about his campaign.

Two footnotes to the story of Jack Williment-Barr.

ONE: His mother has asked for her son not to become a political football, and that is understandable.

TWO: While the Mirror is credited with the story about Jack lying on a hospital floor, the original story was by Daniel Sheridan of the Yorkshire Evening Post. A reminder that even in tough times for regional newspapers, a good reporter will still find strong stories.

Oh, and an unconnected footnote.

Johnson is going about suggesting that joy will be so uncontained over Brexit that a baby boom will follow. He bases this on what he says happened after the London Olympics. Yet there was no such baby boom, as BBC Radio 4’s More Or Less and others have been pointing out (the birth rate actually fell). Johnson appears to have invented this baby bump, alongside much else.