“Capitalism: good or bad?” is a big question for a small blog.

The man asking the question is  a bad capitalist, due to lack of capital. But while sitting on an almost empty wallet just now, I started to read about a couple unknown to me until a couple of weeks ago.

Here, I’d like to run their story alongside that of a pizza restaurant that is known to me, although I’ve not been in a while.

John and Irene Hays own Hays Travel, a Sunderland-based company set up by John 40 years ago. According to a report in last Sunday’s Observer, John returned to his hometown of Seaham from Oxford, uncertain of what to do next. His father suggested a business making coffins, but instead he set up a one-man travel agent at the back of his mother’s shop. Four decades on, that company has just rescued 500 Thomas Cook stores and saved 2,500 jobs.

Not bad for a man who dodged a future in coffins.

John and Irene believe in ethical capitalism, a noble tradition but one hard-pressed in the smash-and-grab world of modern heartless capitalism.

The former CEO of Thomas Cook, Peter Frankauser, was hauled before a parliamentary committee earlier this week, where MPs suggested he might like to pay back some of the hugely generous bonuses he received during his well-padded stint at the company which sank with him at the tiller. Spoiler alert: he wasn’t keen.

John and Irene have remained loyal to their region and, according to that Observer report by Tom White, they “keep a very thin corporate layer between themselves and their thousands of staff”. Last year, the company hit a milestone turnover of £1bn and the couple shared a £1m pot between their employees.

John sees a “pretty stark” contrast between themselves and the whole Thomas Cook business – “Capitalism is under pressure at the moment and I think a lot of what Thomas Cook represented unfortunately was not the best side of capitalism.”

He adds that Thomas Cook was too corporate and top heavy. “Irene and I own 100% of the business and we live a lovely lifestyle so don’t need to take lots of money out of the business.”

Good luck to John and Irene – and the next time I can afford a holiday, I’ll know where to go.

In 1965, the late Peter Boizot opened the first Pizza Express restaurant in London’s Soho. He brought a pizza oven from Napoli and a chef from Sicily, for the birth of what would become a high-street chain.

Boizot spent almost 30 years building his empire, before selling it in 1992 for £15m. The buyers were Hugh Osmond and Luke Johnson, the latter being the former chairman of Patisserie Valerie, another small business gone gouty with bad capitalism.

Osmond and Johnson floated Pizza Express on the stock market a year later. By the unreadable rules of capricious capitalism, the company was then worth £150m.

Assorted private equity deals later, Pizza Express was bought in 2014 for £900m by Chinese private equity house Hony Capital.

When rumours swirled recently that Pizza Express was about to be dragged under by a £1.1bn pile of debt, it was tempting to see that as a perfect story arc of good capitalism undone by bad.

How could simple dough make so much money for private equity companies, only then to be saddled with such an unfathomable debt? As the author Chris McCrudden explains in a series of tweets about Pizza Express’s corporate history, “it’s a fascinating story of how solid businesses get crippled by debt to make a few people rich”. (It’s worth reading his thread on @cmccrudden).

Pizza Express is still around for now. Following public sadness as its possible demise, the company’s PR-heads traded tweets about how “it’s good to be kneaded” and “we’re still making dough”. Hopefully that is true – but all those pizzas have made an awful lot of dough for rich people who live a long way from the heat of those kitchens.

Peter Boizot must be turning in his pizza oven.

…with Laura Stevenson, at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds

Craig Finn comes on stage dressed all in black: trousers, untucked shirt, jacket and baseball cap. His glasses are large, his face seems almost glum and hard to read: what’s he thinking in there? He launches straight into a song without preamble, making emphatic mime movements as he sings, as if plucking something from the air then releasing it.

Finn may be an unlikely rock star, but that face isn’t inscrutable: it’s the face of a man in control, a man concentrating totally on his music, a man reading his own life and perhaps yours, too.

Two, perhaps three, numbers in he stops to chat, saying this is his first visit to the Brudenell in Leeds. You and me both, Craig.

Finn used to front the American rock band The Hold Steady, and occasionally he still does. Tonight, though, is all about his solo career comprising four albums, with the latest being I Need A New War.

Finn, we are soon reminded, is the ultimate entertainer, who operates in many contradictory modes at the same time: sombre and serious, hesitant and emphatic, and kind of stand-up funny. Mostly he is just a great teller of rock stories, sometimes in a half-mumble that with passion swells to a louder register. Sometimes those stories are sad and about messed up lives or poor choices; sometimes they are adult reflections of teenage life; more than a few are an uplifting blast.

What you get with Finn is sentiment, wit, a clear eye, a beery eye, and more than a smudge of Catholicism.

And while he might look serious as he comes on, he is fun too, and always engaging to watch, holding the stage with his storytelling, making a range of enjoyably eccentric movements, occasionally picking up a guitar, mostly not.

For this tour he has a five-piece band, the Uptown Controllers, including new boy Nelson Deveraux on sax/flute and clarinet. This is only Nelson’s fourth show with the band, not that you’d guess that from his supremely confident playing. This great band (keyboards, drums, bass, guitars and Nelson) slows for the gentle moments, then turns the dial up to the rouse-the-hell-out-of-this-ceiling setting.

I can’t give a full list of songs as I was watching, not reviewing. But those I spot include Maggie I’ve Been Searching For Our Son, Christine, A Bathtub In The Kitchen and Grant At Galena.

Our family group – three-fifths of a whole Cole – have fingers crossed for God In Chicago, and here it is, that beautiful and dislocated short story whose meaning remains elusive: a funeral, a bequeathed container wrapped in newspaper, a drug deal with an unloved old schoolmate, a drive to Chicago, a night of love (“We all want the same things”).

This song opens with stately piano and Finn speaks the lyrics, before singing half-way through, helped by support act Laura Stevenson.

God In Chicago was signalled as the last song, but Finn and his Controllers burst straight into a closing blast of Ninety Bucks, with its rousing chant.

We drive home with a headful of Finn, tired, misled by the sat-nav, but happy.

It’s not mine, it’s all his – bumptious blond man, told one whoppers about why we had to shut down parliament, and now he’s engineered this stately farrago.

Honestly, one never said one wanted to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, forced to spout political chicanery. And no one told one it was a disguised Conservative Party broadcast.

Only good thing to be said about the hair-ruffling fibber is that he’s not as boring as that Labour man with the beard. Dear me, one quite nods off when he’s droning on…

Sometimes the Queen must be tempted to just speak her mind, instead of dutifully reading out a script written for her by the prime minister of the day.

This is not a new notion. As long ago as 1964, when Harold Wilson came to power, Private Eye riffed on this idea, with a Queen’s Speech cover which had Her Maj saying: “And I hope you know I don’t write this crap…”

There is something mildly grotesque about all Queen’s Speeches, but the one the Queen was required to read out today beats the stately lot. A prime minister with a minus majority rolls out the whole stuffy procedure, asking the Queen to recite a list of policies that will almost certainly never be acted out.

What’s worse, Boris Johnson was filmed leering while the Her Maj read out this political shopping list – including all that “we’ll be out of the EU by October 31 stuff”. At least Johnson didn’t get the Queen to repeat that “dead in a ditch” line. But did he have to borrow Priti Patel’s smirk, the one she is never seen without? The Home Secretary’s motto: if it isn’t smirking, it isn’t working

The official Labour Party line is that this Queen’s Speech as a “cynical stunt”, and on this Labour is right. It was all a political scaffold designed to raise Boris Johnson high in the air – as he is, but up a wobbly ladder in a gale, shouting at the wind.

I really can’t be bothered to sift through all the policies in this make-believe speech. But one should worry us. And this is the proposal to demand voters turn up with ID to vote. This could stop potentially hundreds of thousands of people voting – mostly those who are unlikely to vote Tory.

As there is apparently no widespread evidence of voter fraud, this is a self-serving policy based on urban myths about phantom voting and designed to boost the Tory vote.

Johnson is making all sorts of promises while skipping through the magic money tree forest. One minute the Tories are anti-spending and very pro-austerity; the next they’re blowing billions, mostly on filling all those holes left from that first cruellest phase.

It’s a pre-election plot designed to undermine Labour’s similarly grand spending pledges. And if voters are daft enough to swallow the bountiful Boris act, it might ever work.

It’s also engineered to trip up Jeremy Corbyn, who only really has one favourite mode: ranting about the pain caused by austerity. He’s quite right but that record sounded stuck long before Johnson started splashing cash he might not have.

Where will it all lead? Nowhere happy, is a good but gloomy guess.

Every time you see the words ‘nanny state’, it’s best to take a deep breath and admit into your brain two contradictory thoughts.

Sensible thought: if the government has a duty of care to its citizens, which surely it does, then we should celebrate the nanny state. The state can be as much of a nanny as its likes over, say, attempting to reduce smoking. It’s a vile and stupid habit, but that’s easy for me to say as it’s a habit I don’t have.

Less sensible thought: It’s fine for nanny to nag people about smoking and about eating so much rotten food they inflate themselves. But those few drinks I have every week? Oh, come off it, they can’t be a problem, can they?

That second thought raises the Travis Bickle question: “You talkin’ to me?”

It seems nanny was talking to me when the suggested number of units a week was halved for men to 14 units. Under the old rules I could smugly sip my wine or slurp my beer, knowing I drank nowhere near the limit. And then that changed.

Has it been a good change? Well, it’s made me think between drinks. Recently I did one of those online health surveys and discovered I drank “more than 63 per cent” of men my age.

What, even with four nights a week alcohol free?  Do those other men my age live in a monastery or something?

The phrase nanny state is usually attributed to the Conservative politician Iain Macleod, who is said to have coined it for a Spectator article all the way back in 1965.

Every time someone  suggests we eat or drink less of something, it is now an official rule of journalism that certain newspapers must moan about the nanny state. Yesterday it was the turn of the Daily Mail, which described Dame Sally Davies as “nanny-in-chief” for suggesting a ban on eating on public transport.

Over in the Daily Express, Kate Andrews said the idea was so extreme it suggested “an unhealthy obsession with consumption on the part of the public health officials who cooked it up”.

The Times was more reasonable, saying that some moderate restrictions were worth considering, arguing: “These may seem ludicrous to some, but so once did a ban on smoking in public places.”

In her final speech before retiring, the chief medical officer made the entirely reasonable point that the government should put children’s health before companies’ profits. She said it was “every child’s right to live in a world that promotes, not harms, their health”, adding that junk food advertising should be banned.

It was the ban on eating on public transport that earned most nanny points. And this  left me in a quandary. Eating on public transport and on the street can be generally unpleasant. All that food, all those calories, all that fat, all shoved down people’s faces as they dash about or sit with their feet on the seats on trains.

One of the problems with such eating, surely, is that the food barriers have been removed. And once that happens, people feel free to eat all the time and anywhere.

With you so far, Dame Sally. But what about long journeys? If you’re on a two or three-hour train trip, you will need to eat. Anyway, Dame Sally’s prohibition can’t possibly extend to food snobby people who  eat sandwiches cut from a loaf they baked themselves.

In a sense, my reaction pinpoints the problem. Health advice is all very well when it’s directed at somebody else. But the problem comes when you clock that they’re talking to you.

Dame Sally is right to worry about children being overweight. As for all that nanny state stuff in the Mail and Express, well, that lot are never happier than when having a moan they’ve moaned many times before.

Thinking about it now, it’s clear that the wrong question was asked on that fateful day on June 23, 2016. Here’s what the ballot paper should have asked:

Option one:

Do you wish to engage in a monumental and pointless act of self-harm that will tear the country apart, baffle the rest of the world, lead to all sorts of vile nonsense about how we won the war by ourselves and with only a handful of conkers, pave the way for the rise of Boris Johnson as prime minister, do all manner of stupid things such as leaving the single market, all because of a berk called Nigel Farage and his shadowy right-wing backers who splutter on and on about sovereignty (whatever that might be), do you want to chuck everything away to throw your lot in with a US president of questionable mental strength who nevertheless breaks Twitter by spouting off about his “great and unmatched wisdom”, do you want to watch as the Labour leader sits on the fence for three years while trying to make up his mind about Brexit, and do you want the rest of the world to throw away all notions of Britons as pragmatic and sensible people in favour of spending three years chewing each other’s heads off?

Option two

Do you wish to be sensible and just carry on as we are?

Footnote one:

While a little over 17m people voted for Brexit, they only represented 51.7 per cent of those who voted. That in turns represents 37% of the electorate and 27% of the population. This leaves 63% of the electorate and 73% of the population who did not vote for Brexit. As a little over 16m people voted to remain – even without having seen my helpfully rephrased question – that daily splurged myth about this being “the will of the British people” should be politely corrected whenever possible; or shouted down whenever possible, but really there’s just been too much shouting. A close win never was the will of the people; and perhaps the people have willed up a new will.

Footnote two:

Leave.EU’s has deleted its vile tweet about Angela Merkel – “We didn’t win two world wars to be pushed around by a Kraut”. Can we just sit at the sensible table and agree to stop going on about how we won the war all by ourselves? Wars are complicated and end for overlapping reasons. The notion of solitary British supremacy is just a comforting myth. Without wishing to dig too much deeper here, the clue lies in the title of “world wars”. Oh, and the second of those wars ended more than 70 years ago and the first more than 100 years ago. Try looking forwards for a change, chaps.

ONE of the good people, and there are many, who left my old newspaper recommended The Papers, a BBC Scotland documentary available on iPlayer.

The two-part film about The Herald newspaper in Glasgow, along with associated titles, is a decent watch, for newspaper people and ordinary people.

Not an easy watch for newspaper people, but there you go. The deadening familiarity will take you back or pinpoint your reality (cuts, cuts and more cuts).

These films also summon up the inked romance of newspapers. I know, I know – hard to believe, but it is a thing, or always was for this newsprint refugee.

Perhaps it’s the urgency of deadlines that never go away, or the rush of the presses, or companionship forged in doing what can be a difficult job. All that and holding in your hands the tomorrow’s-chip-paper product of your efforts: a newspaper, what a marvellous creation that is (or should be).

A foolish notion for sure, especially at a time when, according to Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, “nearly two-thirds of people say they can no longer tell good journalism from rumour or falsehoods”.

Writing in the Observer about how we ended up in our present shitstorm, Rusbridger sums up the malign role many newspapers had in shaping Brexit – “If you are going to put a crucial decision on the future of Britain to a vote of citizens, it’s pretty obvious what the proper function of press should be: to arm them with unvarnished facts on both sides of the argument.”

Instead what we have are lies so varnished they make you squint.

Many of those lacquered lies appeared in the Daily Mail under its former editor, a man who finger-jabbed hatred into every headline. The new editor is still the editor of the Mail, but he seems less hateful, less unhealthily obsessed with winning the argument.

The Express, the Telegraph and the Sun too all went into one-sided Brexit battle, offering neither insight nor help, just bludgeoned opinion.

All that is a long way from Glasgow and the Herald offices, although Brexit pops up throughout the two films, the inescapable story of our age.

We see the editors, journalists and photographers at work, trying to bring out their papers as the cuts continue. The Herald was one of the great newspapers, but now it sells around 22,000 copies a day, as the push to go digital continues.

The deadening familiarity lies in the slow death of newspapers. But is also lies in ownership: those proud Scottish papers now belong to Newsquest, owners of my old newspaper. Newsquest is hardly alone in making cuts, but it appears to do so with an indecent degree of enthusiasm.

At meetings we see editor-in-chief Donald Martin discuss more cuts with his staff, spinning out the official lines in a bullish manner. Yet is that a glint of despair in his eye; perhaps.

There are departures in the second part, as experienced journalists opt for voluntary redundancy, and the tearful farewells rehydrate a few tears of my own.

Perhaps what I miss most, and it’s another foolish notion, is the romance of the newspaper office. That busy and sometimes cross-tempered fulcrum. That place where everything somehow comes together at the last minute, even when it looks as if this time you won’t make it.

My fractured life now sees me write occasionally for one of the surviving good newspapers. This is a laptop task, and no newspaper office is entered. Another part of my life sends me to an office for many newspapers, a different prospect than working for one paper. Another part still sees me standing in a university classroom and talking about journalism.

Here, to close, is a memory I still like. My old newspaper used to be printed where we worked. When the presses rolled, you could feel the rumble at your desk, a deep echo to your puny typing.

Newspapers change and morph into something else, or too often they just disappear. While there is an elegiac tone to The Papers, there is something uplifting about all those red-eyed writers and editors working into the night to get the paper out. And a sense that, with luck, the smudge ghost of newspapers will survive somehow.

Maybe that’s another foolish notion; I’ve had a few over the years.

It is strange to recall that Euroscepticism was once the tattered passion of the belligerent few. How such a relatively minority sport came to derail the country for three-and-a-half years, and almost certainly for much longer to come, is the tale of modern Britain, the country that ate itself and then spat itself out, not much liking the taste.

Once upon an innocent time, only saloon bar bores spluttered on endlessly about leaving the EU.

Chief among them was a shouty non-entity called Nigel Farage. Since then, sadly, Farage has become a shouty entity.

The founder of UKIP (as good as deceased) and the Brexit Party won’t be happy until we leave Europe. But he won’t he happy then either. It’ll be the wrong sort of Brexit; not the Brexit he wanted. And he won’t be happy because happiness doesn’t fit his obstreperous nature.

What would he have to shout about then? One reported theory is that he will bugger off to the US – hardly the honest act of a man loudly obsessed with this country’s sovereignty (whatever that is).

Anyway, Farage seems to have hijacked those opening paragraphs. He always does that. One minute there is no sight of the frightful man. The next he is shouting at you as you type. Perhaps if he does go to live in Trump Land, we will no longer have to listen to him.

Sadly, it seems likely that we will have to listen to Boris Johnson for a while longer. An interesting insight into the man we reluctantly refer to as the prime minister comes today from the former Tory minister David Gauke, one of the 21 rebels who lost the whip after voting to stop a no-deal Brexit.

Never mind, says Gauke, the Churchillian parallels. Johnson is much more like Trump than Churchill, barging down the path to populism using Trumpian language and tactics.

Gauke tells the Guardian that the divisive Downing Street briefings using terms such as “collaborator” and riling up party activists “corresponds more to Trump than to the long tradition of the Conservatives and Winston Churchill”.

Hence, too, the constant use of “surrender”. Like Trump, you could easily say, Johnson also stirs up a blizzard of noise and nonsense to mask what he’s up to – or to disguise the fact that he’s not getting anywhere (take your pick from the political supermarket shelf of gloom).

At the time of writing, Boris Johnson is due to address the party faithful at the Tory conference in Manchester. What a gathering it’s been, with the Tory sisterhood doing their bit.

There was Housing Minister Esther McVey telling the class about how houses were made. “If we have this new way of going it… 3D architects, 3D visionaries… doing it… with it on a computer… doing it… there’s a whole new raft of jobs”.

House are built using computers – wow, there’s a thing. You might have thought the housing minister would know that’s how it’s been done for decades, but there you go.

And let’s not forget to mention Home Secretary Priti Patel (however tempting that might be), who bragged that she would end free movement of people – all while looking so smug and pleased about the rights she wants to take away.

Now over to Andrea Leadsom, the energy secretary or whatever job it is she has. Attempting to rally the Tory troops, she certainly plugged some of that energy into idiotically bleating: “He has the personality and the pizzazz to get Brexit over the line, doesn’t he?” Her whip-them-up line was met with an awkward silence as the cameras panned an unimpressed crowd of party members.

But does Boris Johnson have the necessary pizzazz – and do we want a pizzazzing PM anyway?

The unavoidable slogan of this week has been “Get Brexit Done” – as dishonest as it is short. Brexit cannot and won’t be “done” by October 31. The best/worst that can happen is that the long quarrel about how to thrash this thing out begins by that deadline date.

Brexit can’t be done like that, as everyone including Boris Johnson knows. It’s just a game, a shouty slogan – it’s Johnson’s version of Trump’s “Build the Wall”.

I think we can agree that life was better once upon that innocent time, when leaving the EU was only spluttered about by saloon bar bores. And an annoying berk called Nigel Farage.

It is my habit to defend the BBC from its ideological enemies, but that’s hard in the Naga Munchetty race row (resolved, sort of).

The BBC got it deeply wrong before belatedly attempting to put matters right yesterday.

Leaving race aside for a moment, at least we can accept that this furore was built on a barrage of complaints. Oh, hang on, not a barrage but one. A single complainant is said to have started all this. One moaning misery. One member of the awkward squad.

Couldn’t that single complaining viewer have been written to and politely told that their views had been considered, but as no one else had complained, the matter wouldn’t be taken further?

That would have saved time, embarrassment and face.

The corporation originally sanctioned the Breakfast presenter for breaking impartiality guides with her comments regarding Donald Trump’s racist remarks about four Democrat politicians whom he suggested should “go back where they came from”.

Asked by fellow presenter Dan Walker how she felt about this situation, Munchetty spoke her mind but only in a restrained fashion, saying: “Every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism.”

After Munchetty was officially ticked off, the BBC was bombarded with complaints about the way she’d been treated, including an open letter signed by many leading Britons of colour.

On the orders of director general Tony Hall, the BBC has now done an about face. Munchetty is no longer sanctioned as the BBC tries to climb out of a hole of its out making; a self-made crisis, a self-dug hole, if ever there was.

This follows the revelation by the Guardian yesterday that the original complaint had been about both presenters. For weird reasons, as the complaint passed through the bureaucratic machine, it was singled down to Munchetty. The complaint is said to have referred to both presenters, but named only Munchetty, so she was the one punished (now unpunished).

As a way of making a terrible decision worse, this couldn’t be bettered. Both presenters were criticised, yet only the black woman was put forward for an official warning. This new twist seemed to suggest that the BBC is clueless about race; strapped down by its own rules and unable to move freely.

I just hope the single complainant wasn’t a Mr D Trump of Washington/New York/a golf course somewhere.

One final thought on the BBC news right now. Unlike many others, I still have no complaints about Laura Keunssberg. She’s doing a good job in difficult times, I’d say.

What I’d like to complain about is all those awful vox-pops on every night, nearly always from Leave constituencies where serial moaners have their largely incoherent say all over again.

Serial moaning Remainers hardly get a look in.

We now know what everyone thinks about everything, and no longer need to have it waved in our face every night. Enough with the vox pops already.

I am naked and dripping after squash when the thought arrives: we never really know how others see us.

My victorious partner went in before me and emerges from the shower as I step in. Normally I’m done, dry and dusted while he’s still dripping words and water.

When I step out half a minute later, my partner says that was quick even for me ­– hardly time for my body to get wet.

Across the changing room, a man I know a little says: “It’s only a small body.”

The thing is, while this may be true, the man delivering the remark is about the same size as me, possibly smaller. Wrapping myself in my towel, I make an appropriately amused sound.

Years ago, our son, on his way to six-ft two at the time, noticed his parents talking to a tall friend. A light bulb moment, as if seeing his parents as small for the first time.

Years before that, a reader turned columnist on the newspaper came into the office. He knew me from the phone and from my column byline photo. “You’re smaller than I expected,” he said. Well, yes, and you’re ruder than I expected, but never mind (words that stayed unspoken, more’s the pity).

How small is small? In my case, five-ft eight with a following wind. That’s what I was in the days when measurements were still taken. If you wish to prove me wrong, get me talking about politics or something, then sneak out the tape measure. I will not cooperate, preferring the small lie.

Apart from standing around with a towel in the changing room, my long-time squash partner probably sees me by now just as an old friend. Or possibly as a despairing, shortish balding bloke whose usual good humour evaporates in a sweaty instant on the squash court.

JUST now I used ‘balding’ in a self-descriptive way. This set me wondering about when the ‘-ing’ can be dropped from the adjective used to describe a state of hairlessness. If you are bald, does that imply the process has reached a conclusion; or are you bald only when all hair has fled?

Here, anyway, is a personal sketch to follow one from a while ago (A bald man at the hairdressers, January 27, 2017). On that occasion, a lad waiting at the hairdressers turned quizzically to his dad as I walked in. He didn’t ask what a bald man was doing in there, but his expression did.

Every six weeks or so, I still go the same hairdressers for a head-shave, alerted to the necessity by the mad professor springy bits at the sides of my head.

Newly shorn again, I wondered this time about saying, don’t bother with the mirror behind my head bit. But I didn’t and there it was, the back of my bald head. I know it’s there but really there is no need to show me. Here’s the back of your bald head, that’ll be ten pounds, please.

Still, I feel better afterwards and enjoy the swift process, ten minutes or so to be, if not transformed exactly, at least tidied up a bit.

You’ve got a go-faster haircut, my squash partner said last week as we went on court. It turned out to be a loser haircut, but never mind. Not all men with hair look like winners. Donald Trump, for example, has the world’s most ridiculous hair. He’s very proud of his candyfloss topping though, apparently believing it makes him youthful and handsome.

Although we never know how others see us, we do all know what Donald Trump looks like, from his silly hair downwards. It’s not a good look.

“Commons hits boiling point,” is the headline in two newspapers this morning. Yes, and Boris Johnson has his finger glued to the switch.

Last night the PM turned himself into the human kettle, spouting and spitting for all the see.

This is what we’ve come to, a country led by a ranting, rude and nasty over-boiled kettle; a man who is happy to bellow in the Commons that the best way to honour the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox is to get Brexit done.

If we end up with the leaders we deserve, we must have done something very bad to deserve this rotten man.

Johnson’s performance as he was dragged back into the Commons after the Supreme Court decreed that closing parliament had been illegal, was disgraceful.

His unapologetic, finger-pointing, abuse-throwing turn was almost too awful to endure, causing the volume on the TV to be turned down to half its usual level.

A “barnstorming performance”, according to the editorial in the Sun. Oh, if that’s barnstorming, you can keep the barn.

Johnson only has one way forward: to shout inflammatory nonsense about the people versus parliament, to jab his nasty finger and to insult anyone who disagrees.

The nasty truth is now out there. That allegedly charming, buffoonish bumbler known as Boris always was a creation; some of us spotted the act for what it was a long time ago and may feel a “told you so” moment coming on.

We told you it was all a put-up job, a bit of pantomime, a stand-up act from a nuclear-grade ego wrapped in a suit that never quite fits. And now we can say, yes, look and see that’s the man he is, not the other conning charmer.

Interesting to note also, through the fingers half-covering your eyes, that Johnson is neither smart nor deft as a political performer. He arrives with a bulging pocket of insults and delivers them with obnoxious brio. He is all swagger and bluster, blowing in a wind of his own making.

His performance last night might have suggested confidence, but really all that bullying and bellowing surely covered inner and doubt and weakness. You only behave like that when you can see no other way out.

OTHER NEWS: And, yes, there is some. The BBC has made peculiar rulings against two of its broadcasters.

The Breakfast present Naga Munchetty has been told she breached editorial guidelines after she criticised racist comments by Donald Trump about the backgrounds of four female politicians.

In discussions with a Trump supporter, she told viewers: “Every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism. Now, I’m not accusing anyone of anything here, but you know what certain phrases mean.”

A clip of the discussion went viral, helped along by the BBC itself. But when a viewer complained, the BBC’s complaints unit ruled that Munchetty had gone too far.

While an angry, fuming white man such as Andrew Neil can say pretty much what he likes on the BBC, a brown woman asked to comment on racism is ticked off. Bizarre and wrong.

In another ruling last week, the complaints unit backed a viewer who said Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis had been “sneering and bullying” in her questioning of the right-wing commentator Rod Liddle.

The unit conclude that the “persistent and personal nature of the criticism risked leaving her open to the charge that she had failed to be even-handed”.

Is it even possible to be even-handed with a man like Liddle? He’s a professional big-mouth commentator who lays his views on with a trowel. Nothing wrong with that, so long as you have a strong stomach, but someone of such robust and occasionally vicious opinions doesn’t need to be handled with kid gloves.

And, by the way, Emily Maitlis is ace and deserves the support of her employers.