JEREMY Corbyn addressing media matters is like a man sticking his head inside a lion’s mouth to check on a troublesome tooth.

Today, in a speech at the Edinburgh TV Festival Corbyn will outline his ideas for media reform. As a minor media head, I’d say there is good and bad here.

Two newspapers splash on different aspects of what Corbyn is suggesting. The Guardian leads with the idea that multinational digital behemoths such as Netflix, Amazon, Google and Facebook should be taxed to provide a new stream of income for the BBC.

Over at the Daily Telegraph – or the Tousled Blond Beast, as that paper should now be known, due to a weakness for promoting its ‘star’ columnist – another aspect of Labour’s plans catches the editor’s eye. “Corbyn says BBC should reveal class social class,” is the headline.

Labour thinks the digital giants should support public interest journalism. The party thinks this could be done by boosting the BBC and funding local news cooperatives.

How such ideas would work is another prickled matter. But the decline in local and regional newspapers is certainly kicking bricks out of the wall of local democracy.

Earlier this year, a study in the US suggested that when a local newspaper closes, the cost of government increases. Professor Paul Gao, of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, drew a direct line between a decline in government efficiency and the watchful eyes of local democracy. When those eyes aren’t watching, the costs rise.

Corbyn is said to believe that without greater investment in investigation, there is a risk “a few tech giants and unaccountable billionaires will control huge swatches of our public space and debate”.

He is right about that, and he is right too to draw lessons from the Grenfell Tower fire.

At the time of the fire, observers including this blog said that the absence of local journalists due to newspaper cuts indirectly contributed to unsafe conditions in the tower block. Some residents believe the lack of a local newspaper meant there was no one to speak up for their concerns or to campaign on their behalf.

Although neighbourhood newspapers are described as ‘local’, all too often they are owned by media corporations. That makes them local only in what they report on, rather than being businesses with their feet in the community mud.

There are many suspects in the great newspaper murder. People’s habits change; newspapers started to give away for free what they previously charged for; the rise in smartphones makes skimming for news so much easier.

And newspaper bosses made poor decisions, too.

First, they panicked about the internet; then thought they’d make piles of money online, only to find Google and co had run off with the loot, leaving only pennies in the cash-box.

Then they started cutting. Now the cuts have done so deep, soon there’ll be nothing left.

In that gloomy scenario, Corbyn’s suggestions of something to replace what is being lost is encouraging, at least in theory.

Now to the BBC. Here, the ideas include that digital top-up fee and a survey of staff backgrounds.

According to the BBC’s own report on its website, Labour wants the corporation to publish the social class of “all creators of BBC content, whether in-house or external”.

Oh, what cumbersome bureaucracy is that!

And is that not sinister: some dead-eyed committee probing and prodding the social background of everyone at the BBC? And that “in-house or external” embraces many creators in many different organisations.

Perhaps the BBC does employ too many people of similar background. But laying down strict criteria is a dark road to head along.

Still, it is interesting that Jeremy Corbyn should at least be thinking about the media. For he is often hostile towards the media – as many members of the media are towards him.

Another starting point would be for Corbyn to point out that not all newspapers and all journalists are part of a mainstream media conspiracy, as some of his supporters suggest.

In the early 1980s, that’s where you’d find me. Sitting in the bar at Greenwich Theatre on a Sunday lunchtime, with the newspapers, a pint, something to eat, and live jazz as a soundtrack.

The musician I remember most was South African saxophone player Dudu Pukwana, who died in 1990, aged only 51. The last track of this 1988 album by the joyfully anarchic big band namechecks the musician and explains that title: Open Letter to Dudu Pukwana.

Loose Tubes formed a couple of years before this album. A collection of 20 or so young musicians used to rehearse with jazz educator Graham Collier, before casting off from their mentor and going their own way with glorious abandon.

This was the band’s third album, and it comes with echoes. Band leader Django Bates used to play with Pukwana, and he also used Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich (where Dire Straits once recorded).

Ah, Wood Wharf Studios, that’s where you’d find me. Drinking coffee with Billy Jenkins, maverick musician, studio keeper and all-round good guy. Not so good with the coffee, though: he once added double cream past its best and greasy globules floated on the surface.

Anyway, so this one has history. It’s also a fantastic album of free-spirited British jazz. Rules are glanced at, and then kicked noisily down the road.

There isn’t a dull note in any of the four tracks, starting with Sweet William, and a great sense of fun and joyfulness resonates, especially on Accepting Suites From A Stranger, with its jokey chant.

In 1987, Loose Tubes were the first jazz orchestra to play the Proms in the Albert Hall. They were youthful, fun, bold and irreverent, and this album is all those things and more.

And, yes, I know there are people who say, “Oh, I don’t like jazz” and I even know one or two. But honestly, you’re missing out here.

NOW, where were we? Ah, yes, rudeness in politics. Yesterday, I was worried about the discourteous Brexit ‘debate’. And today I welcome rudeness, which is not consistent, but never mind.

In rude news this morning, Melania Trump decries the destructive power of social media. Yes, that Melania, the one married to the man who infects Twitter with insults and boastfulness like an overweight orange snake spitting puerile venom.

And, yes, just as Melania was addressing this sensitive matter, her husband was using Twitter to attack John Brennan as “the worst CIA director in our country’s history” and a political “hack”.

I was trying not to think about Trump, but then foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt came on the Today programme and started being softly reasonable about the president. And that pushed me over the edge. That man needs the slap of hard words, not soft massaging blather. A rude man deserves rude words (and never mind what I was saying yesterday: time moves on, you know).

And then I found some. Not my words, although I do wish they were. They weren’t even Charles Kaiser’s words, but he does get to pass them on.

On the Guardian website, Kaiser reviews a new book by the Republican political consultant Rick Wilson, with the splendid title, Everything Trump Touches Dies.

And just remember this: Wilson is meant to be on the same side as Trump.

Here are some of Wilson’s ‘eviscerations’, as Kaiser terms them. Referring to Trump’s opening speech as president, Wilson says everything in it was “moral poison to anyone who believed in any part of the American dream. Everything about his nationalist hucksterism smelled like… a knock on the door of authoritarian statism”.

The right, he says, is “merrily on board with a lunatic with delusions of godhood”, adding that the tax bill was a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.

Oh, I am starting to feel better already.

Wilson argues that the Trump administration is a “hotbed of remarkably obvious pay-to-play and corny capitalist game-playing. How obvious? Think 1970s Times Square hooker on the corner obvious… The degree to which this president has monetised the presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up act in the Corruption Olympics.”

And just in case that doesn’t’ satisfy, Wilson adds that the presidency “hasn’t been an endless exercise in self-fellation, until now”.

Wilson shares some of the blame among himself and other political consultants, saying: “The creature that emerged after Sarah Palin crawled from the political Hellmouth in 2008 kept growing, hungry not for policy victories… but for liberal tears, atavistic stompy-foot rages, and purity over performance… we fed the monster and trained it…

“Then Trump came along… The monster is out of its cage, and its new trainers (both here and in Russia) encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most capricious, cruel and violent behaviours.”

Here are Wilson’s thoughts on the paradox of evangelicals clinging to the body of an ungodly man.

“All the things evangelicals had said for generations that made a candidate anathema were suddenly just fine… Being a goddamned degenerate pussy-grabber with a lifetime of adultery, venality, and dishonesty is not, to my knowledge, one of the core tenets of the Christian faith… Trump has opened entirely new theological avenues… There is literally not one aspect of Trump’s behaviour as a citizen, a husband, and as a man that shows the slightest scintilla of repentance for anything, ever.”

That’s a book I have to read. Some people are so dipped in the vile ink of incivility that retaliatory rudeness is the only response.

Here is one Tory MP talking to another in a not so fine example of present political debate: “We don’t need any lectures from Remainers.”

This is typical of the ping-pong rudeness of  politics since Brexit, but who said it and about whom?

Oh, almost anyone about almost anyone else, and if it’s not pro and anti-EU Tories laying into each other, it’s factions within Labour jousting swears on Twitter over allegations of antisemitism in the party.

In fact, those words were spoken by Tory backbencher Nigel Evans shouting down his fellow Tory MP, Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, for saying that a no-deal Brexit would be a bad idea, until he changed his mind and said something else.

Another Nigel, the Farage one, pompously proclaimed in the Daily Telegraph the other day that he was “back” to campaign over Brexit. Astute followers of the news, or even those who switch on when a blue moon is shining at Newsnight time, could be forgiven for thinking Farage never went away.

But that man does like the limelight, and perhaps he felt no one was looking his way, so he made his announcement and did a lame tap-dance into the waving spotlight of attention. Once his brogues had stopped tapping out of time, he swore that he would take on “Theresa the appeaser”.

Much as his friend Trump loves to lay into “crooked Hillary”, so Farage likes to have a handy woman to blame for everything going wrong.

Except that nothing has gone wrong, at least not in Farage terms. He’s getting Brexit which is what he wanted, but he fears it won’t be a full-on hard Brexit, or a hard-on full Brexit, or whatever sort of Brexit it is he wants.

Love him or loathe him, or loathe him and loathe him a bit more, which is the best solution, Farage is the man who gave us Brexit. Perhaps getting what he wanted has turned out to be a disappointment.

He also helped stir up the toxic fog, with everyone shouting each other down as they try to work out exactly what Brexit it is (not so hidden clue: nobody knows).

As no one knows, trying to work it out has reduced us to a shouty congregation of disagreeable types.

Brexit and Trump are the double-act of our times. The rancid argument over Brexit are too often conducted in Trump-speak slogans; and the trouble with Trump-speak is that Trump often doesn’t know what he’s speaking about.

Trump is also horribly impetuous or impetuously horrible, swinging out insults and verdicts at the drop of his Twitter thumb. After last week’s incident in Westminster, the president fired one off: “Another terror attack in London. These animals are crazy and must be dealt with through toughness and strength!”

This was long before anything was known about the nature of the incident in which 29-year-old Salih Khater drove into cyclists, injuring three. Later in the week, police announced that they could not be sure of a terrorist link. If this proves to be the case, Trump won’t care, for he’ll have moved on to jump another incorrectly aimed gun.

Instant verdicts, unstoppable rudeness – those, sadly, seem to be the hallmarks of the moment.

This one comes all the way from 1970 – three years after a famous bit of graffiti declared: “Clapton is God”, a daub inspired by his time with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (the first band I ever saw, although in a later line-up).

Heard again, this double album of bluesy love songs is both instantly familiar, thanks to that title track, and a happy revelation. The album wasn’t a success in its day, due in part to puzzlement over who Derek might be. Clapton’s ‘post-God’ desire for anonymity had a self-fulfilling consequence: the album was so anonymous it initially disappeared.

At the time of recording, Clapton and his Dominos were working with George Harrison on his album, All Things Must Pass. The guitarist was said to have been in love with Harrison’s wife, Pattie, and at night poured his heart into writing these songs. Hence the sense of longing; and as for the long notes sliding in, they were supplied by Duane Allman, of the Allman Brothers, who died in a motorcycle crash the following year, aged 24.

Allman provides the slide guitar solo in the instrumental second part of that title track. In an interview in the Daily Telegraph to mark the album’s 40^th anniversary, organist and pianist Bobby Whitlock said: “Duane was a good addition to the band, but I can tell you one thing – if Eric had played those parts, they would all have been in tune.”

But Layla still rouses the spirt and colours the soul blue: it’s one of those tracks, perhaps like Free’s All Right Now, that the years cannot diminish. At the time, Layla sank as a single and interest in the track only revived two years later as it was re-released to promote a Clapton compilation.

Fourteen tracks are spread over two vinyl discs, some longish blues jams, and some betraying Clapton’s feelings at the time (Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?).

The other stand-out song is Bell Bottom Blues, again filled with intense longing – “I don’t want to fade away/Give me one more day, please…”

Drummer Jim Gordon was said to have been a deeply troubled and troublesome man on tour.

“Cocaine and heroin and whisky will make you one crazy dude,” Whitlock said in that Telegraph piece. “Eric and I managed to come out relatively unscathed. But Jim’s alcohol and drug intake was way over the top. It was pretty scary what was going down.”

In 1983, Gordon was convicted of murdering his mother and, aged 73, is still in prison.

Not fully perfect perhaps – yet Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs holds its own, even if the band never released anything else.

Although the album toured well in the US, a follow-up never fully came about, thanks to drug use, frustrations and endless conflicts. In the last session, Clapton put down his guitar and walked out.

“It was frustrating,” Whitlock told the Telegraph. “Eric just went ahead and locked the door at Hurtwood [Hurtwood Edge, his Surrey mansion] and stayed home for two years and did heroin.”

This selection from the vinyl shelf belongs to my wife: she didn’t buy it on release, as she was only 12 at the time, but picked up the album sometime later.

IT is reasonable to be wary of newspapers, as everyone from an occasional critic of this blog to my friends in the curry house last night will argue. But President Trump takes this distrust to levels that should alarm us all.

Trump routinely talks of “fake news” and refers to the news media as “the enemy of the people”.

Recently at a rally in Pennsylvania, he jabbed his finger at journalists covering the event and described them as “fake, fake, disgusting news”.

The outgoing UN human rights commissioner has said such assaults are “very close to incitement to violence” that could lead to journalists censoring themselves or even being attacked.

Well, at least we can count ourselves lucky that Trump isn’t saying those inflammatory things to gun-toting rednecks who hang on his every stupid word…

A year ago, the editor of the Washington Post, Marty Baron, said his newspaper approached the Trump administration not with open hostility, but just as it would any administration. “The way I view it is, we’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work. We’re doing our jobs.”

Part of that job is reporting what Trump says and attempting to give a balanced picture of an unbalanced man – a man who feels it is acceptable to refer to a prominent black woman as “that dog”. The way Trump talks, it’s just astonishing, and sometimes we should remind ourselves to be astonished. It’s all too easy to be out-astonished in his company.

I know little about Omarosa Manigault Newman, except that she was a contestant on the US version of the Apprentice – a qualification that elevated her to the White House as a political aide, until Trump tired of her. Now she is touting a book and is at war with that crazily inconstant man.

In this morning’s news, Trump has removed the security clearance of John Brennan, a CIA director who has served four presidents – something this prominent Trump critic likens to the behaviour of “foreign tyrants and despots”.

Also, this morning, and this is what I am getting around to, something I knew nothing about in the curry house last night, the leader writers are beginning to turn against Trump. Not one or two of these constantly critical souls but approaching 350 of them.

These leader writers belong to news groups that have been brought together by the Boston Globe to denounce what the paper calls a “dirty war against the free press”.

That is a large gathering of leader writers – and what might be the collective noun for such an assembly? A ‘grumble’ of leader writers, perhaps.

Good luck to those leader writers, power to their scratchy pens. Calling on the collective might, if that’s what is still is nowadays, of newspapers and news websites to speak with one voice is a smart move. The leader articles do not parrot the same words, but they are passing on the same message: hands off the free press.

The Guardian has joined in this collective leader-writing effort, and here’s part of its editorial…

“Mr Trump’s insults and incitements are a calculated danger to… the respect, civility and dialogue that should exist between the press and its readers. The Guardian stands with the US press in its efforts to maintain the objectivity and the moral boundaries that this president – like so many others in much more dangerous parts of the world – is doing so much to destroy.”

I still read the Guardian, in print and online (bunging them a fiver a month for the privilege), but my friends in the curry house are not onside.

One is a Corbyn fan who believes the Guardian has it in for the Labour leader, and the other just doesn’t trust the paper’s world view, especially on China. I was outnumbered over the popadoms, in a pickle over the pickles.

I guess my problem is this: if I stop reading the Guardian and the Observer, if I spurn the BBC, just what is left for me to read and do? You should always approach all sources of news with a wary eye, but distrusting them all, and ranting about the evils of the mainstream media, is to follow Trump on the path to God only knows where.

Yesterday saw a bout of blogger’s block. Sat down, scanned the headlines and pulled out a few possibilities. But nothing seemed right or authentic, so a wordless shuffle away from this ledge took place.

My mind felt like a shower drain furred with hair. Should I comment on Corbyn or Trump again? Or should I condemn the strange official silence surrounding the dozens of children killed last week in a Saudi-led hit on a school bus in Yemen; the Saudis we supply with arms worth billions?

One of few voices speaking out against Britain’s involvement in this atrocity was the former Tory Cabinet minister, Andrew Mitchell, who said: “I think the attack on a school bus should provide all parties to this conflict with a wake-up call to just how catastrophic on all fronts it is.”

Sometimes the most surprising people speak absolute good sense, and what Mitchell said resonates more than all the inky assaults on Corbyn, even if the Labour leader does lay himself open to such attacks.

Today the mental fretfulness has passed, and now let us rise into the air to admire the view. An unexpectedly uplifting sight arose on the BBC news last night with airborne footage showing how the heatwave is revealing Britain’s ancient past to archaeologists.

Lack of moisture in the soil may be a worry to farmers, but it can also reveal the strange hidden beauty of the land on which they work.

The prolonged dryness has “provided the perfect conditions” to see ancient crop marks, according to Historic England.

Surveys from the air have revealed “Neolithic ceremonial monuments, Iron Age settlements, square burial mounds and a Roman farm for the first time”, the BBC reported.

The findings include two Neolithic monuments near Milton Keynes, of all places: an unfair slight, there, as a long-lost friend lived in the countryside near the no-longer-new town, and it was lovely enough round there.

Long rectangles exposed near Clifton Reynes are thought to be the paths or processional ways dating from 3600 to 3000BC. That thought summons up one of my favourite books, Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways, in which the writer traces the old tracks, drove-roads and sea paths crisscrossing Britain.

Other sites around the country exposed for the first time include an Iron Age round settlement in Cornwall, a Bronze Age burial mound in Derbyshire, and Iron Age square burial mounds or barrows in Pocklington, not too far from here.

There is something deeply pleasing about the past emerging in this way, about the hidden ways and structures writing their shapes across the land, as if in architectural invisible ink. The patterns are strangely beautiful too, like abstract paintings, and somehow it is oddly calming to be reminded of the ancient past. Especially when the news is a babble and you’ve got a mind like a blocked shower drain.

I sort through the tin of letters, looking for the apology from the man who went on the win the Nobel prize for literature. These letters are old as no one writes letters nowadays, least of all me.

Then I spot the envelope, with its round franking mark: “SALISBURY WILTS, 7.15PM 14 NOV 1974.” The pale blue stamp cost the writer four-and-a-half pence. My name and address are written in thin black ink.

The letter inside the envelope is headed “105 Great Russell St, WC1” and it begins “You are absolutely right…”

Aged 18, I had written a snooty letter to The Sunday Times. This was in response to an article by the novelist VS Naipaul about Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which was on the A-level syllabus.

There was a mistake in the article, an error that escapes me now. It was a confusion of some sort over characters in the novel.

I am trying to read the letter two days after the death of the man who wrote it. The article in The Sunday Times must have been reprinted from elsewhere, because Naipaul writes: “I have already admitted the error – unforgivable, I think – in the American magazine which printed the article.”

Naipaul continues: “It is of course pointless now to explain why the error occurred…”

The handwriting is a little difficult to read, so Naipaul’s explanation of how he made the mistake is lost to me.

It is possible to make out what Naipaul is saying at the end of the letter, but perhaps retrospective vanity has sharpened my eyesight. “The paper was read to an assembly of Conrad scholars at Canterbury – not one pointed out the error then. If they had been as sharp as yourself, the error might have been corrected before it went into print.”

The Secret Agent, which was televised by the BBC not long ago, was Conrad’s delayed response to the accidental death in 1894 of Martial Bourdin, who was fatally injured while carrying a bomb across Greenwich Park. This incident became known as the Greenwich Mystery.

Sir VS Naipaul died at home in London last Saturday, after reading a poem by Lord Tennyson with the incoming editor of the Daily Mail, Geordie Greig. The two had been friends for 20 years, and Greig told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend on Sunday that he rushed to be with the writer after a call from his wife, Lady Nadira.

Ten years or so after receiving that letter from Naipaul, I was working on the South East London Mercury where – as reported earlier – Geordie Greig turned up as a trainee, arriving in Deptford via Eton and Oxford.

Naipaul came from less elevated circumstances. He was born in Trinidad and, according to the introduction to his obit in the Guardian, “won both acclaim and disdain for his caustic portrayals, in novels and non-fiction, of the legacy of colonialism”.

The novel that made his name was A House For Mr Biswas, the funny and malicious story of a man who claws himself out of poverty, fighting members of his own family at every turn. I loved that book and have read others, although they are misty now, whereas Mr Biswas still resonates.

Reviewing A House for Mr Biswas for the Observer in 1961, Colin MacInnes hailed a writer whose voice “even when scornful or ironical, can be as tender, just, kind, delicate, filled with unassuming pity”.

It is time to seek out those novels again. Time, too, to return the letter from VS Naipaul to the old tin full of letters from university friends, two now dead, and notes from girls I no longer remember. Although there is one from Heather, and she does stir a glimmer.

Putting the apology back in the tin makes me feel sad for a lost voice, and sad too for all the letters I no longer write or receive.

There was something to be said for a letter.

IT has always pleased me that the composer Handel and the guitarist Jimi Hendrix should have lived in the same London house. A happy accident of history – and, besides, it reminds me of my teenage self and my dad.

Early in my vinyl days, there was only the one record deck. Sometimes this led to what you might term a Handel vs Hendrix stand-off. My dad would commandeer the record player for Beethoven and Bach, and when his back – or indeed his Bach – was turned, I would slip in there with a bit of Grateful Dead (the double live album).

My dad played the violin, still does at 86, and I used to wake up hearing him practise. This left a musical split personality that is with me still: lots of rock, folk and jazz in the collection, but a fair bit of classical, too.

This record went with me to university. It features three concertos, but the important one in this instance is the Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, or the ‘Bach Double’ as it is known.

In her book Year of Wonder, which offers a piece of classical music for every day of the year, Clemency Burton-Hill chooses the unspeakably lovely second movement as her ‘tune’ for Valentine’s Day.

Clemency says the whole concerto suggests falling in love, conjuring a “sublime soul matey-harmony”. “There are moments when the two violins get lost in each other’s thoughts or finish each other’s sentences without even being conscious of it; then there those passages that turn unexpectedly into heated debates.”

But the true romance comes with the Largo ma non tanto – the bit in the middle.

“For my money,” Clemency writes in her notes, “this second movement might just be the most beautiful piece of music we have.”

She’s not wrong there, and the soaring, yearning dialogue between the two violins gets me every time. And I’ve listened to it countless times.

If you want a piece of music to take you away, to spin you in teary silk, this is the best suggestion I have. It’s also the first piece of classical music pulled from the vinyl vault (or the wardrobe in the spare bedroom).

If you don’t listen to classical music, and God knows I listen to a musical all-sorts, this is my best suggestion for a place to start.

Incidentally, we’ve been following Clemency’s book all year, although we are two or three weeks behind, and have made many great discoveries.

The dust of controversy stirred up by Boris Johnson is always about him and not whatever ridiculous or offensive words he just uttered to feed his addiction to self-promotion and the endless lash of headlines.

And if that last paragraph conjures an image of Johnson stripped to the waist while having his back whipped by the dominatrix of attention, well please accept my apologies.

He’d barely left the Foreign Office before he was invited back to the Daily Telegraph, where his less than prodigal return was greeted on the front page with the announcement: “He’s coming home.”

Reports that on reading that his wife said: “Oh shit!” and dropped a plate can be ignored, as I just made them up.

What is true is that Theresa May insisted Johnson stop writing his column when she made him foreign secretary. But he sneaked through the back door anyway to dash off a few columns, usually critical of May.

Now he’s back to his sideline career as a commentator and big mouth – a gig that is reported to earn him £275,000 a year.

When he was Mayor of London – an earlier stage in the Bor-rassic era – he said that his then Telegraph pay of £250,000 was “chicken feed”.

The latest rash of look-at-me headlines has been stirred by Johnson saying that Muslim women wearing burkas “look like letter boxes”. He also compared them to “bank robbers”.

According to the BBC, a source close to Johnson said he “won’t be apologising”, adding: “We must not fall into the trap of shutting down the debate on difficult issues.”

Yes, Johnson was sticking up for liberal values – while, ahem, saying something highly illiberal.

Johnson has been seen about with Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, ardent far-right agitator and fellow “nasty piece of work” (thank you Eddie Mair for that useful Boris label). Bannon loves to weaponise hatred – and, in Trump, we have a US president who has embraced hatred of outsiders. Essentially he is the first President of Hate.

Trump and Johnson occasionally indulge in mutual backslapping, but Johnson is a minnow in the attention-seeking pool next to that old pike Trump.

Yet we should try not to be detracted by Trump all the time. Look, instead, to Italy, where a rise in racist attacks has been blamed on the new far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini.

Or look to Spain, where the arrival of around 20,000 migrants – to a nation of 40 million – has seen the new leader of the Conservative People’s party, Pablo Casado, bang the anti-immigration drum.

Baroness Warsi – a surprisingly sensible Tory – called Johnson out on what she described as his “dog-whistle Islamophobia”. She’s right on that, and the main reason Johnson does and says such things is to appeal to the Tory grassroots, where such opinions still have currency. For he still thinks he could lead his party.

But just remember this: it’s not about the burka – it’s all about the berk.