BREXIT and Boris and other bastardised bother – that’s my embarkation point this morning.

The inhabitant of this ledge has long believed that Boris Johnson is a ruthless, scheming, out-for-himself operator and not the charming bumbler of all too convenient pretence. If proof were needed of his reckless regard towards anyone who isn’t called Boris Johnson, it finally arrived when simply by opening his big mouth he possibly condemned a British-Iranian woman to a further five years in jail.

Good sense is a foreign land to Johnson – and let’s get over the creepily chummy Boris business. The Foreign Secretary said to a parliamentary committee last week that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “simply teaching people journalism”. Her distraught family say she was in Iran on holiday.

Now Iranian state television has cited Johnson’s idiot words as proof she had been spying for the British – and that could double her five-year sentence.

Johnson has always been good with words, in the sense that he writes well and knows how to grab attention with a speech. But he is also careless with words: speaking and writing is a self-boosting performance art to him – with an ‘ah’ and a bumble, he’s off again, seemingly saying whatever comes off the top of his head.

This ability served him well as a columnist, where saying whatever happens to be uppermost in the mental attic is all part of the act. But as Foreign Secretary, Johnson should show far greater caution. Words have impact – and his careless words about Zaghari-Ratcliffe may well keep her in jail and away from her young daughter and British husband for another five years.

Johnson has since made a very reluctant apology – an apology so tardy as to be a further insult. This morning’s Daily Mirror makes a reasonable demand to Theresa May – listing the damage done to Zaghari-Ratcliffe by her foreign secretary’s rogue elephant mouth, then saying: “Now sack him.”

That seems unlikely as Mrs Maybe is a weak prime minister held hostage by unravelling events – and by her own cabinet.

This morning she outlines plans to set the time and date of our departure from the EU in law, warning she will not “tolerate” any attempt to block Brexit.

Theresa May stamping her feet and saying she won’t tolerate something is like a teacher who long ago lost control of her class standing there in tears and mumbling that this behaviour is appalling. No one is listening, and they are all shouting whatever they want to shout.

She’s lost two Cabinet ministers in a week, for heaven’s sake: a groping Defence Secretary and a gone-rogue international development minister. The hill on which Mrs Maybe stands is not high or mighty, but a molehill and she will only be allowed to stay for so much longer. Not a place from which to made demands.

Now I know that Brexit hasn’t happened yet: for good or bad we are still merely at the shouting and squabbling stage. A country that has a more than reasonable claim to past greatness has been reduced to a sectional land where the two halves of the Brexit debate pour rancour on each other. And nothing else gets done.

People look at us from abroad, and wonder whether they’d misunderstood us for all those years. Where, they ask, are the sensible Brits with their calm heads and understated manners? Perhaps, they think with a shrug, before turning their attention to something more important, the Brits just aren’t so great any more.

Still, Theresa May is making demands, so everything will be all right.

I SEE that the Whitby author GP Taylor is stirring up poppy trouble.

Taylor is a man of interesting parts as other selves line up behind his most famous role as the best-selling author of Shadowmancer. In his time, he has been a rock band roadie, a policeman and a vicar.

You can add to that another distraction, that of newspaper commentator. In his column for the Yorkshire Post, Taylor offers his view on white poppies. It’s fair to say that he isn’t impressed.

“Remembrance is increasingly being seen as a glorification of violence, tinged with the toxic aroma of ardent nationalism,” he writes or possibly even fumes.

Opinions on this may differ. My own fuming comes from an alternative direction, but I suspect that remembrance is more truly best seen as an excuse for people to exercise their opinions, whatever side of the trench they lie.

The newspapers at this time of year are filled with poppy rows, as was being discussed on this ledge only last week. The nonsense poppy row is almost now a tradition all on its own.

Anyway, Taylor isn’t finished yet, writing: “The snowflake generation look at those who made the ultimate sacrifice as savages who died for nothing.”

The snowflake generation is a term of abuse used to characterise young people who are too easy to take offence, or at least I think it is. It’s a bit of Daily Mail-style lingo I don’t particularly wish to flourish.

Taylor has many strong thoughts on poppies and snowflakes, but his main ire is reserved for white poppies. He writes that these are “being forced on children, supported by teaching unions”.

I have no idea about the truth of this, although a quick Google points to a story last month in the Daily Telegraph. White poppies are promoted by the Peace Pledge Union, which is said to have signed up 100 teachers who belong to the National Union of Teachers.

Perhaps this is what lit the fire under Taylor’s kettle. He also has a pop at “our rabidly PC culture” – one of those handy phrases to cut and out keep for a cross day. I guess that the political correctness or otherwise of our culture is a matter of taste, but sweeping generalisations are always useful in a newspaper column.

Taylor offers a proudly robust defence of the red poppy and all it represents. He says he has always believed that the red poppy honours all lives lost in all wars – something disputed by supporters of the white poppy, who insist the red poppy only remembers our own fallen.

In fairness, Taylor does acknowledge that the white poppy “represents peace and all those who have died in conflict”, pointing out the role of the Peace Pledge Union.

What he forgets to mention, perhaps because it doesn’t fit his thesis – and we’ve all done that, selecting those bits of the truth we fancy – is that the white poppy is 80 years old. It’s not a modern, politically correct poppy but an alternative poppy almost as old as the traditional red one.

I have never worn a white poppy, possibly never even seen one. But I’d be happy to buy one if I saw them for sale.

The colour of a poppy shouldn’t matter, but sadly the red poppy – as worn proudly by many, perhaps with a tear in their eye – has become red meat to those who wish to complain about modern life. It’s forced on anyone who appears in a BBC studio, for fear of a causing a row, creating a weird sort of poppy panic.

Yet arguing about the colour of poppies seems to me to be a form of disrespect to all the dead we remember, however or whenever they died. But perhaps I am just an ancient sort of snowflake.

YOU would have thought there were bottomless reasons to enjoy Blue Planet II – reasons as bottomless as the oceans explored in this BBC wildlife series, a follow-up to the original after 16 years.

But that is to reckon without Christopher Booker, veteran Telegraph columnist and long-term denier of climate change.

Never mind the breath-taking camera work; never mind images of dolphins surfing or cosying up with whales when you thought the whales had turned up in search of lunch; never mind the truly weird fish that could gender-swap from female to male; never mind the walrus herd struggling to find a piece of ice to call home.

No, Booker was in a grump after the first episode, grouching away in a piece headlined: “Fake news! How the BBC and Blue Planet got it wrong, yet again, about walruses and climate change.”

I don’t wish to waste your time with too much of what Booker had to say. Basically, he argued that Arctic ice wasn’t vanishing as Blue Planet and Sir David Attenborough postulated; and walruses were having the time of their tusked lives on all that non-disappearing ice.

The BBC and Attenborough could scarcely offer “a better example of what it likes to scorn as ‘fake news’,” said Booker, still at the misleading people game at the age of 80, which is going some.

As far back as October 2011, rival columnist George Monbiot in the Guardian dedicated a piece to “The superhuman cock-ups of Christopher Booker.”

Monbiot listed assorted sins against the fact committed by Booker. Luckily, viewers have been happy to ignore the likes of Booker. Viewing figures suggest that 14.1 million people saw the first episode of Blue Planet II – making it the most watched programme of 2017 so far.

And in cheering news, it beat Strictly Come Dancing and the X-Factor. While I don’t mind Strictly, I would rather go and sit at the end of the garden in the rain than watch a minute of that knackered Simon Cowell vehicle.

Anyway, how uplifting that so many people watch Blue Planet II, reportedly the third most watched programme of the past five years, behind the World Cup final in 2014 and the final of the BBC’s last Great British Bake Off. The Channel 4 hijacking of Bake Off  went well, or so they tell me, but I left with a soggy-bottomed shrug after the first episode.

The second episode of Blue Planet II used a mini-submarine to dive deep and capture astonishing footage – and two unmanned submersibles to dive 1,000 feet below the Antarctic Ocean.

An unlikely cast of deep-down characters included creatures with unlikely names such as the hairy-chested Hoff crab, snub fin dolphins that spit water and a tusk fish that has learned how to use tools at dinnertime. As well as the huge-fanged fish, the flapjack octopus – does someone just make these names up? – a fish that sprouted legs, shrimps imprisoned in coral, and an astonishing sequence as six-gill sharks mobbed the sunken remains of a sperm whale, eating what may have been their first meal in a year, tearing great chunks of dead whale as blood inked the depths.

When the sharks were done, zombie worms – honestly, I am not making this up – used acid to burrow into the whale’s bones.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the fish with a see-through head. And in one heart-stopping sequence, the Christopher Booker flatfish was seen fighting over a copy of the Daily Telegraph with fellow climate-denying old crab Lord Lawson. Honestly, I just made that up. Or maybe Lord Lawson was really the ugly fish with the big teeth.

OH, let’s get into an old groove. Let’s spin away whatever stupid, mendacious and fallacious thing Donald Trump just said or is about to say. Let’s glance away just for now from the Westminster sex scandal, a fungus that hasn’t yet stopped growing.

Let’s forget all that and slip on a record, a proper record, big and black and made of lovely vinyl. Twenty years ago, around the time we got our first CD player, it looked like vinyl was doomed. It was an endangered species that would soon belong in the music museum.

Yet vinyl has been making a comeback in the past few years. Sony is returning to making vinyl 30 years after it abandoned the friendly old format. And this week, Sainsbury’s announced that it will be relaunching its own-label records.

Dedicated vinyl huggers never abandoned the big and shiny discs. They stayed in the groove while everyone else embraced new formats: first CDs and then iPods and then streaming. Ownership of albums or CDs looked like an eccentric habit in an age when music could be plucked from the cloud or wherever it is that streamed music comes from.

Vinyl charts returned a couple of years ago, a sign that this done-for old way of listening to music was undergoing a revival. Not all of this can be down to men in late middle-age trying to find their lost youth inside a record sleeve.

So, yes, this week I joined the revolution; or the revolutions; or re-joined the revolution. I bought a record deck for the first time in 20 years or so. I do have a transportable one my wife bought me a couple of years ago, a lovely-looking retro thing with the speaker in the lid, a new take on the old Dansette record player. Not at all bad, but not exactly hi-fi – and how comforting to dust off that old word again.

The last record deck I bought was made by Bang & Olufsen, or at least I think it was. I certainly had one of those, back in the days when I occasionally spent big, probably bought around the same time I had a sports car. Life has not allowed me to climb back into a sports car, so it had to be another later-life purchase: a record deck (made by Pro-ject, for those who like that sort of information).

It has only been connected for a few days but I have listened to an old Joe Jackson album (Night and Day, from 1982) and the first album by the sax player Andy Sheppard, with its infectious opening track, Java Jive.

Sheppard was 19 when he first heard a jazz record by John Coltrane. He sold his worldly goods, bought a second-hand sax and has been playing ever since.

I’ve always listened to his music, but had forgotten that first album, and it was a thrill to hear the first notes sway in after the introductory crackle and hiss of the stylus getting to know the vinyl.

The third album was the main reason for the deck. The middle boy bought me the double album soundtrack to the film Baby Driver, a fantastically retro production with a sleeve that opens like a big book and two discs. The songs are listed on the back, sides A to D. Great music, too – The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Beach Boys, Kashmere State Band, Dave Brubeck, T.Rex, Barry White, Simon & Garfunkel and more.

Listening is a different experience, in that you need to turn the volume up on the amp as vinyl isn’t as loud. I Googled that, wandered into various hi-fi bore websites, but made my excuses and hurried away.

I am looking forward to rediscovering all those old albums. It’s pot luck for now as they are not in order, but hidden in a cupboard and an old metal trunk – put there for sanctuary after the bloody cat scratched all the sleeve ends.

I am going to enjoy this vinyl voyage, while also still listening to some of the few hundred CDs, and listening too to music on my iPad and the Bose speaker. Oh, and the headphones. That’s my ears busy for a while now.

For now, though, it’s the record deck: warmer somehow that CDs, unless I’ve just fallen for the retro spiel. And if I have, I don’t care.

I GLANCE at my phone on the way back to the table in the curry house. Through the window Clifford’s Tower looms in the darkness. Students in Halloween costumes go past, a chaotic stream of youthfulness and mildly reckless fun.

This is a boys’ night out. Four men linked by words in some way or other. A couple of pints and then a curry. It’s always good to meet and talk about books and politics and just stuff.

“There’s been a terrorist incident in Manhattan,” I say, sitting down.

Outside a girl dressed up for mock horror tries to climb the steep bank to the castle. She only gets so far before gravity and perhaps alcohol send her stumbling back.

The students ham up the horror on a site that has seen its share of real horror. In 1190 one of the worst anti-Semitic massacres of the Middle Ages took place there. The city’s entire Jewish community was trapped by an angry mob inside the tower of York Castle. Many chose to commit suicide rather than be murdered or forcibly baptised by the mob.They also set fire to their possessions and the wooden tower burned.

No one knows the number of victims, but according to English Heritage, modern-day keepers of the castle, “a later account in Hebrew suggests that 150 died”.

Resentment had been growing for some time against Jewish immigrants, many of whom came from France after the Norman Conquest of 1066. This hostile sentiment rose thanks to the presence of Jews at the Coronation of Richard I. The general hostility was stoked by the raising of taxes to fund the Crusades.

A false rumour said the king had ordered the massacre of the Jews and a man called Benedict was said to have been killed on his return to York.

Horrors old and new in one Halloween night. It’s not much of a comfort to think that people have been doing appalling and cruel things to each other since 1190. And way before that.

The Halloween crowds were out in Manhattan, too. Enjoying the night, caught up in the fun, when a deranged ideologue drove a truck along a cycle path in Lower Manhattan, killing eight people and injuring 11 more. Five of the dead were friends from Argentina, part of a group of ten who were in New York to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of their graduation.

The incident is regarded as a terror attack, probably by a lone wolf, and the worst in the US since 911.

President Trump tweeted through the night, because that’s what he does, on ordinary days and hell days. His tweets ranged from the properly presidential, offering condolences and prayers and the thought that “God and your country are with you!”, to the usually Trump-esque: “In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person. Law enforcement is following this closely NOT IN THE U.S.A!”

After 58 people died in the Las Vegas shooting, and a further 546 were injured, Trump sent the following Tweet: “My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you.”

He was criticised for that odd use of “warmest”. Notable in the President’s tweets at that time was a lack of anything to say about such huge loss of life in yet another mass shooting.

A life is a life. A life lost to a demented religious cause is equivalent to a life lost to a madman who sprays bullets on a music festival. Stephen Paddock acted for no known reason; the terrorist nutcase acted for reasons twisted out of his religion.

Both are forms of horror, both a sort of terrorism. Victims of shootings die in large part because the US cannot see the link between gun ownership and gun crime; last night’s victims died because one sort of God had a go at somebody’s else God.

Trump calls on God as an automatic reflex, without anyone having any true idea of his beliefs; the terrorist called on his God as an excuse for the evil that he did. That’s a god-awful lot of gods.

Outside, the students have gone to wherever students go. Soon we head out too, cycling home or walking home, at the end of a night that was happy for us and hellish in Manhattan. Happy and hellish seems to be our world.

HOW does sex pest sound to you? I worry this term is a bit Carry On and 1970s. Sex pest sounds like an annoying neighbour in a terrible old sitcom, rather than someone who causes genuine pain or anguish.

Sex pests are in the headlines as the swill from the Harvey Weinstein affair reaches Westminster. A sex pest can ruin a life, but does fit neatly into a headline. And that risks making light of something serious, turning assault into a nuisance: oh, what a pest you are.

The Metro, not often a source of inspiration to this ledge-bound skimmer of headlines, sinks lower in my estimation this morning with: “Pestminster crackdown.” Too much even for those of us who like a pun.

What does a sex pest look like? According to today’s Sun, a sex pest looks like Michael Fallon. The defence secretary is an old-school Tory hitman, brought out when waters are choppy, and the man who did for Ed Miliband with a ‘hit’ on the BBC Today programme before the 2015 election.

Judged purely on such appearances, and the oiliness of his manner, and a casual arrogance to make the skin crawl, Michael Fallon is any sort of pest you might wish to name.

Rumours are washing through Westminster of past and present ministers said to have behaved inappropriately. The international trade minister Michael Garnier sent his secretary out to buy sex toys and called her “sugar tits”. He owned up to the offence but dismissed it all as “good humoured high jinks” and “amusing conversation”.

As the balance of power between an MP/Minister and their secretary is far from even, such behaviour cannot be dismissed so lightly.

But what about the oleaginous Fallon? According to the Sun, he was guilty of knee-touching 15 years ago.

Now I am now about to argue that inappropriate touching of knees is unimportant. But it does fall within a broad spectrum of possible offence, depending on the situation and the reaction of the woman being touched.

The Fallon case doesn’t exactly live up to its billing in the Sun – “Shock confession as sex pest dossier implicates SIX Cabinet ministers.” The main headline, wrapped around the odious offender, says: “FALLON: I FELT RADIO HOST’S KNEE.”

The woman receiving this unwanted attention was the journalist and broadcaster Julie Hartley-Brewer. If you’ve caught her on shows such as Have I Got News For You, Hartley-Brewer is tough, rather arrogant, not all that funny, but she does know Westminster.

When this story emerged, Hartley-Brewer refused to name the man involved, but Fallon later outed himself. The journalist then said: “No one was remotely distressed or upset by the incident in 2002”, tweeting: “My knees remain intact.”

She also said: “I have not been a victim and I do not wish to take part in what I believe has now become a Westminster witch hunt.”

To an extent, it’s all about context. If Harvey Weinstein invites a young actress into his hotel bedroom and puts his hand on her knee while asking her to go topless for him, that constitutes a vile situation, deeply alarming behaviour and sexual assault.

If an MP gets too flirty with a journalist who knows him well and isn’t upset by his unwanted attentions, the knee touching is of a different order

None of this is to belittle anything. Yesterday’s debate in Parliament, led by the reliably unimpressive Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House of Commons, showed that much works needs to be done to make Westminster a safer place of work, especially for young women in junior roles.

But Hartley-Brewer has a point when she says that it is “wrong to treat workplace banter and flirting – and even misjudged sexual overtures – between consenting adults as being morally equivalent to serious sexual harassment or assault. It demeans genuine victims of real offences.”

A thorny thicket, for sure. Everything must be done to flush sexually inappropriate behaviour out of Westminster and everywhere else. But there is a danger that Sun-style exaggeration does muddy the waters in ways that aren’t helpful, and can even inadvertently downgrade women with genuine complaints.

And if the woman whose knee was touched is not bothered, then that should be the end of it. Even if the frightful Fallon should keep his hands to himself.

IT is my unfortunate habit most mornings to sit on this here ledge and run a sleep-blurred eye over the newspaper headlines.

Maybe one day I should wash those headlines right out of my head, but it is a structured start to the day. And, frankly, on occasions an annoying one. Some days the muttering grows so loud, there is a danger of falling off.

Today we see the return of a favourite story: the Remembrance row. These come along every year. As the clocks go back, by ancient tradition the news editors scour the country for evidence of alleged disrespect to our fallen heroes. Never mind that a far greater disrespect was sending them off to die in the first place.

First up for a pelting this year is the Reverend Steve Bailey, vicar of St Peter’s Church in Oadby, a small town that lies five miles south east of Leicester. These stories often feature small towns that lie five miles from somewhere or other. It’s as if newspapers trace the nation’s heartbeat to the small corners of Britain.

Leicester is a model of multiculturalism and that is why this vicar acted as he did. Rev Bailey has decided, you see, that the hymn Onwards Christian Soldiers should not be sung at the Remembrance service.

He feels it is inappropriate as people of other faiths might attend the service and the laying of wreaths at the local war memorial. A fair point, you might think. Unless you were a news editor seeking evidence of disrespect to those we sent to slaughter.

In a statement issued through the Diocese of Leicester, Rev Bailey points out that removing the hymn was agreed with the Royal British Legion. But members of the Legion club, a separate body, have set about grumbling, and their discontent has reached the newspapers.

In the Daily Telegraph, an unnamed member of the church says something perfectly sensible. “The hymn is completely inappropriate. It is about spiritual warfare and not earthly warfare and we wanted something that would reflect Oadby’s multicultural population and people of all faiths.”

Other hymns have been chosen instead, including All People That On Earth Do Dwell – a nicer hymn and finer sentiment.

Hymns are woven into the threadbare fabric of the national overcoat, and even a non-believer who rarely attends a service knows a hymn or two. Those tunes are part of who we are, whether we appreciate it or not.

You must admit that Onward Christian Soldiers is a dreary affair – and a dreary affair burdened with militaristic intent.

The hymn begins cheerily: “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war/With the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe; Forward into battle see His banners go!”

I don’t intend to type any more. You can see where the vicar is coming from.

The hymn was written by the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould, a man interesting enough to have spawned his own appreciation society. Visit this and you will discover that he married a mill girl half his age, and dedicated his life to antiquarian pursuits alongside his role as a squire and parson of a small Devonshire village. Surprisingly, he was also regarded as one of the leading novelists of the time, an early archaeologist and a collector of folk songs.

All genuinely interesting, but he is mostly remembered for writing in 1865 a plodding hymn that it is best forgotten now. The music, incidentally, was by Arthur Sullivan, a prolific composer mostly remembered for the operas he wrote with WS Gilbert.

Two years ago, the concocted row concerned Jeremy Corbyn allegedly giving a nod rather than a full bow after laying a wreath. The Telegraph even called on an etiquette expert to calculate that the Labour leader had titled his head by only ten degrees – said to have been an insufficient display of respect.

More Remembrance nonsense will doubtless be along soon, while all those dead soldiers are still dead, taken in the middle of life so that certain newspapers can now get themselves in a righteous tizzy.

AFTER yesterday’s demented headline in the Daily Mail – “OUR REMAINER UNIVERSITIES” – it’s clearly time for me to pay proper attention.

There I am, in my this-and-that life, walking around a university, doing workshops with students and meeting colleagues without ever once noticing any crazed Remainer professors at all.

It is true that one of my brothers is a professor and a Europhile, but he mostly teaches in France these days.

The Mail’s latest spot of rabid intolerance came about because – well, because Paul Dacre, the orchestrator of that newspaper’s daily rants, just felt like going off on one. As a part-time journalism lecturer, I feel safe in passing on that technical term for the Mail’s frequent outbursts and tantrums as it pretends to be speaking common sense, while spouting uncommon nonsense.

The blame for this ridiculous story lies in Tory whip Chris Heaton-Harris MP, a man whose name had never troubled my ears until this week.

Harris got into trouble for writing letters to universities asking for information and names about the professors who lectured about Brexit. While he was soon slapped down by the Government, the Mail, clearly concerned that some other loon was getting all the attention, decided to indulge in a spot of McCarthyism

There is a problem with that front page about “our remainer universities” – apart from it being just another rant in a seemingly endless line of rants. Mail world logic involves looking at something and shouting that the opposite is true. Apply that logic to this story and you can happily conclude that Britain’s most educated people are against Brexit.

Inside yesterday’s edition, the Mail even nodded to Senator Joe McCarthy and his scourge against communism in the 1950s. A come-on headline asked: “Have you – or do you know anyone – who has experienced anti-Brexit bias at university?”

Have you now or ever been… taught by an intelligent, informed professor of politics or economics who thinks that Brexit is a bat-shit crazy idea. Well, it’s highly possible, I suppose, but hardly counts as proof of universities being involved in a huge plot against Brexit.

A picky person could even turn this question round and ask the Daily Mail: “Have you now or ever been guilty of flagrant bias in favour of Brexit – mostly because your editor wanted to get one over on David Cameron?”

Mail-world is a planet that wildly over-heats thanks to the hot breath of hatred. In the past, and not without occasional good cause, the paper has raged against hate preachers. Yet basically the Mail itself is a hate preacher, a preacher of intolerance, bile and general nastiness.

Although not according to the banner at the top of today’s front page which claims victory in ending the rationing of cataract operations – “The Mail, a paper that really cares about people…”

Ah, yes, a paper really cares about people – unless you voted Remain, happen to be foreign, a migrant, assorted judges, anyone even loosely connect to the Labour Party or a saboteur needing to be crushed (that’s someone who doesn’t believe in Brexit, by the way, a rising constituency nowadays).

Anyway, at least we have Twitter. All sorts of people aired their thoughts yesterday. Some recalled Viscount Rothermere speaking up for fascists in the 1930s under a headline: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts.”

Others passed on messages they had sent to the Mail, including my favourite from Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) – “Dear Daily Mail. Please take your McCarthyite witch-hunt and shove it up your collective arse.”

Mind you, Edna may not be all she seems, as her Twitter bio says: “Retired. Likes Bridge. Doesn’t much like anything else – young people, gratuitous nudity, hatless politicians, Communists, Johnny Foreigner, wholefood etc.” Satire alert, I suspect, but sometimes satire is all we have.

OH, some of those headlines need a response today.

Here’s the running order: BBC apologises for not challenging Stilton-brained Lord Lawson over his dubious climate change figures; Brexit is the stupidest thing any country has ever done apart from Trump; and ‘super-rich hacked in Bermuda data leak’.

Most days, the BBC is defended by me. But one great problem the corporation has lies in its perpetual attempts to be even-handed.

If you grant a climate-denying old loon such as Lord Lawson the same due status as virtually all scientists on the planet, then you are being unbalanced and not balanced at all. You are giving the climate crackpot the same value as those who have studied and investigated the science. You are equating a one-man band with a whole orchestra of evidence.

Lord Lawson – and that title is less of an honour, and more of an expression of despair, as in Lord! Lawson you don’t half spout some cheese-brained nonsense – once went on a very effective diet, and it’s easy to worry that some of the weight loss came from what he keeps inside his skull.

The BBC has now apologised for its Today programme interview with climate change denier Lawson, admitting that it had breached its own editorial guidelines by letting him get away with claiming that global temperatures had not risen in the past decade.

He wasn’t challenged on air – even though Lawson’s own Global Warming Policy Forum later admitted that his figures were “erroneous”. Your whole approach is erroneous, mate; almost everything you say is riddled with errors, and your forum is the political equivalent of shuffling around with your fingers in your ears and going: “Can’t hear you – can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

The Guardian today quotes Bob Ward, the policy director of the Grantham research institute on climate change at the LSE, as saying: “There needs to be a shift in BBC policy so that these news programmes value due accuracy as much as due impartiality.”

Exactly. It was just such an approach, combined with institutional laziness, that elevated Nigel Farage and Ukip to such a level. And look where that got us all.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire media mogul, professional big mouth and onetime mayor of New York, is quoted today as having said that Brexit is the “single stupidest thing any country has ever done” apart from the election of Donald Trump as US president.

It’s hard to disagree with that. And in both cases the experiment doesn’t exactly seem to be rolling over nicely. Brexit is an unending squabble as assorted Tories try to grab the steeringwheel from Mrs Maybe – who seems to have no idea where she is headed – and the Trump presidency, to continue the motoring metaphor, is one big car crash, with new casualties daily.

With all that in mind, here’s a cheering thought. Today’s Daily Telegraph reports that some of the world’s richest people are braced for their financial details to be leaked after the offshore tax company Appleby was hacked in Bermuda. There are also fears that this exposure could threaten British Overseas Territories and their frankly dodgy tax arrangements.

Goodo – the more exposure the better, the more we know about where the wealthy stash away their loot the better.

Unlike Oh Lord It’s Lawson Again, where the less exposure the better, unless someone wants to plonk the silly man in an over-heating desert somewhere.

MY wife is speaking to me from behind the newspaper. She has clearly misunderstood the role demarcations of this family. It’s my job to annoy people by reading out fragments of newspaper articles.

This special service offers edited highlights of the best bits so that the listener doesn’t have to bother reading the story for herself. Or it spoils any future reading by doing the same.

I haven’t spent 30 years muttering through inky sheets to then have this service provided back to me. Whatever next? I’ll be spending untold hours in the garden before you know it. And my wife will be lying on the sofa and pretending to read the newspaper while having a nap.

She’s reading a long article about Emmanuel Macron, the youthful French president. Macron set up his own party, calling it En Marche! And, yes, that exclamation mark is there by design. With my part-time lecturer head on, I am always telling students to pluck all the exclamation marks out of their work. And then Macron goes and gets elected astride an exclamation mark.

Anyway, my wife has just read out that when Macron launched his party, it was a while before people started to notice that it was christened with his own initials. He’d created a party in his own image.

As a man who shares the same initials as the Labour leader, this set me thinking. What if our party leaders followed suit? This is quite a tricky game because Jeremy Corbyn is too modest – or possibly too weighted with false modesty – to do anything so egocentric. But still. The Jerusalem Collective Party. The Just Caring party – “The party opposite is past caring!”

The Juicy Carrot Party – fresh from the allotment; the Jam Collaboration Party – fresh from the same. Or, in acknowledgement of his fans, the Oh Jeremy Corbyn Party – or OJP for short.

Theresa May has a surname ready-made for this game: The That’s Mayhem Party. Or Total Mayhem for short. Or the Take Me (Away From Here) Party, in acknowledgement of just how miserable she appears to be in the job, up to her knees in unending Brexit shit.

The Thatcher Minor Party; the Trembling Madhouse Party; or, in keeping with the French theme of this divertissement, That’s Merde!

The English translation of which is: Same Old Right-Wing Shit Bugger Me Have You Seen the State of the NHS Party.

My wife interrupts these thoughts by reading out another passage. She tells me that when Macron was elected, the stunned former president Nicolas Sarkozy “is said to have commented with disconcerting humility: ‘It’s me, but better’.”

Well, I shall have to go and read that now. Probably. You know how some people don’t like reading books that have been read by someone else, well I’m a bit like that with newspapers.

I like to have first dibs at the newspaper. I’m not sure why. Is it to claim ownership of what I have read? Not sure, and the funny thing is I quite like reading an old book, and thinking of other eyes absorbing those words first.