THE sun is shining and we are tasting wine: what’s not to like? The gravel in my throat and a hacking cough, perhaps. This afternoon tour of the Swan Valley was booked some time ago, so I swallow a couple of Nurofen cold and flu tablets, as supplied by our daughter, and man up.

There are seven of us on this tour and the young woman leader drives the minibus between wineries, as they are called here. At the first stop, she gives us a mini-masterclass in wine-tasting, telling us to hold the glass by the stem and to swirl the liquid. I swirl the wine, and soon enough, the wine swirls me.

There isn’t much to say about a wine-tasting tour, except that they are pleasant occasions. Being a good boy, or possibly a foolish one, I drink everything offered, liking some more than others, but casting into the spittoon only a splash of red too oaky even for me.

Apart from the three of us, the other guests are an Australian couple (she’s from Melbourne, he’s from Perth but has recently been relocated to London); and a couple from Venezuela, now living in Perth.

Risking my sandpaper vocal cords, I chat as best as possible. Everyone is friendly and interesting, but what stays with me is a thought about Venezuela, a country of many advantages, including the world’s largest oil reserves, that seems to have become an economic and political basket case.

The president, Nicolas Maduro, blames foreign sabotage for his country’s problems, including severe shortages of food and medicine, hyper-inflation and worsening violence. Maduro has responded to this unrest by jailing and blacklisting opponents.

Anyway, it hardly seems fitting for a man drinking wine in the Australian sunshine to offer a definitive view on what’s happening in Venezuela. Some on the left in Britain side with Maduro and blame the US, seeing Venezuela as a proud left-wing country brought low by capitalism.

Again, swirling my glass, I don’t know the truth of this. But I do know that this lovely young couple – one a lawyer, the other working 50 hours a week as a chef in an Italian restaurant – left Venezuela because it was no longer possible to live any sort of life there.

All their young friends left too and are scattered around the world. When everyone who can leave a country does, it doesn’t look good for that country.

They are a bright, attractive couple, newly married by the look of it, lovey-dovey in the sunshine, taking photographs of each other and enjoying their day off. But it is possible to sense a sadness in them too when they talk about their country. They don’t mention the president or who’s to blame; they don’t take sides. They just pause beneath a different blue sky to say what a rotten mess their country has become.

They chose Australia because it was the man’s dream to visit the country, and now he’s living that dream instead of living the nightmare of life at home.

Later, over tiny paper cups of different chocolate liqueurs, they tell me that they like the sunshine here – and that they should visit London, but worry about the weather.

“Doesn’t it always rain there?” the woman asks, frowning.

By the time we head back into Perth, I have sampled everything on offer: assorted wines, bits of cheese, a little glass of beer, good chips and those chocolate liqueurs (bad idea that: I blame those lovely Venezuelans).

Back in the city, its banking towers scraping the blue sky, we retreat to a cafe hidden down an alleyway before heading out for a meal with the daughter of friends from York, who now lives out here. On the way to the restaurant, I go into a supermarket to buy throat lozenges.

Now it is late and I have been in and out of bed. I could accuse the cough but only have myself to blame. All that different food and drink is having a rebellious moment in my stomach. I get out of bed for a while and read Oliver Twist on my Kindle. After that I return to bed and sleep well enough, and wake feeling quite a bit better.

WE are in a crowded bar in Perth for a gin tasting and one of the bald men swings by with the last drink. “You’re my favourite,” he tells my wife, as he hands over her glass. “What about me?” asks our daughter. “No, her,” he says, swinging away.

The gin tasting is a late birthday treat for my wife – and an early one for me, arranged as a surprise. The bar is heaving. They’d expected 20 guests and found themselves with closer to 50. As the evening wears on, and the gin is poured, the bar gets pleasantly lively.

Four Pillars is a small Australian distillery that makes various gins and by now we’ve tried a few. A very pleasant G&T kicked things off, made with their ‘rare dry gin’ and served with orange and Fever Tree Mediterranean tonic.

This gin is made by a coterie of bald blokes, possibly four, although I can’t quite remember. Two of them are here tonight: the stocky showman who complimented my wife, in between delivering outrageous patter and leading a Christmas singsong – they have a Christmas gin, you see – and a tall, more serious-seeming former Olympic athlete, who tolerates his companion’s boisterousness with good grace, and the occasional cutting remark.

Neat gin is a neat idea, until you stand up to leave. There’s a navy-strength one to give you sailors’ legs; that Christmas one to make you sing; a Bloody Shiraz gin that steeps Yarra Valley Shiraz grapes. And that paring drink, a Negroni cocktail that only I manage to finish.

“We used to make wine and drink gin,” one of the baldies said earlier, “then we decided to do it the other way round.”

The gin is very good, unlike – they quip – the wine they once produced. The former athlete is the chief distiller, tasting every 15 minutes of his working day, while his mate distils characterful clamour every 15 seconds, or so it seems.

All great fun and we weave our way back to the station in good if tired shape. Our daughter goes off in her direction, and we catch the train to Fremantle. In the darkness before the last stop, you can see the docks lit up at night, the hulking shadows of ships and new cars neatly lined up on the quayside. Fremantle is a great mix: cultural, trendy, full of hipster-style bars and cafes (Hackney on Sea, if you like) and a working port, too. Many of the buildings are old hotels that have a Wild West feel and there is much to see and do.

We have toured the old prison, visited the maritime museum and the shipwreck museum and the old roundhouse jail on the seafront. Yesterday we spent time in an art gallery housing indigenous art, fantastic paintings, all dots, swirls and mysterious shapes – often aerial views of landscape, the gallery owner told us.

We lay on the beach for an hour and then, in readiness for that gin, had a meal at somewhere called Bread In Common, a former medical supplies warehouse that now supplies top-notch bread and good food in a cavernous space. Being a bit of a bread head, I stood by the ovens to feel the departing heat. Another great find has been Little Creatures, a brewery with bars on the seafront.

Waiting for the bus after the train, it is cold and I am coughing, having managed to bring along a holiday chest, which is annoying, but there you go. The previous day we caught the wrong bus and ended up walking a long way back. But tonight, having worked out the right stop beforehand, and my wife having steered me away from confidently choosing another wrong one, we are safely, tiredly, transported back to our Airbnb for a post gin-sozzle cup of tea.

SO here’s the thing. What do you make of an Airbnb rental that doesn’t come with a kettle? Now there is much to love about where we are living for a week, but the absent kettle confused us.

We looked everywhere, opened all the cupboards. Where do Australians hide their kettles? I rang the owner, who’d left the key under the front-door mat for us.

“The house is lovely,” I said. “But we can’t find the kettle.”

“We don’t have one,” our host replied. “You’ll find pans in that big drawer at the end of the kitchen. We boil water in those.”

We’d had a longish day in the vomit-yellow hire car and, being Brits, we fancied a cup of tea. Since Monday we have been making tea and coffee using a pan. This works fine but is still oddly unsettling, because how can you have a house without a kettle? A kitchen without a kettle is, well, like a vomit-yellow car without an engine. And say what you like about that car but it went fine, once I’d quarantined my left leg.

There is something so comforting about the boiling roll of a kettle. And it’s a lot less fiddly than tipping boiling water from a pan into a glass teapot. Yes, you read that right: a glass teapot. Anyway, I am drinking tea made that way as I type this.

After making tea without a kettle on arrival, I fancied a beer and got one from the fridge. Then I couldn’t find a bottle opener anywhere, and didn’t feel it would be reasonable to phone the owner. Later we went into a bottle shop – that’s what they call them over here – and asked if we could buy a bottle-opener. “Buy? I’ve got one you can have for free somewhere, mate.”

The bottle-opener was found and I promised to return to buy a bottle, and I’ve not done that yet. Incidentally, supermarkets here don’t sell alcohol, hence all those bottle shops.

There is one other negative about this lovely house in East Fremantle: it’s close to a busy highway, but the owner emailed a warning just after we booked. And it’s worth the noise because the house is great.

In the welcome pack, the owner calls it “a beautiful heritage home” and he’s not wrong. It’s a little like a Victorian terrace cottage that’s been tastefully modernised. You walk up the front steps to an old door that opens to reveal a long hallway. There is a bedroom at the front, another beyond that, then a sitting area that leads to a kitchen and dining spot, with a mini-study where I am writing this and drinking pan-boiled tea. Behind me there is a loo and shower, and outside the door there is a decking area, with washing machine and garden sink under cover. Beyond that lies a small walled garden.

All the floors in the house have been sanded and given a high-gloss varnish; and there are nice design touches everywhere, with small extensions expanding the space. Everything is arty and comfortable and there is even an old leather chair that swivels.

Although we’ve run our own mini-Airbnb business for a while now, this is only the second time we have used the online booking service. The other time was to rent a room in a large Victorian house in Bristol, where the wife was friendly enough but the husband looked permanently pained about having strangers in his house.

Airbnb has been good for us. Most of our guests leave happy, and we earn a little extra. But the headlines are often negative nowadays, with fears of people causing housing problems by cashing in on Airbnb. I’ve no idea where our owner lives when he’s not here; perhaps he has another house. But this one is homely and full of all his stuff and pictures, almost as if he’d just popped out, possibly to buy a kettle.

THE car we hired was a lurid colour. We couldn’t settle on the tone. I suggested vomit yellow and my wife said it was a sort of green – if so, a green that should never be seen. But it was easy to spot in a car park.

We picked the car up in the middle of Perth, close to the highway. All I had to do was drive to the end of the road and take the second turning on the left. I took the first turning on the left.

This left us having to go around a huge block in the middle of the city, unsettling with me jumping and lurching. Most cars in Australia are automatics and I hadn’t driven one since a holiday to the States years ago. I kept using my left foot on the brake, pushing my leg down as if operating the clutch on our car at home, throwing my passengers forward. Then I remembered that the left foot is redundant in an automatic: do everything ‘right’ and the car behaves.

We reached the highway and headed south to Busselton for a weekend break with our daughter.

The day before, we’d been for a walk with our friends M&A in the John Forrest National Park on the Darling Scarp, east of Perth, named after the Victorian explorer and first premier of Western Australia. The walk was same but different: like the walks we do at home, but through pea-gravel scrublands with wonderful bursts of spring flowers (and a kangaroo or two).

Afterwards we had tea and cake in a roadside café – same but different again, with a road train rattling by filled with live sheep. The stink reached across the road.

At the holiday village in Busselton, the wi-fi was rubbish so this is a catch-up. The town is famous for its jetty, built 152 years ago and running to 1.841 kilometres. The jetty has been restored and rebuilt and in parts you can see the old wooden structure in the sea.

A train runs the length of the jetty, but we walked along, watching as Saturday anglers fished for squid, whose black ink stained the jetty. As we returned, the mist came down and the land disappeared, yet by the time we had lunch in a restaurant overlooking the jetty, the sun was strong enough to burn us a little as we ate outside.

The next day, we had breakfast in a bush café, then went into Dunsborough for shops, a gallery and so on, and a walk along the beach. It was a bit chilly and as everyone keeps telling us, it is winter here, or only just spring, and they’re keeping their coats on, even as I go out in T-shirt and shorts, shivering with defiance. Days have been warm or a bit chilly. Sometimes there has been rain.

After Dunsborough, we visited an olive farm and a brewery/winery in Eagle Bay in the Meelup regional park, then walked along a coastal path below the Cape Naturaliste lighthouse, looking for whales.

And we saw some – too distant for photographic proof, but there all right, exposing a fin or flashing a tail, and blowing water out. Now that was a thrill, and mysterious to think of those huge creatures mostly hidden from sight, but shyly announcing themselves as we watched from the path.

Yesterday, I drove the vomit-yellow-green Toyota back to Perth, and we travelled expensively by taxi from the car hire place to our Airbnb in Fremantle, named after Captain Charles H Fremantle, who arrived to claim the place for King George IV in 1829. We arrived to claim the place for ourselves for a week.

WE saw more of Perth yesterday, visiting the art gallery, then doing a self-guided walking trail called Convicts & Colonials. Or a self-getting-lost tour, as we’re good at that.

Later, we had a meal at the house where our daughter is working as an au pair, which was lovely.

Returning home fairly late, we watched TV for the first time, tuning into a political comedy called Mad As Hell. I’m not sure what the Brit equivalent might be – a cross between Have I Got News For You and The Mash Report (BBC2’s latest attempt at news satire: slow to start but it had something about it, mixing topical jokes and silly parodies).

Mad As Hell is a political sketch show hosted by Shaun Micaleff, a grey-haired straight-man who presents as a sort of exasperated newsreader. I didn’t get all the jokes, but even without the political context, it was very amusing.

But it was interesting to watch a show where you needed to have all the triggers explained – especially if you’re a bit of a politics-head who likes to know what’s what. Here, my finger wasn’t on the button – barely even knew where the button was.

Luckily, our friends were on hand to explain the context, and even without that it was very funny. We don’t learn a lot about Australian politics at home, apart from the odd snatch, such as Pauline Hanson, the veteran nutcase nasty who wore a burqa in parliament as a horrible stunt. I guess you might say that she’s their Nigel Farage, only with a different sort of slime.

Maybe they should get themselves a Trump, as that brings the world’s eyes to your door, along with associated horrors.

Anyway, I am typing this at the breakfast table, which is very rude, and this morning we are going out for a walk in the hills, so I’d better put away my typing fingers, and walking into the shower.

IT IS 2.30am and we are up, stumbling around. A cup of tea and a stumble more, and the taxi comes. I booked online, then phoned to check last night. “No, don’t have that one,” said the man. “Ah, wait a minute – it’s on the wrong page.”

Ah, the panic of travel. But the taxi comes and now we are on the train with the other ghosts. The carriage is spectral until Leeds, when the train bursts with raucous girls and a bustle of boys eating McDonald’s.

A young woman, tall and glam in a tight red dress, asks if the train stops at Huddersfield – with the ‘H’ gone missing – in a voice to wake the dead and the other passengers. They troop past us and the train shakes with noise as their night-out mugs the early start to our day. A sleepy young woman diagonally opposite, wrapped in a shawl, can see what’s going on. She looks at me and smiles a smile that’s hardly there.

The noisy girls and the burger boys leave at Huddersfield and quiet returns. We arrive at Manchester Airport with hours and yawns to spare, to wait in that no man’s land of shops and bars and pints of beer at dislocated hours.

Not us, just two coffees and no breakfast because it’s early and we’ll be eating on the plane, only the flight ends up 90 minutes late, the drinks trolley comes first – no thanks, not yet – and then breakfast is a strange airline meal at some weird hour.

Two more of those meals arrive at stranger times. Talking of strange times, we’ve already set our watches to Perth time – a good tip, that one, and many ‘wrong’ hours later, having stopped briefly in Abu-Dhabi, we have ten more hours to go, and here’s the thing about flying to Perth: there is nothing between Abu-Dhabi and Perth but ocean, hours and hours of ocean.

Then we are at the airport, met by our old friend and our daughter, who is here for the best part of a year. Now we are at our friends’ house in Perth, where we drink tea and shower off the flight, and try to stay awake.

We all go out for a meal, then the three of us peel off for a walk into the city and a drink. After a couple of hours, we leave our daughter and decide to walk to our friends’ house, a plan more bold than sensible, and 40 minutes or so later, we phone for help and a rescue.

Now we sit around, talking. And here’s the thing, you see. We met our friends M&A years ago, when we rented rooms in their house in London, and became good friends. It’s how my wife and me met, but we haven’t all been under the same roof since we moved north in 1988.

M&A emigrated to Australia shortly after we left London, and raised their three children here. The youngest wasn’t much more than a baby then, now she has a baby of her own. The eldest used to sort of see me as his Dad Number Two, and he has two children now. The third ‘child’ lives on the other side of this gigantic country, so we don’t meet her.

Old stories are told again, with new ones butting in, and we stay awake until bedtime, then sleep till morning, hours of sleep, apart from an hour awake, where I read Oliver Twist.

Yesterday was our first full day here and we trekked round King’s Park and the botanical garden (above). We got lost, found our way again and I walked along while photographs were taken of plants: it takes a while with a plant-obsessed wife, but this place truly is fantastic, with high walkways and views over the river back to the city. And lots of plants.

Anyway, that’s us. Over here and Down Under. Still not quite believing that we got ourselves organised. Now I need to go online to book a car for a three-day jaunt to the south.

MICHAEL O’Leary, the famously lippy boss of Ryanair, guards his mouth more than he used to. Not difficult, perhaps, for the man who once said: “Germans will crawl bollock-naked over broken glass to get low fares.”

Tact is not his thing, although he can he self-aware – but perhaps only in the way that Donald Trump is aware of himself all the time, and aware only of himself.

Here’s another bit of O’Leary scripture – “Do we carry rich people on our flights? Yes, I flew on one this morning and I’m very rich.”

You could fill a page and then a few more with his bon mots, and mots not so bon, but here is just one more from his back pages: “If drink sales are falling off, we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes sales.”

Not a comforting thought as we are setting off on a very long flight on Sunday, but luckily Ryanair doesn’t go that far. Anyway, we’ve been advised to skip the alcohol and the coffee, so the hours will be stretched.

Mostly these days O’Leary keeps his hand over his mouth, but the prospect of Brexit buggering up his budget airline has seen him remove that hand – not to unleash the full Irish vernacular, but to make a reasonable point in a colourful manner.

The Ryanair boss is worried that Brexit uncertainty could hit his business, as airline schedules and flight bookings are arranged nearly a year in advance. He says that Ryanair needs to be sure of its legal position by this time next year to start selling flights for March 2019, when Brexit begins (that’s if it ever begins or indeed ever ends, and there’s the Brexit Paradox for you).

The colourful part came when he criticised Mrs Maybe on Sky News, saying: “I fail to see what she’s doing in Japan for three days at the moment, why’s she not in Brussels or in Frankfurt or in Paris, which is where these negotiations need to take place.”

He added that Theresa May had just come back from three weeks’ holiday in the Swiss Alps and that she needed to be sorting out Brexit, “not swanning around Japan drinking tea and sake”.

O’Leary has a point here. Mrs Maybe swanned around Japan in the hope of drumming up post-Brexit business – but that can’t begin until Brexit has been sorted out. Why didn’t she forsake the sake and help to sort out Brexit first? Because swanning about is easier and probably more fun, and conjures a cake-and-eat-it illusion that everything will be crumbly and delicious once we leave Europe and instead go knocking on doors around the globe, like door-to-door salesmen in poor suits and with shifting smiles.

But I have preparations to make, two days’ work left to do, and other work to do for when I return, so that’s your lot for now. I plan to take my laptop ledge with me and will report in from Australia occasionally.

TWO women dominate today’s front pages. One dead these 20 years and the other condemned as a “dead woman walking”. One departed in a moment of tragedy; the other was last seen in the political departure lounge.

Princess Diana first, I guess. Yes, her death was tragic, denying her sons of a mother; and robbing the nation of the woman Tony Blair went on to famously dub “the people’s princess”. Diana’s death in a car crash in that Paris tunnel helped define an era, and much weight is put upon that sad event.

This month’s remembrance always was unavoidable and now we have reached the actual day of the anniversary (do only non-royalist grumps sigh and mutter: “Enough already”?).

The national sainthood bestowed on Diana forgets her manipulative and scheming side; the woman who played the media to her own advantage, sometimes merely showing the honest good she did – visiting Aids patients, for example – and at other times using journalists in her personal wars with Prince Charles and the royal family.

Perhaps the best comment on all of this is a tart joke from Private Eye, calling Diana “the papers’ princess”. Diana was good for business in her day, and keeping her alive – perfectly preserved in printer’s ink – has remained good for business. If she signed a deal with the devil in her short lifetime, the devil seems to be getting the best out of the bargain.

Everything will be allowed to subside now, until the 30^th anniversary, by which time life will have changed, and Charles could be king – or even William, perhaps.

And Theresa Maybe will still be prime minister, if she has her way. After running an election campaign so terrible that she threw away her majority, Mrs Maybe was considered doomed – having been given that ‘dead woman walking’ black spot by former Chancellor George Osborne.

Mrs Maybe previously said she would only stay for as long as she was wanted, and some of her MPs appeared to think five minutes might be pushing it. But now she has turned defiant, saying: “I’m not a quitter.” In Japan, where she is drumming up business to fill that Brexit hole, she told reporters: “I’m in this for the long term. I’m the people’s prime minister. There’s no way those bastards are shafting me.”

Well, perhaps she only said the first part of that. But Mrs Maybe did say that she was aiming to fight the next election in 2022, saying: “There’s a real job to be done in the United Kingdom.”

With her usual rhetorical flourish, and channelling her inner Churchill – the insurance dog, rather than the noted Conservative – she added: “It’s about getting the Brexit deal right, it’s about building that deep and special partnership with the European Union but it’s also about building global Britain, trading around the world.”

Dear me, that woman is dull, but sometimes dull does it. Perhaps that’s her strategy: out-dulling everyone else until they all say, “Oh go on, go on.” It’s a plan, but the disaffected in her own ranks are not known for undying loyalty, so we shall see. It will take a lot for a leader who led so poorly to be trusted with the steering wheel for another general election.

MELANIA Trump is on the front pages this morning, accompanying her husband to Texas. Her outfit has drawn attention. Now I am far from a fashion icon, but can pass on that she was wearing aviator sunglasses, black tailored trousers, a FLOTUS baseball cap, bomber jacket and four-inch designer heels.

The heels were mocked on social media, so she changed to trainers, but kept the shades on. The ribbing seems unfair. After all, you need a bit of height if you are going to walk through a flood.

As for Donald Trump, he wore a totally unsuitable expression – part campaigning candidate, part weirdo without a clue, saying outside a fire station in Annaville, Corpus Christi: “What a crowd, what a turnout.”

The more the world puts up with him, the odder Trump seems. Arriving in a hurricane devastated, flooded state – with so much of Houston underwater and bodies being found – Trump seemed to suggest that the crowd had come just to see him.

But Trump always relates everything to himself. It’s as if the world is a big mirror in which he can check his hair hasn’t blown away and that he is still great, a great man.

Just what you need in days of devastation. A visit from a vain, egotistical president – and one who doesn’t even believe in the climate change which lies somewhere behind this disaster. “Many people are now saying that this is the worst storm-hurricane they have ever seen,” Trump tweeted, as if it were a reality TV competition between hurricanes, the Storm Apprentice.

As he toured Texas in the wake of hurricane Harvey, Trump had Arizona on his mind. He was less pleased with the turnout there for his recent rally, reportedly sacking George Gigicos, who organises his political events, because he thought the crowd in Phoenix was too patchy. Trump was in a grump about there being empty spaces in the convention centre.

Why is the president still campaigning to be president? So that he can gather the faithful few in a church of the absurd and bask in their adulation, while laying into the media and the opposition – who keep, you know, opposing him.

It’s all very odd, but then Trump is odd, the world is odd.

Living in a city that floods makes you aware of the devastation water can cause. We have friends who are still not back in their house after the floods of Boxing Day 2015. Yet nothing in York, however bad, compares to the destruction in Houston.

An interesting article in the New Yorker explains how this ethnically diverse city is exposed to flooding, thanks to a combination of geography, flatness, highways that become rivers, and a lack of proper planning control, with building on flood plains and so on.

That happens here, too. It’s as if we refuse to remember and forget the flood as soon as it’s gone. We’ve become Noah in reverse, closing our eyes to what is surely going to happen.

Incidentally, in Inishowen, County Donegal, a woman who gave birth to a baby boy last week after being stranded in the floods in the town of Clonmany has called her new son Noah. A cheerful note on which to end.

OUT and about in the sunshine yesterday, I spotted something on Facebook and felt moved to comment. Oh, the idiocy of looking at Facebook on a sunny bank holiday.

Sometimes technology makes fools of us, or amplifies our foolish nature, but there you go.

I was photographing the Soapbox Challenge in York, managing to capture one of the carts flying past at speed. And what a lovely York event this is.

Anyway, after taking pictures I had a quick look at Facebook, and dear God how life can end up being measured in ‘quick looks’ at Facebook. There I spotted something being shared that ‘proved’ the BBC was hopelessly biased.

This claim is often made on Facebook by the usual suspects (mostly avid Jeremy Corbyn supporters) – and kicked around by another usual suspect (me with a frown on). The post was from the left-wing blog The Skwawkbox, a Corbyn supporter and frequent critic of the BBC.

On this instance, the accusation was that the BBC was involved in a cover-up (another one). The blog began: “If you get your news from the BBC, you may well have no idea that the Tories are now being investigated for serious multi-faceted election fraud in the recent General Election affecting no fewer than ten seats the Tories won in June.”

The blog then praised Channel 4 for uncovering the story – adding with a snarl: “Our so-called national broadcaster has put beyond question the fact that it is suborned by and in the pockets of the corrupt few against the interests of the many.”

If you get your news from the BBC… Well, as mentioned before, I do – along with the Guardian, Observer and other sources, including Channel 4 News. And I spotted the story the BBC is alleged to have smothered in an evil cover-up. It went up on their website on Saturday, when I first read it, and is still there now. The headline is: “Police probe claims Tories used call centre to canvass vote.”

Within the story there is a link to a previous BBC website story on June 23. That earlier story was, it is true, mainly a report on how a Channel 4 News investigation alleged that the Conservative Party contracted a secretive call centre during the election campaign and that this may have broken data protection and election rules – something the Tories deny. And will no doubt go on denying until they are even bluer in the face.

Now this is a good story and kudos to Channel 4. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that it was true; they’re a slippery lot, those Tories. But the BBC has covered it and that undoes the complaint made by The Skwawkbox, doesn’t it?

Now it is true that the BBC hasn’t given a lot of space to this story or much if any airtime. But it has covered the story on its website and the story is easy to locate. I found it with two or three clicks while standing in the sunshine watching those carts whiz by.

Nowadays anyone can have a platform, or indeed a ledge, but I worry when you see smears that aren’t true. You can argue that the BBC is too complacent/corrupt/whatever to cover this story properly. But you can’t say they haven’t covered it at all because they have.

People from right and left moan about the BBC, and this offers the Corporation the traditional defence that it must be doing something right if everyone is complaining. I don’t defend the BBC without qualification, but on balance believe that we would be much worse off without it.

The BBC does much more than supply a mostly reliable source of news, but even if you stick with that part of its remit, we are surely better off with the BBC at the cornerstone of our national life than, say, having to rely on a nakedly partisan broadcaster such as Fox News.

For all its faults, the BBC is mostly a good thing – and mostly a good British thing. That’s why I am happy to pay the licence fee.

As for the story in question, The Skwawkbox post complained about the BBC without exactly explaining what the story was. For that I had to read the two stories on, ahem, the BBC website, where a link was provided to the Channel 4 News page.

Such wildly critical items are shared widely on Facebook, and fair enough – it’s all part of the mix. But if you get your news from them, you may have no idea that you are only getting a partial picture.