BROADCHURCH versus The Wire is not a contest many people would think of holding. But both deserve a smudgy honour for their portrayal of newspapers.

The American drama goes deeper into print, with an entire series set in and around a newspaper. The paper is modelled on the Baltimore Sun, where the writer David Simon worked as a journalist. In one episode, an editor stands on a chair in the newsroom to announce cuts, saying: “We will have to do more with less.”

More with less. My life captured in one of the greatest TV dramas ever. My life and that of just about any other journalist attempting to stay afloat on a local newspaper at the time.

In April 2009, the BBC showed all of The Wire and Simon said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph: “All the things that have been depicted in The Wire over the past five years – the crime, the corruptions – actually happened. The stories were stolen from real life.”

The newspaper sections certainly rang true, as did a sad moment in ITV’s Broadchurch this week. Writer Chris Chibnall’s drama is back on fine form after a misfiring second series, with a disturbing rape storyline, and passing hints of a swinging scene in Broadchurch.

The plotting is great, the suspension twanging. As always, the relationship between Hardy and Miller sings like a simmering row. Miller came out on top this week and she does get some great lines, snapping after interviewing a suspect: “I am never in the mood for swaggery young shits.”

Perhaps only journalists will have noticed the relevance of one moment this week. The local newspaper editor Maggie Radcliffe (Carolyn Pickles) is a solid presence in Broadchurch. This week she is summoned to the newspaper group’s HQ for a meeting with a much younger woman executive, who airily tells her that the Broadchurch Echo office is being closed and the newspaper absorbed into a larger group paper, with a wider news focus.

Maggie puts up a spirited defence of the importance of proper local news, and defends the role of a paper that’s been around for a century (or something). And she is right, and yet spitting in the wind. Or in the face of corporate indifference and incompetence – or that curious mixture of the two, a sort of arrogant shrug. That’s just the way it is. Get with the modern world.

The young executive editor whisks off with her salad and her fragrant stupidity, back to bla-bla-land, leaving faithful, work-obsessed old Maggie with her redundant beliefs. She seeks solace in the churchyard and ends up losing a misery show-down with the local vicar, a man whose God is always frowning.

Back in the real world, this week the company I used to work for announced that it would be closing the subbing-hub in Newport. Two years ago, the hatching of that plot cost sub-editing jobs throughout the country, including mine.

The last few months of my life on the Press were spent getting to grips with the new system, and working with the people in Newport, many of whom were new graduates paid around £13,000 a year – about half the hardly generous usual salary.

Some were old hands like myself, bouncing from one thing to the next. Now they are all being bounced away, with a few going to another hub in Dorset (ah, perhaps that is where the Broadchurch paper is going to be padded out with non-local local news).

Nearly everyone with any sense knew from the start that the Newport hub was a terrible idea. I heard from an editor once that it was introduced purely as a way of breaking down old editing structures and making it easier to offload people. That wouldn’t surprise me, but it does still sadden me.

Decent people remain on the Press and tomorrow one of them is leaving (for another job, not thanks to corporate whim). Goodbye, then, to Gavin Aitchison and his gruff good heart. Gavin is the news editor, beer writer, weaver of internet spells, dealer in old photographs of York, and surely more besides. He will be missed by those who remain.

MANY words could be used to describe Donald Trump but ‘neophyte’ isn’t the first one to spring from my dictionary. I know the word but looked it up anyway: “Someone who has recently become involved in an activity and is still learning about it.”

A new boy, an innocent, a layman – is that how we should still regard Trump?

Reports this morning suggest that Trump’s wild allegations that he was wiretapped by Barack Obama during last year’s presidential campaign have found little support among leading Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said he had no seen any evidence to back up a series of unsubstantiated tweets made by the president last Saturday.

Devin Nunes – is that a name or an anagram? – is the chairman of the House intelligence committee, and he also could offer no proof of Trump’s allegations, although he did say to members of the press: “As you know, the president is a neophyte in politics. And I think a lot of the things he says you guys sometimes take literally.”

Trump may be relatively new to politics – and certainly new to the operational grind of politics, as opposed to the spouting-off side – but it is a grave mistake to regard him as any sort of an innocent whose tweets shouldn’t be taken seriously. For his ‘big lies’ are a calculated tactic rather than simply the unfiltered thoughts of a man sounding off on Twitter.

Just think of the way he put his money and weight behind the ‘birther movement’ theory that Obama wasn’t American – he surely knew this was bullshit, but kept plugging away at it because the louder a lie is shouted, the more people get to hear it.

This is also in keeping with his constant attacks on the media, as in his now infamous press conference when he gathered together members of the world’s press and called them liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” He described CNN as “very fake news… story after story is bad” and said the BBC was “another beauty”.

All of this could be the petulance of a pampered egomaniac. And perhaps it is. But in truth it is much more calculating than that: Trump attacks the media constantly with the aim of weakening an opponent. In line with right-wing movements of recent times, he wants to diminish traditional media to make room for media more of his choosing.

In simple terms, this means Twitter, where he can talk directly to people without having to go through journalists.

In darker terms, it means he wants to encourage the rise of media outlets or companies that report the news the way he likes to see it, such as Breitbart News. And that company may have ‘news’ in its title, but it’s not really interested in the news at all, as suggested by Hope Not Hate’s new report, ‘Breitbart: A right-wing plot to shape Europe’s future’.

As the charitable trust declares: “Breitbart is a political project, with a specific political agenda, staffed by willing propagandists. It distorts and fabricates news to deliberately incite anger in its supporters and fear in others. It pollutes the political space and demonises and vilifies its opponents.”

So, it’s not merely news told from a partial perspective; it’s basically propaganda pretending to be news. And that’s scary. Much scarier, say, even than the Daily Mail, that patron saint to offended liberals everywhere.

The man behind Breitbart, Steve Bannon, is now at the heart of Trump’s administration. So, he has moved from right-wing propagandist to becoming one of the most powerful men in the world.

Spinning lies can be a successful tactic – just look at the mystifying rise of Nigel Farage, a man who has swallowed more urban myths than I have porridge.

The Leave campaign basically ran on lies and exaggerations – that whopper about all the post-Brexit money that would come to the NHS was disowned almost before the paint was dry on the bus.

The Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr wrote a fascinating, if terrifying, feature the other week profiling Robert Mercer, the computer scientist and hedge-fund mogul, who has put his money and his computer smarts behind Farage and Trump, and helped the Leave campaign. He it is who seems to be behind many of the attacks on mainstream media – and he is engaged in secretive ‘information wars’ to disable mainstream media

I don’t have the time to elaborate, but you’ll find the article online. A long read but an important one…

WE are having a party to mark our youngest one’s departure to Australia for a year. The first guests will be here soon. The leaving girl is busy in the kitchen with her mother. I am sitting on the sofa with my eyes shut.

Normally I would be working out when the host can have that first glass of wine – is midday okay by you? – and going on a peanut hunt or sampling the food before being caught crumby-lipped. Instead, I am trying not to move. And trying not to cough.

Before anyone calls this man flu, my mother-in-law had it first, although in fairness she didn’t pass the dreadful lurgy on, as she was too ill to attend last Sunday’s leaving lunch (our girl is having more farewells than Frank Sinatra).

And if this is man flu, I am not man enough for it. After two days of being a nuisance at one of my jobs with my wheezing and spluttering, and three nights of almost no sleep thanks to the coughing, I am whacked out.

The guests arrive and I make feeble small-talk from the corner of the sofa, propped up by the arm. Later, I stand and do a mingle shuffle. I drink a glass of wine and don’t enjoy it (something must be wrong); and I eat food that tastes of nothing much.

The house fills up and I retreat to another sofa, the saggy old blue one that has been newly confined to the conservatory. I doze off again for a while as the party continues around me.

Normally I am good at the circulating, stopping to chat and top up glasses. After I wake up, I remember my duty and do the mingle-shuffle again. “Hello, Julian – I wondered where you were,” says a later-arriving friend. I explain my woefulness and repeat the conversation moments later with the later-arriving friend’s wife.

My brother tells me he’ll be leaving soon to catch the train home, but then he changes his mind and decides to stay and have more wine. Hang the expense, he’ll go later and they can get a taxi from the station. “Last of the big spenders!” says his wife.

Sometime after that I disappear upstairs. I think I saw the middle boy leave for Manchester with his girlfriend. The oldest boy was still here when I retreated. Upstairs I fall on the bed and sleep for an hour or so. When I come downstairs, my brother has just left, some hours later than he intended.

My mother and her partner are staying the night. I last until 8.30pm and go up the bed, leaving everyone else to watch SSGB. I hear later that my mother kept falling asleep and saying that she couldn’t follow the programme. “It’s quite simple, Margaret,” her partner said.

I sleep for 11 hours ­ ­– about two normal nights for me – and stagger down for breakfast. Despite the sleep, I diagnose myself as being man-flued out and tick the box marked: still feeling crap.

When my mother leaves, I catch up with SSGB and then spend the day dozing and watching television. I go to bed at 10pm and keep myself awake coughing until 3am.

I fall asleep and have the strangest dream. I have driven to London in my new Mini (not that I have one of those) and park it somewhere outside a block of flats where one of my sons is staying. When I come out, the car has been stolen. I go to look for the car by walking up a steep and narrowing tunnel. After a while it becomes too claustrophobic and I want to turn back, but there is a man behind me and he won’t stop. “You’ve got to keep going, ” he says. “I’ve been in the pub since two-thirty.” The brick ceiling is getting uncomfortably close and panic is setting in. I can’t cope with this.

I wake with a cough. It is 4am.

It was a lovely party. I just wish I hadn’t invited all those germs.

IF you’ve wondered what Jeremy Corbyn should be doing, here is the opinion of a woman from Rochdale – “he should be sat on a barge somewhere floating up and down”.

This anonymous political adviser was quoted in last Sunday’s Observer by the former Labour pollster James Morris, who is now senior director at the public relations firm Edelman.

Morris has spent the past year running focus groups for various parts of the Labour movement, talking to warehouse packers, scaffolders, care workers and checkout assistants, reports the Sunday newspaper.

What he discovered will be of little comfort to the Labour leader – “The disdain they have for Corbyn is remarkable. There is no sense that he is on their side, or has any of the capabilities of a prime minister.”

You don’t have to be working class or belong to the Labour Party to echo that sentiment. I can’t tick either of those boxes, but I do usually put a cross next to the Labour candidate at election time.

Morris points to one of the big problems for Labour, which is that the party has suffered a catastrophic collapse among working-class voters, with only 16% saying they would now vote Labour.

This disaster goes deeper than the unreconstructed old leftie who now runs the party, but his presence doesn’t seem to be helping.

Perhaps he would be better off sitting and floating on a barge. He could choose a quiet canal away from all the political noise and his supporters could line the banks and cheer him on. There would be a speech, probably a good one, and Corbyn would nod wisely, communicating his stubborn certainty that his is the only path (or canal).

Except that, if you believe the Times this morning, there may not be as many cheerleaders lining the bank as there were. Leaked data suggests that Labour as shed 26,000 members since last summer – more than 75% of them new members who joined in a rush of Corbyn enthusiasm after the 2015 election

Some 7,000 members are thought to have resigned last month following Corbyn’s three-line whip commanding MPs to support the government over the triggering of Article 50.

It is strange the way that Brexit is mostly a Tory mess and muddle, and yet the political damage is being done to Labour. That’s what you get for being a functionless opposition that seems to have not a clue how to carry on, leaving Mrs Maybe to sail imperiously by, quite undisturbed by that beardy bloke shouting from a barge.

Last night there was a party-political broadcast by Labour. This was timed to reinforce shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s cry for the rich to pay more taxes.

The scenario went like this: fat man in a shower, dries himself off, slowly gets dressed in three-piece suit and tie. The back of the jacket has a fat-cat slogan embroidered in the material, after the fashion of American baseball jackets.

Alongside the raised taxes on fat cats in showers, there was mention of freeing both the NHS and the railways of privatisation. So, here’s the thing. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that, and yet watching the latest Labour advert filled me with despair. Jeremy Corbyn has been saying such things for ever and it just reinforces the picture of him and McDonnell as being from the past rather than the future.

There is no sense of what George W Bush once referred to as “the vision thing” – hardly the snappiest of manifestos, but there is something to it. What is Corbyn’s achievable vision? Who knows, as he seems to prefer his own game of fantasy politics.

I do have one argument with the Observer (where long ago I once worked): an accompanying feature on how Labour could be in deep trouble in Halifax referred to the South Yorkshire town. Dear me, there’ll be rumblings in the West Riding.

HERE goes – nose-holding time again. Let’s jump into that morally stagnant pool shared by Donald Trump and Ukip.

You can take your pick with those two, but today’s cautious paddle will address Trump and Sweden and Ukip v Ukip.

Trump had a strange moment last week – all right, I need to narrow that down a bit; Trump had a Nordic noir turn last week when he declared to his supporters: “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden!”

Among those who didn’t believe it was the population of Sweden, as nobody had any idea what Trump was talking about. My favourite response came in a tweet from the former foreign minister Carl Bildt: “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking. Questions abound.”

They usually do when Trump’s around. The president’s apparent belief that a terror incident had occurred in Sweden the previous night turned out to be a misunderstanding garnered from watching a report on Fox News claiming there had been a surge in gun violence and rape following a record number of asylum applications in 2015.

A fact-check column in the Guardian on Saturday reported that Swedish police later said their words had been taken out of context. Tellingly, the facts did not match the wild accusation – “The data tells us that there was no surge in gun violence or rape in 2015, when Sweden accepted more than 160,000 refugees. The rate of gun deaths stood at 0.32 per 100,000 population, compared with 4.04 in the US – 12 times that of Sweden.”

It is not uncommon for people to mask their own sins by pointing to the failings of others, and that is what Trump does all the time. He is obsessed to the point of total delusion by ‘fake news’ – and yet he spouts fake news to his supporters without a thought.

There was a time when a presidential briefing constituted more than: “Hey, I saw this last night on Fox News. Terrible thing, truly terrible.”

The other telling fact in lay in the final statistic – the rate of gun deaths in America is 12 times that of Sweden. Never mind raising your unusually small hand to point a finger at Sweden – what about all the murder and mayhem in your own backyard?

While Trump and his followers endlessly worry about Muslim terrorists, they seem blind to the fact that the average American is much more likely to be killed by another American than by a terrorist. And that’s a fact – although not one you will hear from Trump.

Ukip appears to be unravelling after last week’s failure to win the Stoke Central byelection, and this morning in the Telegraph the party’s former leader, Nigel Farage, demands that his party’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, should be thrown out for trying to damage Ukip.

You may recall that Farage welcomed Carswell aboard the rocky Ukip dinghy when he jumped ship from the Tories. Ever since then, relations between the two men have frostier than a toxic snowman. Can a snowman be toxic? Oh, I didn’t see why not, especially if it is sporting a tattered purple and yellow scarf.

The latest matter of contention – the full skeleton rather than a mere bone – are claims that the Clacton MP blocked an honour for Farage. There had been moves from with the Ukip cul-de-sac for Farage to be given a peerage, but this clashed with his role as an MEP, so a knighthood was suggested instead. Carswell is said to have responded rather wittily that Farage should be given an OBE “for services to headline writers”.

You would be looking at Nigel Farage for a long time before you mistook him for a delicate flower, but nevertheless he insisted his Ukip colleague was “consumed with jealousy and a desire to hurt me”. He called on the current leader – well, this week’s Ukip leader at any rate – Paul Nuttall to expel Carswell.

What a poisonous bunch of political pygmies. A knighthood for Farage would have been the ultimate proof that the honours system was done for. This country is engaged in a massive experiment cum gamble caused by Farage’s endless barracking and ego-trumpeting, and the time for an honour, if such a dark hour exists, will be when we have some idea if this whole Brexit farrago is going to work.

Yesterday, John Major, the former Tory prime minister, added his scepticism over Brexit, saying he had “watched with growing concern as the British people have been led to expect a future that seems to be unreal and over-optimistic”. He added: Obstacles are brushed aside as of no consequence, whilst opportunities are inflated beyond any reasonable expectation of delivery.”

I was never a member of that man’s fan club, but Major is talking total sense there.

YOU might wonder what connection the Humber Bridge has with this morning’s byelection results. And, no – it’s not just that some Labour supporters might feel tempted to walk halfway across that span and jump off.

The political scientist John Curtice points out in the Guardian this morning that the Tory victory in Copeland represents the biggest increase in support for a government party since Harold Wilson’s Labour government won Hull North in January 1966 – “at the cost, incidentally, of a promise to build the Humber Bridge”.

Clearly some byelection bribes are more impressive than others, and future generations have benefited from that one. No such inducement was offered in Copeland, where the Tories snatched a Labour seat they had not won since 1931.

Professor Curtice again: “Indeed, never before in the whole history of post-war British byelections has a government overturned so large an opposition majority as Labour was defending in Copeland.”

It is tempting to wonder that if Jeremy Corbyn can’t cope in Copeland, where will he be successful? On Today just now, shadow chancellor John McDonnell appeared to blame Tony Blair and Lord Mendelson, saying their disunity was part of the reason for the defeat

Well, it can’t have helped to have had that pair of political ghosts rattling their chains in your corridor – but Corbyn has been in charge long enough now to carry the can for such a disaster.

There will be many competing theories about the causes of this remarkable revival by the Tories, but Corbyn’s confused stance on Brexit can’t have helped. He seems only too happy to fall out with his own anti-Brexit MPs while holding open the door for Mrs Maybe to get whatever she wants.

I think that if you look carefully at Theresa May, you see a very scared woman who doesn’t really have a clue how the mess she inherited will work out, how long it will take, or when we will know if we have arrived. But she has a good accidental friend in Jeremy, who seems curiously inclined to making her life easier.

Not so long ago, anyone who criticised Corbyn came in for hot heaps of abuse. Has the ardour of his supporters dimmed now? Who know, but it must be hard to maintain the fire in that relationship. Have Corbyn and his ardent followers now reached the stage their partnership where one of them goes to bed much earlier than the other?

John Woodcock, the Labour MP for neighbouring Barrow in the Cumbia, said that the byelection loss to the Tories showed the party was “in trouble”. That’s the honest truth rolled up like a carpet if you ask me, but blame Tony Blair if you wish – after all, he carries many sins, some fairly and others less so (Iraq remains the indelible sin for many; winning three elections for Labour seems to be forgotten – or written off as a sin anyway, because he won by not being Labour enough, or something).

Of course, it was a night of two halves, and thankfully Labour saw off Ukip’s new leader Paul Nuttall in Stoke Central – which had been seen by some as UK’s ‘Brexit capital’.

A blow for Ukip is always a warming tot for the soul, although there is another warning for Labour here: if Ukip wobble and the Tories start winning back the purple brigade, then Corbyn and Co are in even deeper trouble that we thought. And that shit they are standing in looks deep enough already.

Incidentally – and I do like an ‘incidentally’ – if you are made of sterner stuff than me, tonight you could watch Nigel Farage on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV. I think that’s a two-for-one offer I can resist. Farage will tell Morgan that his Brexit victory came with a heavy personal price and cost him is (second) marriage. Asked why he carried on, Farage says: “Well, somebody had to do it. I believed this was the most important political question we would ever face in our lifetime.”

And it will be years yet before we know who was right.

Shuttlecock-up or conspiracy? Oh, there is no doubt in the mind of this semi-competent hitter of the yellow plastic feathers (real feathers being an extravagance at our Thursday night session).

Badminton has been treated shabbily by the decision to cut all funding for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The sport, along with six other disciplines, has lost its appeal against UK Sport funding cuts, and will not receive any of the £5.7m it was given last time.

GB Badminton said it was “staggered” by the decision to reject its appeal, say the BBC. Putting aside the fact that staggering is mostly what I do on the court, as well as lunatic lunges and occasional flashes of something approaching competence, I sympathise fully.

Badminton is a great game at any level – and truly blinding to watch at the top-flight level.

In a typical display of nonsense-speak, UK Sport chief executive Liz Nicholl said none of the seven sports had provided “critically compelling new evidence” that changed the assessment of their medal.

Further words falling from her mealy mouth regarding the disappointed sports were: “Their position in our meritocratic table therefore remains unchanged and they remain in a band we cannot afford to invest in.”

Their position in our meritocratic table… oh, come off it with your technocratic weasel phrases. It’s just the usual ugly rush to lionise the grabbing of medals in athletics – nothing wrong with athletics, but this national obsession with winning medals at all costs is another poor reflection on the over-moneyed Olympics. Just more public money being pumped into the human medal factory.

Surely some of that cash still should go to badminton – a sport than can be played by anyone at any level. Encouraging participation in sport should be part of the return on our investment, and badminton is the perfect sport for anyone and everyone who wants to give the game a go.

It’s also fantastic to watch at top levels. As you would discover if you saw our bunch on a Thursday night. We may be middle-aged bumblers but we have fun, even if that bald bloke with the glasses does occasionally lose his rag – although not as often as he fails to find it when playing squash.

Shuttlecock-up or conspiracy? Oh, the intrigue and treachery option for sure.

DEPTFORD High Street, 1980. The office, on the second floor next to the station platform, was a long room where the air was filled with smoke and the clattering of typewriters. The editor’s office smelt of cigars and, in the afternoon, spent Guinness.

Leaving the office at lunchtime, you walked past the switchboard lady/receptionist. All phone calls went through her and there was a board into which she plugged the relevant wires. Without her intervention, you couldn’t talk to anyone.

Down the stairs and into the street, there were assorted pubs left and right, including the one where the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was said to have been murdered. He was killed by a man offended at his atheism, apparently. I didn’t know that then, but fortunately never went in there shouting my head off about God not existing.

Deptford was a rough old place in 1980, so heaven knows what it was like in 1593.In fact, an article in the Daily Telegraph ten years or so back described the place where Marlowe was murdered as a “modest and respectable dining house”.

It was the grotty old Brown Bear pub in my day, and from memory a stuffed bear stood somewhere in the bar. Or perhaps that was just a local who hadn’t moved in a while and had ossified into part of the furniture.

We rarely went in that pub, but instead favoured one at the end of the high street, on the corner with the road to Greenwich.

Everyone drank at lunchtime in those days, and hardly anyone seems to now. Even as a relatively modest drinker, I would often have a couple of pints. The editor had three or four pints of the black stuff sometimes, and in the afternoon his mood could turn, so you learned to keep you distance in the post-Guinness zone.

And if he wishes to dispute that version of events, sadly he can’t as he died some years back. He wasn’t exactly old, so perhaps Guinness isn’t good for you after all. And nobody ever said cigars were good for you, even though I smoked them back then, with a pint (but only in the evening as a rule).

The South East London Mercury was a good and busy newspaper all that time ago. Most of the reporters were young and we’d all go out together for a lunchtime drink. Sometimes we drove to Greenwich or Blackheath, and whoever was behind the wheel had a pint or two as well. People did that back then.

All this came back to me this week on hearing that Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market, has banned alcohol during the working day, according to the Financial Times.

This move brought accusations of big brother and so forth. Maybe it is heavy-handed, but to be honest I can’t really manage a lunchtime drink nowadays. Even a glass of white wine sends my head a little blurry.

People eat at their desks mostly now, and it is tempting to wonder if that is any healthier than leaving the office for a drink. Two of my jobs require me to drive, so that’s drinking out for a start, and the third job requires me to sit at home and either write or think up ideas. The commute would not be a problem with the third job, but the sitting around and thinking might be. I guess a post-pint nap could be passed off as creative cogitating, but to be honest I don’t want to drink at lunchtime any more, unless at a weekend party or when on holiday.

The flip-side to drinking at work comes when the bosses drink too much and return to the office later in the afternoon over-filled with beery belligerence, leading to rows and nastiness. We’ve probably all worked in places like that. I know I have. No names will be given here, but those who know will know.

At the other end of Deptford High Street was the pub where Squeeze once played on the roof, doing their own take on the Beatles’ roof-top performance. Opposite the office was a yard controlled by a rough-diamond type who would let you park there for a weekly fee. I forget the sum but do easily recall the car: my orange MG Midget, a costly treasure when it needed a new engine. What a long time ago it all now seems.