HERE is the news as read by Donald Trump…

“Today is a great day, great day. We are great, truly great. Don’t believe those other newsreaders. They’re liars, all of them. Telling lies, terrible lies. Every single one.

“The media are liars, terrible liars. I read it in a book. Or somebody read it in a book. I have people, clever people. Good people. They read books. And they tell me stuff. And what they tell me you wouldn’t believe.

“We all know the media today is fake. Terrible people. So now you can get your news straight from The Donald. My news is good news. Not that fake news everyone else has. Good news. The only news you need to hear. You are good people. You need my good news.

“Here are today’s headlines. The Donald is the greatest president, ever. Ever. Those other presidents – useless scumbags, every one of them. You wouldn’t believe the mess Obama left. And Thomas Jefferson – him too. All of them, bad people. I have done more in four weeks than those losers ever did. Losers – all of them.

“Even that Reagan guy people compare me too. He made films. I made billions. He wasted years learning how to be a politician. I am bigger than that. I don’t learn. I just do.

“America is great again. Told you I’d do that. And the big news is it’s only taken four weeks. Four weeks. Those other losers spent years messing everything up. And I’ve sorted it all out. See that pot of gold? End of the rainbow. My daddy left me a rainbow. I made a better rainbow. A bigger rainbow. Pots of gold, folks.

“Here are the headlines. There is only one, only one. I am great. Those other people are all losers. I am great today. I will be even greater tomorrow. And finally, I will be even greater the day after that. Whatever day that is. I have people, good people. And they tell me what day it is. Every day they tell me what day it is, just in case I forgot…”

The trouble is Donald Trump is almost beyond parody, but at least his administration does seem to be good for satire. Witness Melissa McCarthy’s totally brilliant turn on Saturday Night Live as Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. Or Alec Baldwin’s equally smart turn as the man himself.

Yesterday’s pugnacious press conference was bizarre, boisterous and bonkers. Instead of letting the much-mocked Spicer face the media, Trump did the job himself. That’s the thing about people like Trump. They always know they can do better than anyone else.

From what he said it is clear Trump watches a lot of television. He seems to spend so much time shouting at the television news it’s a wonder he has time left for that other stuff. You know, being the greatest president ever.

In his solo press conference, he went back into campaign mode. I think this is because he needs an enemy. Hillary lost so she is not much cop as a foe. So, Trump turns the media into the enemy, saying yesterday: “I turn on the TV, open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos, chaos. Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine, despite the fact that I can’t get my cabinet approved.”

People like Trump define themselves by their enemies. They see themselves as clearly better than their enemies. But they need that enemy as a sort of self-reflecting mirror.

When he was running for president, his supporters were heard to say that he was a businessman, as if this was some sainted calling. Nothing wrong with being a businessman. But Trump is a megalomaniac tycoon who has always conjured his own truth, and as such has been surrounded by people who nod to his every word, scurry to his every desire. “Yes sir, no sir – three golden towers full, sir.”

As a lifelong member of the fake media, Trump’s attacks worry me. And should worry us all. Basically, he wants the news to be his news. Any news that doesn’t tell his version of the truth is dismissed as fake news. Any news which asks questions is fake news. Any news which isn’t The Donald’s news is fake news.

Leaders who control the news are called something or other. Hang on, I’ll just look it up in one of those things Trump never reads. You know, books. Ah, yes. Dictators – that’s the word for leaders who want to control the news.

WHATEVER you think of Michael Gove – and feel free to tick the box marked ‘not a lot’ – he is said to earn £150,000 a year for eight hours a week moonlighting at the Times.

I read that in Private Eye on the same day as Press Gazette, the online magazine for journalists, reported that one in three freelance journalists are on state benefits. This information comes from a survey carried out by the National Council for the Training of Journalists, which questioned 621 freelance journalists, “of whom 526 answered questions about their earnings”.

The survey reckons that freelance journalists typically earn around £20,000 a year. That isn’t a lot, but it is a lot more than I managed while attempting to subsist on freelance earnings alone.

The survey follows data from the Labour Force Survey which showed a rise in the number of freelance journalists in the UK to 34,000 in 2016 from 18,000 a year earlier.

What explains this surge? A newspaper industry in deep shit and laying people off would be my best guess. I had been a fulltime, salaried journalist for all my working life until May 2015. When I was made redundant, I added ‘freelance’ to my job title and carried on, although what I carried on with at first was a foolish fantasy of how nice it would be to earn a good living from being a freelance.

I did earn money, but not a lot.

Two respondents to the survey said they earned more than £100,000 a year from journalism, while 73 earned less than £5,000. My freelance earnings fell between those two extremes, but were much closer to the lower figure than the higher.

“Around a third of those questioned said they also did other work outside journalism,” according to the Press Gazette. You certainly need other work if you are not Michael Gove. That’s why I combine a bit of freelance writing with working for the Press Association two days a week and being a visiting journalism lecturer at Leeds Trinity University.

It’s not as lucrative as my old job – which was hardly a money-spinner – but it is interesting to combine different jobs. This week I have taught on two days, written a freelance feature on another, and will be working on Friday and Saturday in my other job.

In the Press Gazette report, there was a link to an item from 2008 when Quentin Letts, described as “possibly Britain’s most prolific freelance journalist”, said that journalists needed to diversify and not count on making a living only from newspapers.

“I think we’re probably the last generation that’s going to make a living out of newspapers,” Letts told the Independent on Sunday at a time when that newspaper still existed. “I suspect in 10 years’ time it’s going to be much harder to turn a shilling.”

I hadn’t realised that Letts was a freelance or that being rude about people in the Daily Mail could turn quite so many shillings. Perhaps I should have been ruder and posher and less morally squeamish. “That conscience don’t earn you no shilling,” as no one has ever said until just now.

I bought a copy of Private Eye because next Monday morning I want to talk to my magazine students about the importance of satire, with the Eye reporting record sales. Over in the US, Saturday Night Live is having a moment too with its Trump parodies. Alec Baldwin does a top Trump, pouting lips and all, while Melissa McCarthy is blinding as Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer.

We certainly need satire now, as I shall be saying on Monday.

Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, provided me with a quote, which was decent of him. Not all editors and columnists answer my emails for quotes to pass on to students. Tim Dowling in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine was an honourable exception – as, too, was the editor of that supplement.

The Eye item about Gove points out that the Times ran a piece listing former high-profile ministers who were now “out of office but not out of pocket” – and quite forgot to mention Gove the Grovel (did you see that Trump interview? Dear God…).

Top of the money pile are George Osborne, now coining it in working for Black Rock investments, and David Bloody Cameron, accepting thousands to speak about Brexit to a private breakfast of hedge-fund managers.

Run that by me again. Cameron basically causes all this Brexit chaos, and then goes around earning a fortune talking about it. The pink-faced cheek of that man is beyond belief.

HERE are a few tasty, and occasionally indigestible, items from the news menu. Today’s snacks are guaranteed Trump-free as too many mentions of that man are feared to cause PTSD (Post-Trump Stress Disorder).

There is a greasy little snack on the front page of the Daily Express under the headline “MIGRANT SCANDAL”. The newspaper says that 200 migrants a day were caught trying to enter Britain illegally in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

These figures are said to have been obtained by the Express after a long battle with the Home Office. They reportedly show that 24,800 people were stopped in the first six months of last year.

Now here’s the odd thing. It’s a puzzle to see why this is a scandal in Express terms. Surely, it’s the opposite of a scandal as those immigrants didn’t make it into the country – and, moral considerations put aside for a moment, that should please the “keep-them-out” readers of that newspaper. A snack to have them smacking their cracked old lips.

The real scandal, of course, is the appalling speech given in the Commons by Home Secretary Amber Rudd as she rowed back on an earlier commitment to admit vulnerable lone child refugees to Britain, under a scheme named after Lord Dubs.

To date, 350 such unfortunate children have been admitted to Britain, where campaigners had hoped that around 3,000 would be brought here. Nothing about this is ideal and bringing lone refugee children here is an act of last resort in an imperfect world – but, importantly, it is the humane thing to do.

This next headline, from the BBC website, may be hard to swallow – “NHS problems unacceptable, says Hunt.” Jeremy Hunt has been Health Secretary for a while now and he only seems to have noticed that. Meanwhile his boss, Mrs Maybe, was overheard in the Commons given that odd robotic chant she does whenever she throws statistics at Jeremy Corbyn – claiming once again that the Conservatives at the true saviours of the NHS.

Over to the Daily Mirror caff, where the chalked-up menu claims that NHS funding is growing at its lowest rate since records began in 1955 – “With the NHS collapsing around her ears, brazen Theresa May yesterday insisted the Tories have lavished record sums of cash on the service.”

The difficulties with running such a service are deep and go back a long way. But here’s another one of those things. These difficulties always seem worse once the Tories are in charge. Oh, and here’s another: is anyone else worried that this mounting chaos will inevitably lead to calls from Hunt to privatise everything as the only solution to the problems?

In the last paragraph, I ground out a bit of anti-Tory pepper. That old condiment can be hard to shake off. Everything somehow tastes better with anti-Tory pepper.

So, in fairness, let’s consider Jeremy Corbyn’s “emergency Labour reshuffle” as reported on the front page of the i-newspaper.

It is traditional to mention the deckchairs on the Titanic at such moments. However, the Labour Party under Corbyn seems ill suited to such a grand metaphor of impending doom. These deckchairs belong to a leaky old tourist boat sailing past the Palace of Westminster. And never mind how much they are shuffled about, that little old boat is still sinking.

Another image of Corbyn is offered by the Daily Telegraph, where a cartoon likens his plight to that of an Australian man who was trapped in a muddy ditch for six hours and survived by keeping his nose above the murky water.

Now Corbyn did nudge his nose above the water this week after fate – in the shape of a misdirected email – bowled him a gift at PMQT with his question about whether Surrey council had been given a special deal over its council tax rise.

Mostly, though, he seems sadly inept, especially over Brexit. Which is a shame as we could do with him climbing out of that muddy ditch.

Instead, Corbyn claims that reports of him stepping down are “fake news”. Oh, really, couldn’t he think of anything smarter to say?

I fear that the novelty value of having a bumbling Labour leader is beginning to wear thin.

I HAVE been asked to sit on a panel in York about the rise of fake news. So here are a few thoughts ahead of tonight.

It might seem new, but fake news has been around for a while. In 1986, the Sun published the infamous headline: Freddie Star Ate My Hamster – a story as bizarre as it was untrue.

Here is a more serious example from that newspaper. I have been dipping into David Randall’s book The Universal Journalist. He recalls the days when the then editor of the Sun decreed against all scientific evidence that Aids was a disease limited only to drug addicts and homosexuals.

This approach reached its lowest point in the headline: “Straight Sex Cannot Give You Aids – Official.” Aids was also dismissed as the “hoax of the century”.

Eventually the tabloid backed down and printed a tiny apology on page 28.

Not fake news so much as stubbornly biased news. As for the hamster, that was fake news. Fake fur, if you like.

Here are two recent examples from the Daily Express, which campaigned for Brexit with a loud voice and hasn’t stopped shouting yet.

Twice in the past week, the crusty tabloid has been forced by the Independent Press Standards Organisation to flag up corrections about front-page Brexit stories. One story concerned a report that 98 per cent of people who took part in a survey said that the decision to leave the EU should be enacted immediately. The 98 per cent figure had come from a smallish survey of Express readers, rather than the public at large – which was the impression misleadingly given.

The other story went under the headline: “EU exit boosts house prices.” This was ruled inaccurate as the figures used were from a period before the referendum vote – whereas the Express made it appear that the figures were from after the vote.

Fake news or fiddled facts? Take your pick. As for all those mad Express stories about the weather, perhaps the Met Office has something to say about that.

Fake news has always been with us, then, but sadly there is just much more of it around now. In recognition of this, Oxford Dictionaries made ‘post-truth’ its word of the year for 2016 – annoying pedants everywhere, who pointed out that was in fact two words.

One or two words, that coinage does sum up an age where facts are optional at best and where Donald Trump can berate a CNN reporter at a press conference by idiotically chanting: “You are fake news”.

Kellyanne Conway, who massages the truth for Trump, then introduced us to “alternative facts”. You have your facts, we have ours. Suddenly facts aren’t blameless sentries of truth; just something somebody believes.

Many people have pointed out that ‘alternative facts’ has an Orwellian feel, as indeed it does, and sales of 1984 are reported to have risen sharply. Perhaps we should all read that book again.

False information has always been with us, then. What’s changed is that the internet allows falsehoods to spread fast and wide. A lie can be amplified much more quickly now than in the past.

An old quote attributed to many people goes like this: “A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”

Nowadays that lie moves so fast the truth hasn’t even learned to do up its laces yet.

You can’t consider the rise of fake news without addressing the Trump problem. During his election campaign, Donald Trump cleverly laid into the media – the “mainstream media” and always said with a sneer – while at the same time using the same mainstream media to report his every stutter and stumble.

As president, he constantly disparages the media – preferring to communicate through Twitter. This could be because he has a short attention span. But mainly it’s because that way he doesn’t have to answer awkward questions. Trump sees questions as an impertinence. He has his truth and he doesn’t want newspapers or nosey TV reporters offering any other version.

Stephen Bannon, one of Trump’s White House advisers, even went as far as to say that the “humiliated” media should “keep its mouth shut”. And his boss repeatedly calls journalists “among the most dishonest people on earth”.

Takes one to know one, perhaps.

Yet the mainstream media is widely distrusted in the US – and that has left a poisoned void in which fake news can propagate. If you dislike the real news, you can just make up your own.

Many blatant lies were told on Trump’s behalf during his election campaign; he spun a good few himself; and one or two untruths were even told about him.

This superfluity of false information is a big worry. How can we have a meaningful conversation about anything if there are no true facts to hand? How can we see any sort of truth through this thicket of lies?

The internet is like a big, messy playground, full of energy and possibility. It is unruly and wild and has the potential to do harm or good. Without the internet, fake news would not spread so far or so fast. But it is spreading far and fast. And the worry is that soon we won’t have any idea what’s what.

One of the clear dangers is that if people take their news from social media, perhaps on Facebook, then fake news looks the same as everything else on Facebook. And this lends it spurious validity.

Perhaps in time the internet will sort this out by introducing better fact-checking. Human fact-checking, instead of algorithms. Or by allowing users to flag up fake news, something which is being experimented with now.

But perhaps in the end we need be smart enough not to believe everything we read. If something looks suspicious or too good or bad to be true, then perhaps it is. Before automatically believing what you read check it out on the BBC website. Or any other reputable news organisation.

Sometimes it’s a case of “reader beware”.

There is a discussion on this theme tonight at 7pm the Priory Centre in York. Have They Got News For You? The future of journalism in a post-truth world will be chaired by Marcus Romer. The panellists include journalist, producer and lecturer Wendy Homewood, Jack Gevertz, O2 2015 Yorkshire Young Journalist of the Year, and myself.

SO here I am sitting in my Monday morning class. This week’s session is about blogging. The students are setting up blogs and writing some words. Perhaps I should do the same.

What follows is a quick edit of my notes for today’s class. I have just told everyone that they can use their blog for their work. Or also use it to ramble on about whatever interests them. Advice from a blogging rambling. Or a rambling blogger.

This part of the session saw me raise a few thoughts about blogs. And here they are…

Blogs have been with us for a few years now and they have changed and challenged journalism. There are many types of blog, but for our purposes let’s divide them into two:

Blogs attached to professional media organisation;

All other blogs.

You could say that in the early days, blogs were written by bandits who ran wild rings round journalism. These free-roaming outriders could write what they like, they didn’t have to be trained, and no one was telling them what to do.

Since then, blogging has thrived in its own right – and has also been absorbed into mainstream news organisations. This is often the way: something starts as an outsider and then becomes part of the establishment.

What we shall call the establishment blogs are those written by journalists working for the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph or any other major supplier of news, features or entertainment. These blogs are an extension of journalism: they have moved from taking place outside of established media to be practised by professional journalists.

The difference with these blogs is down to delivery rather than content. A professional blog has similarities with a newspaper article, but it can be delivered more quickly and displayed on a newspaper or magazine website immediately. It will be written with a professional eye; written by someone who has learned how to write over many years.

The bandit blogs are still out there of course and there are many of them. A blog can be about anything. If can explore ideas or share moments from a life. It can recommend a lipstick or a recipe. And it can be a going commercial concern.

So, has digital technology been good or bad for journalism? The sensible answer to that is: it depends.

Digital technology has blown old journalism apart, with falling print sales and difficulties in making money online. The pieces are still settling but the printed page has a fight on its hands.

Yet alongside that disruption, there has a rise in what you might call democracy of the word.

If it is easier to be published, then more people get to have their say That is a good thing in many ways. It doesn’t guarantee quality, especially as many blogs are edited and published by the person writing them.

Here is a question: How have blogs changed journalism? They make everyone a reporter. Anyone can now write a news story or opinion piece and deliver it to the world.

This is both exciting and troubling:

Exciting because the speed of delivery means there is no more hanging around and waiting for the presses to roll;

Troubling because that same speed means facts may not be checked.

News organisations often use a blog as a way of conveying rolling news. The blog allows them to tell a story as it happens and can call on many sources, including rival newspapers or websites.

That’s the professional side. So how about the others? Well they are a mass of almost anything you might care to think of. And now you are about to join them.

To wrap up, here are the thoughts of someone who has been blogging for a while now, since June 2015. I called this blog Man On Ledge. This was because I had just been made redundant and that’s what it felt like: standing on a ledge, knees shaking, arms out and hoping not to tumble over.

I have now written hundreds of blogs. For a while I wrote one a day. Some of the early blogs were about the unhappy experience of being made redundant. Others were about life, politics and all that. And they still are. On days when time is being kind to me, I have a think while skimming the headlines. And then I give myself an hour to write 500 or 600 words. I read them over. Press the button. And another one is gone.

I used to write a column once a week for a newspaper. Now I can write one a day. That’s a liberation, but it is a separation, too, as there is something uplifting about words printed on paper. But that’s the old-fashioned side of me talking there.

At this point, I set a directed activity/homework. That is not necessary for anyone reading the blog. And if you do submit any homework, it won’t be marked as I have quite enough to do this week.

THE jokes have been inevitable. Rationing of iceberg lettuces is said to be the tip of the iceberg. Well, if you ask me the tip of the iceberg lettuce tastes as horrid as the rest of it.

It’s funny the things that can cause a media panic. The courgette had its moment and now the iceberg lettuce and broccoli have been shoved into the news spotlight, shivering nervously at all the attention. There is a pepper or two there too and just a moment ago, a shy tomato blushed when a microphone was shoved towards it with indelicate enthusiasm.

Most of the year the iceberg lettuce lies neglected in the salad drawer where it belongs. But now it is the centre of attention, the star of its own shortage. The media is in a panic about a grotty lettuce that tastes of cold nothing.

Bad weather in Spain is partly to blame for the great salad shortage. Emergency iceberg lettuces can be flown in from Bolivia or the dark side of the moon or wherever it is that they are grown. So much bother for such lacklustre leaves.

I don’t much go in for patriotism, not liking the company you keep, but will make an exception for vegetables. We should stick up for winter vegetables grown by British farmers.

In the winter months in this country you can buy British beetroot, Brussel sprouts, cabbages, cauliflower, celeriac, chicory, fennel, kale, leeks, parsnips, red cabbage, swede and turnips. Not everything from that list enters my mouth, but a fair few do.

Lord Haskins, the former chairman of Northern Foods, which supplies Tesco, tells the BBB that we have become a “slightly strange group”, expecting all-year-round produce. And how right he is. Why not just think that it’s winter and therefore you don’t have to eat salad? Or shred a cabbage instead. It’ll taste better and won’t have been flown half-way round the world to languish in the salad drawer awaiting inevitable deliquescence. Toast some seeds and mix those in with a grated carrot and a dressing.

You see, I know about these things. I married into salad. The relationship got off to a shaky start but salad and me, we’re on close terms now.

A former colleague used to grumble about her partner’s eating habits, saying: “He won’t eat salad.” She clearly hadn’t tried the hard-line salad approach adopted by my wife. A man can only resist for so long. Now I even make salads.

I did like the salad-drawer outrage in the Sun yesterday which called on its usual mighty firepower to accuse the supermarkets of holding on to their lettuces to raise prices.

A salad scandal is not something you see often. With that note I shall wind up with an old veg themed joke: That’s shallot for today…

THE protesters thronged outside York Minster where cars were once allowed to drive. They carried banners reading “York is not for sale” and “We will not be driven out” during an “occupation” in protest at the huge growth in numbers of visitors to the city…

And if you can’t recall this happening, that’s because it didn’t, at least not in York. Such a protest did recently take place in Barcelona where a crowd estimated at 2,000 took over the Rambla, the city’s famed boulevard. That “famed” is taken on trust from the Observer newspaper as I have never been to the Spanish city. And it sounds as if some of its residents would be happy for me never to visit. I hope to disappoint them in this wish as my son tells me it is a great city, although the human congestion does sound alarming.

“In 2016 an estimated 9 million people stayed in hotels and a further 9 million in holiday apartments,” the Observer reported last Sunday, adding that a further 12 million day-trippers arrived by car and train or on cruise ships.

Ah, the cursed cruise ships. At least the River Ouse isn’t wide enough to accommodate those visitor-dumping floating towns that seem intent on ruining the world’s lovelier places.

Being a resident of a tourist city is a mixed blessing, but mostly I have enjoyed living in York for nearly 30 years now. It’s a pleasant city with many interesting facets, and living somewhere other people want to visit seems better than living somewhere no one wants to visit.

The downsides include the pressure of people in a small city, and the fact that every local shop that closes is turned into a coffee shop, bar or restaurant. I like coffee shops and bars, and occasionally visit restaurants, but their dominance does threaten to topple York into a city designed primarily for tourists.

It also risks flushing out the originality and quirkiness of local shops, and replacing those qualities with national chains which leave York feeling just like any other city. This has already happened to a large degree and no one seems able to do anything about it.

Sometime before we arrived here in 1988, there was a vogue for locals to sport T-shirts or button-badges proclaiming: “I’m not a tourist – I live here.” The fashion for this statement wasn’t confined to York, and may well have come from New York, although pinning down its origins proved difficult by the time-trusted means of Google.

That slogan was a peculiar mix perhaps of smugness and annoyance, but presumably those carrying the message on their person felt they needed to stand out from the tourist throng. I still can’t work out if it was unfriendly – which in general is not York’s way – or just making a point.

Anyway, visitor numbers have increased massively since then and York would be a poorer city without tourism and the benefits – plus associated annoyances – it brings.

This train of thought was partly inspired by an angry column in the Irish Sunday newspaper I work on for two days a week, editing the stories. This writer despised tourism which he felt was ruining Dublin and offered nothing in return, aside from poorly paid jobs in the service industry.

While he may have a point, his hatred of tourists left me wondering what would happen if there were no tourism. Would we all stay at home and never go anywhere? That doesn’t sound very alluring.

The same columnist has an avowed hatred of Airbnb as he feels the room-sharing website has pushed ordinary people out of Dublin. This may be true, but it did inspire me to stick up for my little Airbnb side-line here in York. The one room we rent out to visitors does not deny a home to anyone local. It’s a spare room used by visitors from around the world. If we didn’t ‘room-share’ it would stay empty.

We started renting out the room during hard times in 2015, and it has provided a small but useful income. The guests are mostly lovely, although we have endured a few oddballs.

That march in Barcelona was said to be good-humoured. It coincided with the passing of a new law by the city council which, for the first time, seeks to curb tourism by limiting the number of beds on offer.

I can’t imagine anything similar happening in York, although occasionally you hear rumblings about a visitor tax.

Usually someone from the council or the tourist office nervously brushes away such a suggestion; but is it really a bad idea? At least that’s one tax I wouldn’t have to pay.

I’m not a tourist – I live here.

‘BREXFAST’ and I’ve not even had breakfast yet.

The Daily Mirror comes up with that coinage on its front page today after the Brexit vote in the Commons, suggesting that Theresa May is ready for a swift exit.

A skim through the headlines is instructive this morning. Before doing that, let’s rewind to the story about David Cameron asking the owner of the Daily Mail to sack its rabidly pro-Brexit editor, Paul Dacre, in the run-up to last year’s referendum.

If you are lucky enough not to be familiar with Mr Dacre, he is to journalism what Lord Voldemort is to Harry Potter. He uses his dark arts to produce a newspaper which is read by many people and disparaged by many others.

Newsnight reported that Cameron approached Lord Rothermere with this request, although a spokesman for the former prime minister said: “It is wrong to suggest that David Cameron believed he could determine who edits the Daily Mail.”

Wrong perhaps, but highly plausible, because you can just see Cameron doing that, privilege speaking unto privilege and hoping for a favour.

Cameron is also said to have asked the famously unbending editor to “cut him some slack”, but Dacre declined and jumped right back on his Brexit barge.

When Dacre later heard of Cameron’s attempt to have him removed, he is said to have been “incandescent”, although a cautious glance at his newspaper suggests he spends his life glowing with rage. I imagine you could warm your hands on the man.

The result was that Dacre barged even harder for Brexit, and he is still giving it a shove this morning with the headline: “WE HAVE LIFT-OFF” imposed over a photograph of Winston Churchill’s statue outside the Houses of Parliament.

A frankly obnoxious sub-heading says: “But 114 MPs betray will of the people.” What a typical piece of cranked-up outrage. Perhaps those MPs were speaking up for those who voted to stay in Europe – are they no longer allowed a voice?

The Mail, the Daily Express and the Sun consistently batter out a pro-Brexit message – endlessly disparaging anyone who disagrees, and turning a narrow referendum margin into the will of all the people to rush for the hardest Brexit possible.

It is the fashion to coin a phrase for what comes next and my entry for this game is Blind Brexit. That’s what we are doing, preparing to take a leap of blind faith as we follow Mrs Maybe to the edge of the cliff.

The headlines do offer some caution, with the i-newspaper summing up the feelings of many: “Britain takes step into the unknown.” That’s it exactly, isn’t it?

The Guardian reports that “a fifth of Labour MPs defy Corbyn as Brexit bill passes” – something picked up by another sub-heading on the Mail’s front page: “Labour meltdown as 47 defy Corbyn.”

What a shambles Labour has been over Brexit – and all praise to York Central MP Rachael Maskell for quitting the shadow cabinet over her leader’s order that his MPs had to vote for Article 50.

A while ago anyone who criticised Jeremy Corbyn came in for abuse from the sainted scrum of his supporters. I haven’t asked for a while, but do you think they have seen the light yet? Corbyn seems like a walking disaster to me. And the often-disparaged Lib-Dems are looking a  more attractive option under Tim Farron.

Let’s end with a cheer for Labour MEP Seb Dance who said he had a “screw it moment” when he held up a sign saying “He’s lying to you” with an arrow pointing at Nigel Farage as the former Ukip leader gave a speech in the European parliament.

It’s a shame someone hasn’t been doing that for years, although the editing machine in my head always adds just such a sign. Along with a few unprintables.

PETER Capaldi is off and that reminds me we could all do with a Tardis right now. In a world where the fatted silhouette of Donald Trump casts such a long shadow, a spot of time-hopping might be a relief. Then again, nothing you are likely to find out there can match the horrors on display down here.

I have had a lengthy relationship with Doctor Who, having watched the first episode as a boy in 1963. Perhaps that is why I stuck with it. I have been there for the cardboard-set lows, been there for the dizzy modern highs – peaks that send your brain fuzzy for lack of sensible plot oxygen.

Doctor Who does like a complicated tale and the modern version has sometimes been slavish to the long-form plot. If you don’t keep your wits about you, well it probably makes as much sense as if you do keep hold of your wits.

Capaldi has announced that the new series will be his last, and that he will be leaving in the Christmas special – along with the show’s lead writer and executive producer Stephen Moffatt, the man with the deep plots.

The 58-year-old Glaswegian followed the younger Matt Smith, bringing a dark but puzzled energy to the role. You could almost see the speech bubble: “I’m Doctor Who – how the **** did that happen?’ The expletive was put there by Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor Capaldi made very much his own in The Thick Of It.

I have only met one Time Lord, although I did spot Capaldi once at the crime-writing festival in Harrogate. He appeared stylish and individual and, at a passing step, much less bonkers than his incarnation of the Doctor.

Capaldi has been a good Doctor, although why a man of my age should care is an embarrassment and a mystery. The Doctor I did meet was Tom Baker, but I think this story has been told before. He was appearing at Greenwich Theatre in a play called the Musical Comedy Murders of 1940.

We met at a café in central London, close to the rehearsal halls, and Baker was pop-eyed and full of alarming enthusiasms, and his voice rattled the cutlery, or so it seems in memory.

The original Doctor Who ran aground eventually, but was then re-born in 2005 and the tenth ‘new’ series will be Capaldi’s last.

Partly what has allowed Doctor Who to survive and mostly flourish is the idea that the main character has the ability to regenerate, “a quirk that has allowed a number of actors to have played the role over the years”, as the BBC website puts it. Thanks to this in-built renaissance, the series can reinvent itself each time a new actor comes along.

All the Doctors have been men, which you might think would go without saying, but there are probably thought pieces being written right now demanding that a woman has her turn in the Tardis. Would that work? Oh, I don’t see why not. My hot tip for the role would be Sandi Toksvig.