Beggaring belief…

As Russian forces were pounding Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, yesterday, the beleaguered Zelensky was winning more global support at the G7 in Hiroshima. Today the Mail on Sunday’s (and others’) lead story was, again, the resignation of a silver haired daytime TV presenter. The Sunday Times led with Suella Braverman’s stupidity in seeking private one-to- one tuition in how not to break the speed limit. Set against the enormity of a war which touches us all, the lowest common denominator editorial selections of much of our press and broadcast media beggars belief.

Twice this week the BBC’s flagship 10pm news coverage was all over the Schofield debacle. Messrs Myrie and Rayworth must surely throw their hands up in horror when they read their scripts for the night. Do they ever say that they can’t lead with such drivel? And in this case the celeb in question worked for ITV!

The Braverman story is boring but, sadly, unsurprising. What happens to certain politicians, mostly Tory, when they become MPs and then, ministers? Does the Chief Whip lobotomise a proportion of the more stupid ones or use entitlement- indoctrination so that the Suella Bravermans of the party can dispense with a moral code and claim special treatment? She would have won just a few brownie points had she rubbed shoulders with the proletariat at some drab hotel and taken her speed awareness medicine. Too stupid, never mind lacking moral compass.

And then there was the blow of Martin Amis’s untimely death. A man whose searing prose – both in fact and fiction – exposed the idiocy of creatures great and small. He found an honesty and truth in his writing which raised him above many others. Fiercely intelligent, forensic in political and social analysis and bitingly satirical. He was a titan and the news of his death arriving, as it did, in the same editions which led on the grubby dealings of Sewella provided a stark contrast between might and slight. Amis’s novel Money, which started my fandom in the 1980s is a modern classic in which the excesses of John Self – booze, drugs, women, porn – are a savagely comic mirror of UK and US society. Not much has changed, it seems. Or if it has, it is for the worse.