Gareth Roberts

The mucky allegations about a 'household name' BBC star – who is said to have paid thousands of pounds to a teenager for sexually explicit pictures – has exposed our obsession with TV presenters. We invite these people into our homes every day. Stars we never meet become familiar, a part of our lives and daily routines. Now, for one of these presenters, their world has come crashing down, and we can't get enough of it. There are plenty of questions hanging over this story: we still don’t know the identity of the presenter concerned, even if social media is awash with a list of suspects. And we don't know whether the allegations are true. But there's no doubt that we find presenters caught up in scandals fascinating. There is also something deliciously exciting about such stories.

In his most recent column for the Mail, Boris Johnson fires a shot at, among other things, ‘the leftie twittersphere’. Lest we forget, that would be the same Boris Johnson that, during his time as prime minister, told us there was ‘nothing wrong with being woke’; who seemed remarkably unbothered about mass illegal immigration; who blithely nodded through the Bank of England printing funny money like there was no tomorrow (you’ll never guess, but it turned out there was, and we are now living in that tomorrow). He even, bizarrely, described the invasion of Ukraine as ‘a perfect example of toxic masculinity’.

After Spotify sacked/let go/‘mutually agreed to part ways’ with, in the words of one of its executives, those ‘f-ing grifters’ Harry and Meghan, there have much discussion about where it all went wrong for the podcasting pair. The general consensus is that the Sussexes may have overestimated public interest in anything they have to say beyond self-pitying tittle-tattle. Their recent statement that they’re not even going to do that any more makes you wonder what else they have stocked up in their ideas cupboard, and why the world would want to pay it their attention. The duff duo haven’t even been paid the full $20 million (£16 million) they signed up for back in 2020.

The government has paid a whacking out-of-court settlement of £100,000 to Anna Thomas, a whistleblower sacked after she tried to warn them about the infiltration of the DWP by political activists. Baroness Falkner, chair of the equality watchdog, was placed under investigation after a spurious ‘dossier’ of complaints was compiled by staff, which just so happened to coincide with her steering the ship in a political direction some staff members didn’t approve of. The RAF despairs of ‘useless white men’; a civil service ‘diversity adviser’ describes women’s rights groups as ‘far-right’ and ‘genocidal’. Home Office staff are threatening to strike rather than implement the government’s Rwanda policy. These are merely the stories from the past week alone.

Radio 4 is in trouble. Listening figures for the station have dipped to their lowest level since 2007. The Today programme, Radio 4's flagship morning show, is doing particularly badly: its audience fell 12 per cent year on year, from 6.5 million to 5.7 million, according to Rajar. For anyone who has tuned in to Radio 4 recently, this decline won't come as a surprise. ‘I’ll just stick Radio 4 on’ was the default habit of my life when bored, from about the age of ten in 1978 to fifty in 2018. It felt like the still, reliable centre of the nation. It was also handy as a blood pressure reducing device. But, in the last few years, something changed.

Talk of a new Labour-Lib Dem coalition is in the air. This is piquantly nostalgic to those of us whose earliest political memories were forged in the fire of the red-hot excitement of David Steel and Jim Callaghan’s short-lived Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78. My initial reaction, along with many others I’m sure, was a guttural ‘oh God no’. But a moment later a different aspect of it occurred to me, in a fine example of what the young people call ‘cope’. My banter senses started to tingle. Because, yes, it would drag out and exacerbate the country’s current despairing decline. But it would also be hilarious. PR might very well remake British politics, but not in the way that the progressives intend There is something inherently funny about coalitions.

Two things are buzzing about in the air at the moment: decline and artificial intelligence. Douglas Murray and Louise Perry have written recently in these pages about social desuetude: Murray on the five million or so Britons who seem to have opted out altogether of economic activity; Perry on the worrying lack of new humans being born. Could AI get us out of these holes?  It’s tempting to scoff at new tech and the alternating warnings and promises about what’s coming down the line. Many of us in the demographic bulge of older citizens will recall the heated clamour of the early 80s. We remember how the auguries about the microchip revolution turned sour when we found that toilets still had to be cleaned and bins still had to be emptied.

Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch ahead in the polls. A recent slight crumbliness in that lead has sparked Labour to produce attack ads which use a formulation I hadn’t seen since reading the walls at my primary school, i.e. – ‘Do you think people should wash under their arms? Janet Figgis doesn't’ – but even these flavourful communications are all about Rishi Sunak and the Tories.  Labour might be running the country pretty soon.

The Gary Lineker debacle has exposed the breathtaking historical and political ignorance of the supposedly educated. Lineker's suspension – and subsequent return – has also demonstrated (as if we didn't know it) the power of the managerial class establishment. But the transmission of Match of the Day last Saturday sans Gary and his co-mutineers revealed something else. The truth about much modern television is that the percentage of actual content is dwarfed by the amount of waffle. As the row rumbled on, the BBC was contractually obliged to run the day’s football highlights package. Without the banter, chat and flimflam Lineker is paid £1.3 million a year for, this clocked in at a mere 20 minutes.