Anyone familiar with that arch-cretin Piers Morgan, pal to everyone whose name he thinks might impress the great unwashed, especially the gullible ones? Well, he gets a side-mention here, but mainly it is about hack ingenuity and how fucking marvellous it can be. Scummy, yes, unscrupulous, yes, borderline dishonest yes, but often fucking marvellous (and I am not talking about politicians and related scumbags, i.e. lobbyists)

Here’s a great example of how Brit newspapers operate, especially, though not exclusively, the tabloids. It this account comes from a story carried by our very good and very entertaining gossip site Popbitch, this year’s May 21, edition.

Like it or loathe it – and, er, to my eternal shame I like it – you must admit there’s a certain true genius in creating a story out of less than fuck-all. Here is a screenshot of the story with the text below it:

The Cannes Film Festival concludes this weekend. A lack of Hollywood stars on the red carpet has kept coverage muted, though, unlike much of the last 20-30 years, when every brand seemed to be throwing parties there.

Back in the 90s and 00s Soho House used to hire a yacht for the festival. It was always a magnet for the cream of Brit liggers, like hacks from Loaded Magazine and the red tops. One day an agitated Matthew Wright, then Daily Mirror showbiz chief, made an appearance. He explained that his editor, Piers Morgan, had demanded a front-page splash.

Someone had an idea. The Swedish porn company, Private, was sailing over to Cannes on a disused car ferry and hosting a party on it, why not go? Quick as a flash, Wright rang up their press office to get him and the other journos on the guest list. He then added Noel and Liam Gallagher’s names.

The next day, on the front page of the Mirror, there was a masterclass in how to invent a cover story out of absolutely nothing.

I used to be acquainted with Matthew Wright when he was still a reporter / writer for the Sun’s Bizarre showbiz column, then headed by one Piers Morgan (Piers Pughe-Morgan in real life).

I didn’t come in to contact with Morgan as I was a lowly down-table casual sub, but self-promoting dick that he was then and still is, he was very much in evidence and a regular visitor to the feature subs’ back bench to sort out his daily column.

I could not get over the fact that he invariably wore a mid-brown Tweed sports jacket. He was and is a sycophantic cunt, always keeping his finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing to make sure he blows with it. And if you missed it the first time around, he is a sycophantic cunt of the most appalling kind.

I was working casual subbing shifts on the Sun features desk – Dear Deidre letters, vague ‘fashion’ pieces and recipes – so nothing you might care to boast about (oh and then the Sun was still using the fucking useless Atex computer system which returned the story you were working on to the very top of the page every time you justified the copy! Irritating or what!).  Matthew wright and I often chatted on meal breaks in the Wapping canteen.

It was on one such meal break in about 1992/93 that Wright told me he was fed up with working on Bizarre (or being a hack, or the Sun or whatever he was fed up with) and was thinking of knocking it all on the head and re-training as a primary school teacher. After reading the story about Oasis and how he stitched them up, I passed that snippet to Popbitch (screenshot below). Honour among thieves? Yeah, right.

Morgan moved on to edit the News of the Screws in 1994, but was then moved to edit the Daily Mirror (occasionally just The Mirror, though an hour or two ago in the Bodmin Morrisons I’ve spotted it was back to the ‘Daily Mirror’ with the ‘Daily’ rather small and at a 90º angle to ‘Mirror’, though why I have not clue – see piccy below).

NB Here’s a neat little story with which you can wow our friends and bring cocktail parties to climax though you might also lose a friend and get kicked out of the party – your call.

When all other papers use an ‘ellipsis’ – as in . . . – in a headline, they print the standard three dots. The Mirror doesn’t, it only prints two. The story is that back in the ‘hot metal days’, an editor or production editor or chief sub or whoever was alerted by the comp at a headline was busting and the ellipsis would fit in.

His solution was simple: he got the comp to take a chisel and mallet and chisel off the third do. Since then all Mirror ellipses have been just the to dots.

All together now: Aaahh!

Logos – and sorry, I couldn’t find any splash heads with the two dot Mirror ellipsis. I suspect your are heart-broken.

   Old-style . . .                                 then . . .                   and now

. . . 

PS I have no idea at all what has brought on this flurry of activity on my blog. Not that I care, but oddly I have had many ideas of what to write about, some not all that awful. You are warned!

In which, among other things I engage in ‘puerile, pseudo-demotic posturing’ as I recount what complete nutters some higher-ups in the rag trade – newspapers, matey, not the fashion industry – often are, ah la ‘Sir’ Jack Stack

Purely by chance, my last five posts on this ’ere blog have been two reviews of books about the newspaper industry, a review of a novel what sent up the newspaper industry and two complementary posts which began life as part of those reviews.

I then realised that although what I’d written in each review was to the point, parts of each of them made them a little too wordy overall and flabby, and we can’t have that, eh? Flabby book reviews? 

Can’t have that, can we! Lord, where might it end? America electing a totally corrupt, cretinous paedophile as its president who then goes on to fuck the world economically by starting a pointless war and reducing American’s more or less respected world reputation to that of a male, balding porn star? Good Lord know!

So I hived those parts to become the ‘complementary posts’ off – shades of British industry of 50 years ago when ‘hiving off’ part of one company was believed to cure many ills (though it never did).

Here is a ‘complementary post’ to my most recent review, and, yes, I do keep repeating that word merely to prove that I do know that distinction between complementary and complimentary. It’s a crucial distinction – in that they don’t mean the same thing – I learned like much else about the English language, spelling, grammar and word by being repeatedly bollocked on various subs’ benches (‘sub-editors’ desks) until I did not get it wrong again.

One distinction I’ve never mastered, though is that between discreet and discrete, and yes there is one, though look elsewhere for an explanation ’cos . . .

For example, until the day I die, I shall never misspell necessary – one c and two s – for the same reason: incessant bollockings eventually becoming more of a pain than getting it right. It didn’t help, however, that often there is no definitive spelling: newspapers, especially the nationals, have a ‘style book’, which must be followed.

They are not a guide to ‘correct’ spelling and grammar and are not intended as such, just a simple ‘this is how we do it, guys and gals, and if you don’t do it the way we like it and don’t learn soon, consider slinging your hook and finding a berth elsewhere’.

So the Daily Mail for some odd reason never used or uses double quote marks as in “double quotes” but always just ‘single quotes’, except when a quote comes within a quote. Thus:

In the main address, the guest speaker reminded the meeting:

‘We should always remember that there is no “typical human kind” and never was. So we should be prepared for all kinds of unexpected and often shocking, variation in human behaviour which might well surprise us. Perhaps to highlight those variations and the behaviour to which they might leads, Hamlet put it “What a piece of work is man!” ’.

Note the double quote marks used, consisting of one set of single quotes encompassing what the ‘guest speaker’ said, and two sets of double quotes when he / she quotes.

But before I disappear entirely up my own backside, let me add the pertinent bit: to this day when I write I always only use single quote marks, except of course, if there is a quote in a quote like above. And, for no good reason at all except habit I follow Mail ‘style’ in other respects, too.

The Mail insisted and that all numbers from one to nine are spelled out, but from 10 however they are represented in digits. Why? The fuck only knows, but that is what I now do.

Another oddity of style I have adopted, though this is not exactly Mail style but the practice of a friend and from subs’ desk boss of mine (Peter B.) is my use of commas. Again, some might insist there are ‘rules’ but sadly no one can quite agree on what they might be.

For some, I might seem to use commas excessively, but I take the very simple and reasonable view that punctuation exists purely for a practical purpose: to aid the reader – a comma will slow down the reader and subtly – you hope, of course – dictate how she or he reads a sentence / paragraph and make a sentence or paragraph clearer.

The hoary example I always use are these two sentences:

‘The doctors who live in the town make a better living’

and

‘The doctors, who live in the town, make a better living’.

Those two sentences, identical but for two commas have two distinct meanings. The first sentence informs us – its main point – that those doctors who live in the town make more money – by implication – than those doctors who don’t live in the town.

The second sentence with its two commas informs us of two things:

1) all the doctors live in the town 

2) those doctors make more money than folk who are not doctors

I’m sure I’m not the only one who reads a sentence or paragraph in a book, online or in a newspaper (remember them?) but doesn’t quite ‘get it’ – what’s this dude trying to say, it’s not clear?

So you read it again, possibly twice or even three times more until the penny drops. A comma inserted at one point will have slightly slowed you down in our reading and made the sentence very clear from the off

You might think me a boring old fart for writing all this and that I should long ago have been put out to pasture. Who knows? Nevertheless punctuation, as in commas and semi-colons – which perform more or less the same task as commas, but create a longer pause – help to clarify what we write. And depending upon what you are writing, clarity is the key to communication.

You might, of course, be writing something where ‘mood’ or ‘sentiment’ or ‘action’ are more important than ‘clarity’, and in that case where you stick your commas will not be as crucial. Up to you.

But one last point: I am one of those guys, though certainly not ‘of the right’ (which I do hope you have finally realised of you have read my blog before) who believes ‘rules’ are intended to assist us and socially keep discord, disruption, disagreement to a minimum and to promote harmony. They should be observed for those reasons, not as some believe because ‘they are the rules’.

To put it succinctly, rules began life as ‘descriptive’ are not necessarily ‘prescriptive’. Yes, they do evolved from the once state to the other but only by our consent. But I’ll leave it there as it is a topic which deserves more space and I am already way, way of track on what this blog post was intended to be

Which is . . .

If you get around to reading Shrimsley’s The Silly Season, you might assume it is largely too fantastical for words, a terrible exaggeration and should be taken with a pinch of salt. You would, though, be wrong. Sitting around on the subs desk gossiping and ’avenn a laff (Don’t you mean ‘having a laugh’? Please, less of this puerile pseudo-demotic posturing to gain readers – Ed) more than once we reflected that Joe Public would be aghast if they knew some of what really does go on in newspapers.

This might not be the best example but in my early days of working casual subbing shifts on the nationals, I was often on the features subs’ desk of the right-wing Daily Express and, for example, if subbing the letters’ page

Rogues gallery (from left): David English, Paul Dacre and Kelvin Mackenzie

delighted in coming up with the most rabid, ra-ra British Empire, cypto-fascist and all things white headlines I might get away with. And I was good at it.

I had and still have what can only be described as a love-hate relationship with newspapers: terminally appalled by their cynicism, hypocrisy, dishonesty, double-dealing, inconsistency and callousness – and please include the Guardian and New York Times as I don’t and never shall believe in saints – but am at the same time in love with, full of admiration for, delighted by, envious of and tickled pink by their utterly outrageous behaviour.

. . .

This post began life as a short catalogue of anecdotes about oddities I’ve come across, though not necessarily personally in my 28 years serving in the ranks of Her Majesty’s Press (and as Brenda was still alive after I retired I’ll stick with Her Majesty’s Press).

My first concerns David English who was one of those bods – and I was not – you hear about who had wanted to be ‘a newspaperman’ from a very young age. He started at 16 and made remarkable progress, 

In his mid-twenties he edited his first national paper, the Daily Sketch, and moved into the Daily Mail editor’s chair after the Mail merged with – as in took over and killed off – the Daily Sketch in 1971. He was still editor when I began working shifts on the Mail in 1990, but unlike his successor, English was not ‘hands-on’.

That successor, Paul Dacre, coincidentally exactly one year and one week older than me (and another Scorpio), was on the floor every evening, keeping an eye on pages as they went thorough the production and would certainly change headline he didn’t like it and often redesigned a page on the hoof (with a layout designer taking care of the details his changes). English? In the two years of his editorship I was shifting, I did not see him on the floor once and only say him about three times.

Another of English’s quirks, which might give an insight into his character, was that regularly pitted his senior editors against each other, giving both the same task to undertake and, crucially, making sure both new the other was in the game. This, English is reputed to have believed, kept them both on their toes. Well, perhaps it did, but it did not create a happy or pleasant working atmosphere.

My favourite David English story was told me by a Mail colleague and sadly – his decision – former friend Willie B, who for for many years held down to two full-time jobs, one on the Mail and the other on the Mail’s sister paper the Evening Standard.

One morning he turned up for work at the Mail’s office, then still in Carmelite Houe in Caremelit Street, two blocks south of Fleet Street, and found a long, long queue of readers at the Mail’s main entrance snaking down the street and round the corner. They – all of them! – had won a toaster as a top prize in the Mail’s most recent competition.

There has had obviously been a cock-up on a grand scale: instead of the usual ten or so winners, there were thousands through Britain, all of whom were know owed a ‘Mail toaster’ and were legally due to get one. But a crisis is always an opportunity and canny David English smelled an opportunity.

His paper was in need of several thousand toasters to hand out to winners and that same day (presumably through his staff and lawyers) he tracked down a factory in South Wales that made toasters, bought it – with his own money – then did a deal with the Daily Mail for his factory to supply the prizewinners each with toaster. So not only could the Mail honour its prizewinners, but English made a tidy sum for himself.

Here are two stories bout Paul Dacre, not yet a knight, but I don’t doubt sooner or later a peerage will come his way. English became ‘Sir David’ in 1982 and was due to take the ermine just three days before he died at an early age of a massive stroke.

Dacre lived and breathed: because I worked double shifts and turned up for work before 10am and was there until 10/11pm, I can vouch the Dacre turned up around 10.30am and did not leave until the first edition was ‘off-stone’. In the days of ‘hot metal’ it was literally ‘off the stone’ but now with new digital technology most people would better understand it as ‘off to the presses’.

The following two anecdotes have been verified by me by two execs (Roger W. and Jackie A.) who were present on each occasion:

In 1995, the Daily Mail’s Femail section carried a feature on one Ffyona Campbell who had apparently walked around the world between 1983 and 1995. As it later turned out she had cheated in some ways and hadn’t quite ‘walked around the world’ but that is here irrelevant.

The day after the Femail feature appeared, at the first morning conference, Dacre ruthlessly tore into the Femail editor and described the piece as the ‘worst piece of journalism [he] had ever read’. The Femail editor was baffled.

‘But why, Paul, why, I thought it was an excellent read!’

‘Well,’ says Dacre, ‘it commits one of the worst journalistic sins possible!’

‘What’s that, Paul?’ asked the very bemused Femail editor.

‘Well, in the stand-first [a brief par or two introducing a feature] it says that Campbell “went around the world on Shanks pony”. Yet you read on and there is not a single further mention of that fucking horse!’

The jaw of every exec in Dacre’s office hit the floor.

‘But Shanks’ pony, Paul!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s an expression that means to ‘walk, go by foot.’

‘Well,’ says Dacre, thereby drawing a line under the matter, ‘I’ve never heard it, ever!’

Another Dacre story which still makes me laugh is at another conference, this time only involving two or three Femail execs. Dacre had come across a reference in a Femail piece of a ‘toilet duck’:

‘What’s this, a toilet duck?’ he demanded.

‘Well, a toilet duck, Paul,’ Jackie A. told him.

‘What do you mean! What’s a toilet duck!’

‘Well, you know, a toilet duck.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, no one keeps a duck in their toilet!’

No, indeed they don’t, but many use a toilet duck.

The fact was that for man who edited in time the world’s most successful ‘middle-brow’ mid-market aspirational national newspaper, and seemed instinctively to know what his readers felt and believed, Dacre never met any of them.

Commuting during the week from his Knightsbridge mews home, chauffeur driven to Northcliffe House in Kensington, always entering and exiting using the Young Street back entrance, spending all dayon the third floow though now doubt taking the lift to the sixth floor where ‘Jonathan’ Lord Rothermere worked and where the board met, then being driven back to Knightsbridge at about 9pm, there was really no chance to meet them.

And if he did, Dacre, a tall and quite shy man (I who I like and liked though he would not known me from Adam) would not have a clue what to say to them. I am a million miles away from the politics and values of the Daily Mail, but I enjoyed every minute of my 28 years working there (except now and again when I was waiting for another bollocking from the chief sub) and can honestly say it was then the most professionally produced and – in industry terms – the best national newspaper in Britain, if not the world or, at least, sharing that distinction with the Sun. Care to disagree? Well, fuck off!

This is getting too long and I’ve decided not to split it in two, so just two last anecdotes, this time concerning one Kelvin Calder MacKenzie (I looked up the middle name), another legend in his own lunchtime and in his way something of a tabloid genius.

I did not work on the Sun half as much as the Mail and only in my first six years in ‘Fleet Street’ (so to speak – but then there were no nationals at all on Fleet Street). But I did work on the feature subs desk and later on the news subs’ Irish edition.

Mackenzie, like his fictional counterpart Jack Strap in The Silly Season, was another very, very hand-on editor. One day he happened to be want to talk to the Sun news desk but the guy he wanted to speak to was on the phone to someone. Kelvin took that phone out of his hand, found himself listening to a whingeing reader for a few minutes, then to cut the call short told the reader:

‘Right, you’re banned from reading the Sun!’ and hung up.

Ten minutes later a news editor knocked on his door and informed him a woman had called in saying her husband had just been banned from reading the Sun, and she wanted to know whether that meant she was also banned as she liked doing the bingo.

Then there’s the time Kelvin was off-for a day or two or a week or whatever and the paper was being edited by his deputies. He came back to find the Sun had launched a campaign agains some high-up City bigwig.

‘Why are we doing this, what’s he done,’ he asked.

‘He’s a cunt, Kelvin!’ he was told.

‘Right,’ says Kelvin, ‘let’s get him!’

An older ‘new technology’ more than 170 years ago got the newspaper industry as was, Britain’s trades union and the press barons up and running. Then, of course, even newer technology fucked up – oh, well

As I did earlier in a previous review, I’ve decided to extract part of the original review of Linda Melvern's The End Of The Street (review here) and publish it as a standalone post. I realised it made the review unwieldy and that left as one, both were not done justice. So here is that extract, rewritten and expanded a tad

To get a good take on ‘Wapping’ and Murdoch’s extraordinary achievement transferring production of his papers – the Sun, the News of the World, The Times and the Sunday Times to his new print plant in East London, some background and context is useful, and that is where Leapman and his book Treacherous Estate is useful, even though in 2026 it is in many ways irrelevant to the current state of the British newspaper industry.

The invention and adoption in the mid-to-late 19th century of the rotary press and the even more significant invention in Baltimore in America of the Linotype machine by a German immigrant, the former clockmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler, sparked an explosion of the popular press in the world.

Both markedly speeded up the process of typesetting and printing, and thus also helped to bring down production costs.

In the mid-19th century, for ten years The Times held the exclusive patent for the rotary press before other newspapers could get in on the act, and it was able to print and distribute tens of thousands of copies overnight where the other papers were restricted to 10,000 or fewer.

This monstrosity (above) and the rotary press which replaced the flat-bed press got the world’s newspaper industry heading for fabulous riches. Until it was invented, type for printing was laboriously set by hand – letter by sodding letter. This linotype – ‘line of type’ – machine speeded up the process remarkably. The typesetter sat at the keyboard – rather close to a vat of molten metal which would form the type – and could produced many lines of type in minutes

The extra income this brought in – and using the then ‘new technology’ of telegraphy – allowed The Times to work a large network of correspondents around the world, vastly improving its news coverage over its rivals and building the – eventually quite spurious – reputation of ‘the best paper in the world’ as ‘The Thunderer’.

From the last decade of the 19th century, however, until Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 The Times did not turn a profit. Even Alfred Harmsworth, who became Lord Northcliffe and had successfully turned around several failing newspapers and bought The Times in 1908 couldn’t turn it around and sold it again in 1922.

In Britain, the early 20th century was very much a golden age for the press, both newspapers and magazines. Before the start of World War II several newspapers, which all worked out of London’s Fleet Street or nearby, were selling well into the millions. Certainly figures of several million copies sold each morning were often achieved with very expensive circulation drives which saw readers bribed with household gifts and even a set of Encyclopaedia Britannia to subscribe. These efforts did push up circulation but cost the proprietors dearly.

Pertinently, the early 20th century was also a time the then ‘the working class’ and especially the growing trades union movement found their voice and developed real muscle. Possibly, the First World War which ended in ‘victory’ but was otherwise a disaster all-round helped ‘the great unwashed’ find their confidence to speak out. The General Strike in 1926 might well have seemed like a defeat but it succeeded in showing the unions and their members where their strength lay.

Certainly, in the years after World War II as heavy industry in Britain began its slow slide to irrelevance as did ‘the British Empire’, the unions and their members made themselves heard: the old world of forelock-tugging ‘deference’ and ‘I know my place’ was coming to an end and more and more strikes began to plague British industry.

Especially odd were fallings out between unions themselves in ‘demarcation’ disputes over which member of which union should or should not be doing this and that, while piggy in the middle – and losing money – were management who in that particular dust-up were powerless and simply left holding their dicks.

This was also true of the Fleet Street unions producing Britain’s newspapers, though one difference was that management were, by necessity, pushovers. Given that a day’s paper lost because of industrial action meant a lot of money lost, management were always desperate to get the paper out and invariably caved in and bought off the unions with pay rises and a shorter working week.

For example (quoted by Melvern in her book), by 1981 Linotype operators in the Daily Express union chapel were raking in £1,100 (£3,973 in 2024) for a 16-hour week. Admittedly this was a little more than other chapels were being paid, so chapels were inclined to keep such matters to themselves. There was also little love lost between print union members in London and those in the same union in the ‘provinces’ who were certainly not in the clover.

The decline in British heavy industry also saw a slow decline in Fleet Street’s finest and within 20 years after the end of World War II several national papers which had thrived in the decades after the First World War had been obliged to shut up shop.

The broadsheet News Chronicle, whose politics were broadly Liberal, still had a healthy circulation of around one million in October 1960, but in that year it was taken over by its fellow broadsheet, the unashamedly right-wing Daily Mail.

From 1956 on it had been losing many readers after it condemned and opposed Britain’s military action in Egypt after President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956.

The right-wing Daily Sketch was also a victim of falling circulation. It, too, was selling more than a million copies in 1952 when, then known as the Daily Graphic, it was bought by the Daily Mail which revived the paper’s original name the Daily Sketch. But readers were also deserting it, and in 1974 the paper was merged into the Daily Mail (with the Sketch’s editor David English taking over at the Mail).

Then there was the Daily Herald, one of the very few British national newspapers which took a left-of-centre line and another victim of declining circulation. In 1933 it was selling a daily two million copies a day, but by 1964 when was taken over the Daily Mirror, the only other left-wing British national – the Daily Worker, later the Morning Star was a communist mouthpiece read only by the comrades and doesn’t really as a commercial paper – circulation was in steady decline.

At the Daily Mirror, Welshman Hugh Cudlipp who had joined the paper in 1935 and is regarded as the brain’s behind the paper’s post-war success, re-launched the Herald as the Sun. Cudlipp, by then chairman of the

International Publishing Corporation (IPC) which owned the Daily Mirror, hoped to prevent the Herald/Sun from snaffling readers from the Daily Mirror by marketing that early Sun as a respectable, intelligent middle-of-the-road broadsheet, in contrast to the Mirror which revelled in a kind of gor-blimey irreverence, typified perhaps by its cartoon character Andy Capp (left).

The paper never sparked to life, however, limping on until 1969 by when it was losing £2m a year (£55m in 2026) and when Cudlipp pulled the plug. He sold it to Rupert Murdoch over Robert Maxwell (who eventually owned the Daily Mirror/The Mirror) as Murdoch had promised he would make fewer production staff redundant as Cudlipp wanted no trouble with the print unions.

By the mid-1970s Britain’s national newspaper industry had stabilised and was to remain stable for another twenty years before, another 20 years on, the internet began to evolve and piss on its parade: now in 2026 it would not be too dramatic to claim that Britain’s newspaper hard copy industry has died.

Compare the figures for the end of the 1970s with today’s circulation figures and you would both cry and laugh your socks off: the Daily Mirror was selling 3.2 million by the end of the 1970s: now it’s a pitiful 205,332. Murdoch’s Sun, a right-wing tabloid – with bare breasts on Page Three – had overtaken the Mirror by a cool half a million copies in the mid-1970s, but today it even refuses to reveal how many it sells – and that will not be out of modesty.

The Daily Express and it’s arch-rival the Daily Mail – Evelyn Waugh’s Daily Beast and Daily Brute, though I don’t know which was which – saw sales of just under 2 million a day collapse to around 128,551 (!) and 687,063 respectively. Even my subbing ‘alma mater’, Brum’s Evening Mail, one of about seven or eight large provincial evening papers in Britain was shifting 335,281 copies in 1976. Today? A fucking awful 8,628!

To cut those papers a little slack, though the courtesy cannot be extended to all of them, the internet has proved useful for some. The Daily Mail, the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph all have a very readable online presence and will be making money from subscriptions. On the other hand the online efforts of the Express, the Sun and the Mirror, on the other hand are a joke.

. . .

How's it going with gas prices, Donny? Oh, and inflation? Any good news? Then there’s the war in Iran? Working out OK, troops home by Christmas? Looks like you’re still making America great again, though so far only China is cheering you on – can’t trust those commie bastards!

Goodness, look here! The gas prices in the US are up $1.32 on average since Donny’s ‘limited military adventure’ (© V. Putin, left) began at the end of February. Well! Who would have thought it! That’s a 44% rise, though not

50%, mark you, so the news is not all bad.

The excellent news for the White House is that it can take a short breath of relief in between explaining why although Donny apparently ‘aced’ the four ‘cognitive’ tests he has taken since January 20, 2025 – that’s 16 months ago – his doctors thought it necessary that he should be tested – FOUR times.

I was born on November 21, 1949, so I’m exactly three years, five months and seven days younger than Americas’ smart, savvy, wise, thoughtful, youthful and statesmanlike [delete as applicable] president, but on the question of cognitive tests, no one has so far thought it wise that I should take one (except, perhaps, my wife, but she has what is politely called ‘an agenda’).

These two illustrations (one above this text, the second below) outlining the startling – and for Donny embarrassing – sharp rise in gas prices were added to my previous post just now to flesh out a point I was making.

But I am posting them here separately as the 13 bods who have so far viewed that previous post since it was posted at about 5pm yesterday and 2am (British Summer Time) might miss it as they are unlikely to reflect ‘Do you know, that post I read earlier was so well written, so incisive, so wise that I think I’ll read it again!’

As for that cognitive test, one it isn’t just the White House that can breath a sigh of relief: all good Americans can console themselves that when their president is shown a picture of a horse, he can name it, when he is asked that the date is, he is spot on and when asked his name, he scores over 50%. Something to be proud of, at least, and than the Good Lord for small mercies.

(BTW The capital G and L are this confirmed atheist’s attempt to be polite, considerate, respectful, understanding and all the rest of the tiresome bullshit now demanded of those of a liberal-leaning:

You really do believe that frogs are uniting to organise the Second Coming for Jesus and hiring the Red Hot Chili Peppers for the occasion? Well, I am obliged to inform you that I disagree and think that is more than unlikely and doubt I shall change my mind but I certainly respect your right to hold unorthodox views though I must decline your kind invitation to debate the matter with you.

NB For an insight into how far ‘Middle America’ is falling into debt by living off their credit cards, take a look gat this in the Wall Street Journal.

The fairies at the bottom of the garden assure us that the stock market is soaring and all is well! Good news, eh? Back in the real world . . .

Here you go, from the respectable Wall Street Journal no less, so it must be true! Shame that it is more bullshit than anything you might might want to tell your dear old gran (though she’s seen a dick or two, don't kid yourself).

This is why the media all-too-often are not just not doing the job they piously proclaim they are doing, but are adding to the ever-growing stock of bullshit in the world. Mind, like God’s love, that stock is infinite, so no need to worry if you are worrying.

And speaking of bullshit, Donny has assured all those still willing to listen – not many now – that ‘an Iran deal is imminent’ and, presumably, will be announced at the same time he will reveal his new ‘health plan’.

‘Powering stocks’ (as in ‘powering the stock market’) gives many that warm ‘well, it’s not all bad then, is it?’ glow. This is followed by the – note, carefully worded – observation that the S&P500 is shooting ahead which ‘often means more good times ahead’.

The ‘more’ is dishonest: America is not in enjoying ‘good times’ and the outlook it looking ever bleaker: inflation is creeping up, groceries – especially fruit and vegetables largely imported from Mexico – are now almost 25% higher on average, energy prices have risen – gas up almost 35%, mortgages becoming dearer, no new jobs being created.

Crucially more Americans are using their credit card to pay for their weekly shopping and US consumer credit defaults are now as high as they were by the end of 2008. Remember 2008? Not a good year.

But the headline is worse: ‘The AI drive hits overdrive’ might also warm the cockles of many a cretin. 

But then the prices for tulips also ‘hit overdrive’ in The Netherlands in the 1630s, as did the South Sea Company stock price in the 1720s, the price of property in Japan in the 1980s and the stock price of innumerable Dot Com start-ups in the late 1990s.

Oh, and in the US in the mid-2000s buying up property to sell again soon was very attractive, especially as you and your goldfish could get a 100% mortgage just by asking, as prices just kept going up and up and up. That, if you recall, ended badly in 2008.

Similarly, buying and holding AI stock is very attractive because the price is continually rising – ‘hitting overdrive’. Traditionally, companies are seen as attractive, as in ‘profitable’, because they are earning money and passing much or some of it on to stockholders. To date, AI companies are not earning a sou, not a dime, penny, cent, fen or centavo – it’s all what they are expected to rake in.

Bollocks, say the cretins, we can wait! So they keep buying, pushing the price higher and so other cretins, worried they might lose out – so make that ‘other greedy cretins’ – also pile in and up goes the price even more.

‘You, matey,’ the cretins say (addressing me), ‘really don’t know what you are talking about! Just look at the stock market valuations of AI and tech companies! Look at them!’

Yes, dear hearts, look at them and try to understand what they are: NOT what you seem to think. A quoted companies ‘valuation’ is not the same as its ‘value’. It is simply the price of the company’s stock multiplied by the amount of the company’s stock. That’s it.

If 100 shares of ‘FillYourBoots.com’ are launched at 1p each, the stock valuation is £1. If a week later the price of each share shoots up to £10, FillYourBoots.com is now worth £10,000. Impressive, eh?

What assets does FillYourBoots.com have and how much has FillYourBoots.com earned in that week? Well, it has no assets at all and has earned nothing but don't quibble, don't be such a naysayer, don’t keep looking on the downside! Chill! Good times are on the way!

Thus I, the CEO, COO and CFF of FillYourBoots.com have managed to convince suckers that ‘good times are on the way’.

Word gets out that FillYourBoots.com looks like a winner – the proof: stocks have shot up in price tenfold! Imagine! Must be a good thing! Get in there!

So over the next week the price shoots up higher, and though some canny investors think they smell a rat sell up and cash in and walk off with a profit, less canny investors pile in further. And as there are more potential buyers than sellers, the price rises even further. Soon, with the price hitting £100 for each share, the valuation – though, note, not value – has hit £100,000.

I needn’t go on an labour the point as you grasped that point minutes ago and those who did not and will not have already left for a less challenging pastime. Anyway, isn’t the WSJ from which this headline comes talking about the S&P500 not just AI stocks? Well, yes it seems to but . . .

Overall, around ten AI and tech companies are grouped together as those whose stock is ‘hitting overdrive’ and two or three, e.g. Microsoft and Apple, do make a profit. But pertinently the AI companies do not.

The financial news they do release is misleading: certainly, the AI and tech companies have turnover and buy and sell, but simple analysis had shown that almost exclusively they trade with one another. Thus no ‘new’ money his being made – it is the same millions doing the rounds which looks impressive on a their balance sheet but de facto means fuck-all.

What is far worse and far more misleading is when, as here, the Wall Street Journal trumpets a soaring stock market, it is almost wholly the trading in the AI stocks which thriging: by ‘valuation’ these ten or so companies make up almost 40% and so their success makes the overall S&P500 look good.

Strip out the ‘gains’ – make that the spurious gains – made by the AI stock trading, and the rest of the S&P500 is barely limping along. It is what has been described as the ‘irrational exuberance’ of those soaking up AI stock bumping their prices ever higher which is skewing the picture.

The description ‘irrational exuberance’ was coined almost 30 years ago by former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan for the behaviour of those piling into any dot-com stock going and we know how that ended.

This is where the ‘P/E’ ratio is useful and gives broad-brush view of just how well a company is performing and whether it might be worth investing in. To establish it you just divide the price of a share by how much that share is earning. The rule of thumb is that the higher the P/E as in each share is earning pretty much fuck-all as are the AI companies, the more such a share should be avoided.

Certainly, there are wise-acres who insist – as always – that ‘this time it is different’. And to sound even more convincing the don’t put it in language most cretins are suckers for: this, they assure us, is a ‘paradigm shift’. More letters, certainly, but adds up to the same old bollocks: This Time It Is Different!

Well, it is your money, pal. Me, I’ll stick to backing the gee-gees – Kev down the pub passed on a dead cert which will start at 33/1 and make me a tidy sum. OK, he’s been wrong these past six or seven times but a broken clock is right at least twice a day.

Overall, the WSJ should know better and probably do, but with newspapers to sell who’s going to be that picky? It reminds me of advice all young reporters starting out are eventually given here in Old Blighty, but no doubt in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa (thought the yanks are perhaps a little too precious to abide by it).

Don’t let a couple of facts get in the way of a good story

It might not win you too many prizes for ethics and professional standards, but it sure does sell rather more copies of the rag you are working for (in the generic sense of ‘rag’ in that the winners have left ink and newsprint behind and are now all binary or digital or whatever the sodding word is. That’s it, ‘online’.