Poor Tories. All they wanted was a housing tsar; someone to brighten the place up a bit, bring beauty back to public spaces. OK, so Roger Scruton (pictured) had some peculiar notions. He was on record with the view that “many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire”. Was this antisemitic conspiracy gloop, even before he high-tailed it to the metaphorical golf club with Nigel Farage? Scruton was also persistently anti-Muslim, but still, housing tsar, right? All the government wanted were some pretty buildings to make England look like England again, and if that came with a side order of fulminating bigotry, so be it. Except that was not all: Scruton was also found to bemoan the “orthodox liberal view … that homosexuality is innate and guiltless”. “It’s not normal,” he once supplied to the public record, via the Sunday Telegraph, in plainer language still.

This is the recurring melody of the government’s mood music: every time they chuck a job at one of their mates, the most casual scrawl through their Twitter feed reveals that a lack of any meaningful qualification or transparent application process for the role is the very least of their problems. Toby Young, it turns out, doesn’t just want to educate the masses; he also wants to leer at the breasts of famous people and control the procreation of those of low IQ, although, luckily for his bloodline, only those on a low income. Ben Goldsmith, meanwhile, thinks that the reason he can’t get a seat on the tube is that there are too many immigrants, and suddenly the sheer shadiness of his non-executive post at Defra, given he is a from a family who have donated £1m to the Conservatives, pales into insignificance beside the eerie spectre of tube seats for the British-born. Doctor Who just covered Rosa Parks: your average six-year-old knows that turning public transport into a race war is not a good idea.

Bad luck? Or is this the inevitable end of cronyism, since part of the point of a proper and impartial appointment policy is to weed out the bigots before they’re in post? Yet still, if I woke up prime minister, and gave jobs to all my friends, I’m pretty confident that their Twitter woodwork would not be crawling with murky, alt-right propaganda memes worthy of the 1930s. Sure, you might find one who had some salty views about the M&S jumpsuit everyone’s wearing; some of them don’t like dogs, which is a surefire way to alienate the voting public. Definitely, positively, I wouldn’t give a culture brief to the one who wants to eradicate mime and all history of it, and I had an uncle with very strong prejudices against the Spanish based – obscurely – on Michael Portillo, but that was many years ago. I have a friend who dislikes the Yorkshire countryside, and one who reacts more strongly to Piers Morgan than could ever be considered reasonable, but I don’t have any eugenicists in this portfolio, or people who want to reattach guilt to homosexuality.

It’s almost as if this isn’t a coincidence: one might just about conclude that the kind of people who think it is OK to give jobs to their friends are the kind of people with shady friends.

When I overhear meetings on trains, I just want to butt in

The train between London and Leeds in the middle of the day is a prime venue for meetings. Most of them are phone meetings: on a recent trip north, I was sat with two guys saying “Sorry, tunnel” into their headsets, and I found it quite easy not to intervene, and just sat there smirking on the inside.

On the way home, though, two young women opposite were having a real-life get-together, starting – in that bonding way women do – with a disposition on how nice absent Person A was. She’s really nice. Everyone loves her. “She probably isn’t that nice,” I wanted to add. “People who everyone loves are always playing some devilish game.” She’s also really gorgeous, totally beautiful, both parties present wished they looked like her. At this point I had to leave and check out the buffet car, otherwise I would have said: “Don’t wish that! You both look great. If I took a picture of you right now on a train, you would look back in 20 years and say: ‘I can’t believe how great I looked.’”

When I got back with some BBQ Beef Hoola Hoops, one was saying to the other: “There are three numbers here: 230, 285 and 310. Shall we just take one of them out?” I still had no idea of the nature of their business. One mentioned Tesco and the other mentioned skincare wipes, but they could have been describing their main competitor, or their plan once they reached King’s Cross. Nevertheless, plainly, someone had to say: “There’s quite a lot of difference between those numbers, don’t just take one out, maybe figure out why there are three of them.” And since I was closest, it really should have been me. I filled my face with Hoops. It was the only way not to talk. My desire to manage people, despite never having been in charge of anything, is a mysterious and powerful thing.

Coffee is no longer a drink – it’s a liquid meal

They call it a Millionaire’s Latte, because it’s £1.99, and it comes with squirty chocolate cream in a cup with a reindeer on it, and fair play, McDonald’s, you have correctly identified the stuff rich people like: liquid food; chewing is for losers. Coffee shops are operating, universally, on the principle that the market is full of pent-up demand to find extra food hidden in coffee. Shortcake, mince pies, pumpkins, cinnamon rolls – it doesn’t actually matter what, so long as you weren’t expecting it. The festive season then frees the beast, and supply sprays forth to meet this thwarted appetite.