Monday

The culture and media secretary, Jeremy Wright, used his keynote speech to the Society of Editors to tell everyone that he never bothers to read the newspapers. Pressed to name a single woman columnist, Wright became defensive and said he wasn’t going to indulge in “a pub quiz”. Second question, name the capital of France. As his department also covers digital and sport, no doubt we can soon expect him to admit he doesn’t watch TV, read books, use the internet or go to theatre, concerts or sporting events. Then Theresa May does have form for appointing people with no obvious credentials to big jobs. Chris Grayling’s lack of aptitude for anything hasn’t stopped him becoming transport secretary and Karen Bradley was made Northern Ireland secretary despite being clueless that the province was divided along sectarian lines. Also this week, we had the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab – a man who apparently prides himself on his intellect – saying he hadn’t appreciated “the peculiar geographic economic entity that is the United Kingdom”. By which he meant he hadn’t realised the UK was an island. Then we have the strange case of the philosopher Roger Scruton. No one is quite sure whether it’s his work on aesthetics and Kant or his homophobia and Islamophobia that qualify him for the job of housing tsar.

Tuesday

YouGov has published a list of popularity ratings for politicians – based largely on the level of public recognition. Top of the list come Boris Johnson and Theresa May with 32% and Jeremy Corbyn with 30%. Curiously the second most highly ranked Labour politician is Ed Balls, despite the fact he hasn’t been an MP for more than three years. Then again, if most of the shadow cabinet can’t recognise one another then why should the public? The ratings also provide some interesting guilt by association. If you recognise Boris, then you’re also likely to recognise Piers Morgan. Bizarrely, for Theresa May the associations you get are Accrington Stanley FC, Chris de Burgh and the Daily Express. Inevitably, there’s as much fun to be had at the other end of the ratings with Tory Mark Field coming in last in 228th place with a rating of just 2%. To which many would say: “That high?” Sadly, YouGov is not able to provide any further fan data on Field as no one cares enough about him to have volunteered any extra information. There’s also bad news for Donald Trump. On the list of foreign politicians he is only in seventh place, lagging behind Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Imran Khan. Call that the category of the world as we would like it to be.

Wednesday

Trump’s White House press conference following the midterm elections was an object lesson in an unmedicated narcissistic breakdown. For someone who professed himself to be so delighted at the total success of getting a dead brothel owner elected to the Nevada state legislature while losing a Republican majority in House of Representatives, the president spent much of the two hour Q&A in a state of unconstrained fury. First he had yet another run-in with CNN’s Jim Acosta, which culminated in the reporter being banned from the White House, then he declared war on any opponents who might try to investigate him, before rounding on a black journalist for asking what he called a “racist question”. It was gripping, if disturbing, political theatre. Still, whatever you might think of Trump’s disregard for truth, morality and decency, at least he puts himself in the spotlight where his flaws can be exposed. Theresa May often talks up her belief in the value of a free press but only ever gives press conferences when she absolutely has to – such as after EU summits – and would never dream of letting them last for two hours. She usually limits herself to four questions at absolute tops, and even then invariably manages to give the same non-answer to each of them.

Thursday

Identity politics has just become even more of a minefield. Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old Dutchman who describes himself as a motivational speaker, has begun a legal battle to have himself reassigned as a 49-year-old. He argues that he feels 20 years younger than he is and that he is being unfairly swiped left on dating apps by people who don’t realise quite how much love he has to give. Or to put it another way, he is upset at only attracting partners of his own age when obviously in a less discriminatory world 30-something woman would be throwing themselves at his love machine of a body. It is almost certifiable: Ratelband is trying to wipe out the first 20 years of his life by insisting that 1969 was the year of his birth, when it’s actually the last 20 years of his life he’s unhappy with. He’d be better off trying to get the courts to declare that we are all actually still living in 1998. Most people I know would rather be declared 20 years older than they actually are. If I were to become 82 overnight, I could put in a backdated claim for 17 years of unpaid state pension, while still doing a job I enjoy, and stand a better chance of living to 100. Better still, people might actually say how young I look and mean it.

Friday

My insistence on a three-day diversion to visit first world war battlefields in Belgium and France, on one of the first holidays my wife and I went on before we got married, didn’t go down too well. It wasn’t exactly her idea of fun. Nor mine particularly. More a sense of a connection I needed to make, and on the centenary of the Armistice on Sunday my thoughts are sure to return – as they do every Remembrance Day – to the rows of identical gravestones in the immaculately maintained cemeteries. How and what we choose to remember is a puzzle. I’ve been reading the newly published Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936-1977 and he observes that Tennyson’s generation used to commemorate those who died in the Napoleonic Wars. No one remembers them now. It’s as if there’s only so much observance of remembrance that anyone can take. Larkin finds himself puzzled that on an Armistice Day just after the second world war, his thoughts are still entirely focused on those who died in the 1914-18 conflict rather than on those – some of whom he must have personally known – who died much more recently. The BBC has also published a fascinating story on its website about how, in the early years after 1918, many veterans would – having observed the two-minute silence – go off to have wild parties in the evening to celebrate the fact they were still alive. The largest and the most glamorous ones took place at the Albert Hall. It was only in the mid-1920s that the orthodoxy for solemnity became established and the parties came to an end. A shame perhaps. Some of the most memorable and moving funerals I have been to have been those that ended in a party. There is no right way to remember. All that matters is that we do.

Digested week, digested: Breaking news: Britain is an island that is quite near to France



David Cameron: ‘It’s no good, I’m still bored shitless.’ Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images







