Boycott - a softy?

GOOD to hear Jon Snow on Radio 4 telling us how vital it is for a television journalist to be absolutely impartial. That's Jon ("**** the Tories!") Snow, as they call him at Glastonbury.

MORE to the point, Snow was banging on about his shock at realising he was part of an out-of-touch media elite. He and his Westminster-bubble cronies in TV and Fleet Street were taken by surprise at the hostility they met at Grenfell Tower. They also failed utterly to contemplate the nation might actually vote to leave the EU. Speaking at the Edinburgh Festival, Snow declared: "Where are the once strong local papers that used to exist and served to inform national journalists? Gone!” Actually, Mr Snow, they are not all gone.

THERE are plenty of local newspapers out here in the provinces. And if Snow and his elite chums had spent only a few minutes looking at the online polls run by some local newspapers before last year's referendum, they might have realised what was happening. One such poll, admittedly in the very early days of the campaign when few votes had been logged, was forecasting a massive Brexit victory of between 87 and 92 per cent. The best way to know which way the wind is blowing is to get out of the bubble and feel the breeze.

GEOFF Boycott, a 76-year-old Yorkshireman, will keep his cricket commentating job despite his ill-judged comment that the only way for him to get a knighthood would be to "black me face." Some accused him of racism for his remark but we should not ignore Boycott's own ethnicity. As 76-year-old Yorkshiremen go, he is a soft old woolly liberal.

IT is all very well serving injunctions on 18 gang members in the West Midlands, banning them from going to various neighbourhoods or meeting each other. But after the mug-shots have been published and the headlines grabbed, who's going to enforce these injunctions? MI5 reckons it can take 20 agents to keep track of a single suspect. Keeping even half an eye on 18 suspects would keep hundreds of cops busy.

TRAVELLERS' tales. A reader just back from Sorrento tells me of a warning sign in the room: "Do not bring food into the room, as ants may arrive".

MY favourite foreign-hotel notice remains: "If you think the staff are rude you should see the manager."

THE ongoing debate about restaurants serving food on boards, slates, slippers and even shovels continues with a Daily Telegraph reader who says when he is offered food on a slate, "we tell the waiting staff that we put slates on our roof but we do not eat from them." How rib-ticklingly hilarious. Waiters, slogging along on minimum wage, simply adore being spoken to like that. They sometimes show their appreciation with a little extra in your meal. Tell me, Mr Slate-Joker, does the term "sneeze muffin" mean anything to you?

THE Met Office is celebrating 150 years of weather forecasting (if wet, in the village hall).