In America, this column would be required to run with a disclosure that noted that the author’s wife has just been appointed as official spokesperson for the Prime Minister. Here? Ah, who cares, right?!

The baked in corruption in the British media is maddening. It’s just accepted. We have a major broadsheet columnist who STILL hasn’t acknowledged that her influence got her partner a lighter sentence for possessing child sex abuse images. And most of the media is silent.

The media class — by which I mean a specific set of well-to-do people in London who went to the same schools and universities, fuck the same people, and go to the same dinner parties as politicians — is rotten to the core.

It has been made abundantly clear to me that I will “never work in this town again” for the blunt criticisms I have made of the newspapers, their columnists and owners. I also have received a deluge of abusive emails, several of which came from Telegraph IP addresses

In many countries where the government is corrupt, there is still a corpus of committed journalists who wish to tell the truth. That is the case in Britain. BUT the editors are bought and paid for and there are few columnists who can or will break from the consensus.

In the local press, the @yorkshirepost and @EDP24 being good examples, there are still publications putting politicians under pressure. But on a national level our political media is zombie-like and addicted to the sweet drug of access.

We have to build independent media but the difficult side of that is that you have to do it from a grassroots level. I run my newsletter purely by asking people who like it to subscribe and fund the newspaper reviews on Twitter and Twitch through contributions. That’s hard.