Tom McTague: You were born in 1978 in Bootle, Liverpool. I imagine in the hospital just around the corner?

Jamie Carragher: I’m not quite sure which hospital it was. By the time my mum was pregnant with me, she’d already had a couple of miscarriages, and the doctors knew there was something not quite right — but they couldn’t put their finger on it. I think they thought initially I would have spina bifida. My mum was very holy, and she didn’t want to terminate the pregnancy. She thought, if that’s what God wants, then that’s fine. When I was born, I had gastroschisis — and was rushed straight to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.

TM: And that’s where your stomach is essentially outside your body?

JC: Yeah, it’s not still like that! But I’ve still got the scar. And I still have a great relationship with that hospital. Everyone in the city is so proud of it.

TM: I hadn’t realised that your mum came from Maltese stock. That’s where her Catholicism comes from?

JC: My grandfather was from Malta. I’ve had the call in the past: could I play for Malta before England?

TM: There’s a whole mad history of Malta. They applied to join the UK officially and we were too tight: the Treasury turned them down. It kind of says something about Britain, I think. But I assumed when I started reading your autobiography, Carra (2008), that the name Carragher meant you had an Irish background. Can you tell us about that side of your family?

JC: That’s my dad’s side of the family. My nan grew up just on the border of Bootle and Kirkdale. My grandad, I think, came over from Ireland with his family — that’s where the Carragher name comes from. There were lots of brothers and sisters; families were huge then. And they were a close-knit community. Everyone’s nan and grandad lived a few streets away from their kids and grandkids. So everyone was just always in and out of each other’s house.

TM: Was it sectarian growing up in Liverpool at that time? Was there a divide between the Catholic kids and the Protestant kids? 

JC: The only divide was whether you went to Protestant or Catholic school. You just didn’t know anyone outside your school. And this area is really Catholic. Liverpool as a city is a real stronghold of Catholicism, and maybe that stems from people coming over from Ireland. It always felt like every school was Saint-something.

I remember, in my last year of primary school, one boy said he was going to a Protestant school for seniors called Hillside. The Catholic teachers were aghast — they couldn’t believe he was going from St James’s to Hillside. It was a big part of your life as a youngster: going to church, Holy Communion.

TM: What I find interesting about Liverpool politically is that it hasn’t become like Belfast or Glasgow, where you’ve got this clear sectarian divide. Even though in Liverpool you had all of the same ingredients: you’ve got Irish immigration, you’ve got Irish names and Irish schools and Catholic churches. And there was sectarianism in the past. My grandmother was brought up in the Scotland Road area, which was at the time an Irish slum and had an Irish nationalist MP, the only one ever elected in Britain. There were Orange Order marches and sectarian violence, too.

JC: I remember those marches as a kid.

TM: What did they feel like? 

JC: To be honest, we were only kids and there was a band playing. But I always remember my dad telling me that, when he was a kid, there was a bit of trouble around them. And for his dad — my grandad — it probably would have been a lot worse. But over time, that strong feeling has died out.

TM: Do you think football plays a big part in that? In Belfast and Glasgow, where there are more heightened tensions, you have Protestant and Catholic clubs. My understanding is that in Liverpool, Everton is kind of seen as the Catholic club, but it plays in blue. It’s like football has somehow acted as a kind of detoxifying agent.

JC: You chose the team who your dad supported; more often than not, it was not to do with religion. The one thing I do remember is when I first started watching Everton in the mid-Eighties, people all wore bobble hats. Some of these hats were half-and-half: the Everton one would be half Celtic, and the Liverpool one half Rangers. That’s the only inkling I have that Everton was seen as the Catholic club.

TM: Your autobiography busts a lot of myths. Early on, people were always saying that you grew up in poverty in Liverpool — but you didn’t, you grew up in a nice house in a nice area. You had a great childhood. You also talk about how people romanticise this city where Everton and Liverpool fans get on; where Everton fans went to Liverpool games even if they weren’t playing. You say all this is rubbish. You’re also quite cutting about what seems to be a new sectarianism emerging in Liverpool, with Everton and Liverpool fans getting quite brutal with each other. Is that still the case today?

JC: Yeah, I think it still feels nasty. We’ve always been seen as the friendly derby, but I’m not sure it was ever quite like that. The notion emerged in the Eighties, when the economic situation was really tough — with people struggling as much as they are today — and the one thing both sets of supporters in the city had to shout about was the two football teams. We, Everton and Liverpool, played each other so often in the mid-Eighties in cup finals — basically the whole of Liverpool descended on London. There was this common camaraderie of going down to Wembley on the coaches together. So I think that’s where this idea of friendship between Liverpool and Everton fans came from. There was this togetherness because everyone was in the same economic situation: football was an outlet.

As a child, I remember we went down to London on a coach right outside here. And this woman, Ann Kirby — she lives just over the road, the old woman organising bingo when you walked in — knitted all the kids jumpers with EFC on. This must have been 40 years ago now. We wore them all the time. And the women sent us all off, because no woman would have gone to the cup final. It was all the dads taking the kids. And there was only one Liverpool fan on the coach of 50 or 60. A very, very brave man.

I don’t think you’d see this kind of camaraderie today — and this saddens me, because as a city, we are different in a lot of ways. We feel like we have to fight — whether it’s against the Government, the establishment. And we can do that as a city, but there’s a real split: red and blue. I think this is good: you need a strong rivalry. But sometimes it goes a little too far. Maybe that’s because, with the invention of social media, football is just in your face 24/7. It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.

TM: It’s like football was previously something that could bring the city together in a way that didn’t happen in Belfast or Glasgow — but now, it’s wrenching it apart. 

JC: Well, it’s easy to feel better about your team if they’re doing ok — but Everton haven’t done well for a long time now. The club’s been mismanaged for a very long time and it is tough for the supporters. They deserve a lot more, a lot better. Football stirs the emotions in the city and that will never change — and I don’t think that particularly helps relationships. You’ve got one team doing really well, and another finding it tough.

TM: There’s this sense in the rest of the country that people from Liverpool have some kind of grievance, that they get too upset by everything. Simon Hughes, The Athletic journalist, traces Liverpool’s identity as a united Labour city back to the Eighties — when you were growing up. There’s opposition to Thatcher, militants taking over the city, stadium disasters, and the appalling response from the government. All that comes together to create this Liverpool identity. Could you feel this as a kid?

JC: I’ve always felt that Liverpool people have got something about them — a personality, a character trait. You very rarely see a shy one. People from outside the city say: “Oh, they always complain, they’re never happy with this or that.” But I think we look at it a different way: we stand up for ourselves, we don’t accept what the Government is saying about a certain thing — even now, 30 or so years after Hillsborough. I admire that the city doesn’t allow people to walk all over us, and maybe that gets other people’s backs up around other parts of the country. But I actually love that about this city. It’s got that real backbone and it’ll fight and it’ll take on people. You don’t want to take on people from Liverpool, I can assure you of that.

TM: I’ve noticed recently that people like you, with an Irish name, or Rooney, with a very Irish name: you’re proudly English. You want to play for England, you wear the England jersey with pride. And yet I sense that there’s a certain kind of anti-Englishness starting to bubble up. People are asking: are we English? Are we a bit different? 

JC: I don’t think it’s bubbling: I think it’s been there for a long time. I wouldn’t say that I’m anti-English — and of course, you wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to play for your country — but I would never choose my country over my city. It wouldn’t even be a question. That’s just obvious to me. What people in the Midlands, the North East, or down South would choose, I don’t know. But if I went abroad and someone asked me where I’m from, I wouldn’t say I was from England. I’d say I’m from Liverpool. I’m sure there are other places in the country that feel the same. There’s a real North-South divide in this country, no doubt about that.

TM: Do you think it’s more acute than it was in the Eighties?

JC: Well, I was a kid in the Eighties. It always felt like it was a fight against someone. I remember my parents talking about Thatcher at the house. I think it probably feels bigger now just because social media has a major part in magnifying things. In the past, your parents would be having those political conversations in the back kitchen, but now it’s so much bigger and stronger because everyone can give their view on social media.

TM: You grew up at a time when Liverpool was earning its reputation as a Labour city. This wasn’t always the case: when your grandfather’s family came over from Ireland, Liverpool was a Tory city. The Protestants would vote Tory and the Catholics would vote Labour or Irish nationalist. It wasn’t until the Eighties that the city embraced its anti-Tory identity. What are your earliest memories of politics? 

JC: It was very simple for me when I was growing up: the Tory Party was for the rich, while Labour looked after the working classes. Even today, people around here are just trying to make ends meet, making sure there’s food on the table. I don’t think they’re watching Question Time, and finding out the policies of both parties. They’re thinking, we’re going to get more help from Labour — and that’s what we need.

TM: It would be difficult for you, wouldn’t it, if you were a Tory?

JC: I’m not sure there could be anything worse than being a Tory. I think people around here would rather I played for Man United. I’m serious.

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TM: Do you think that’s the social pressure — or is it something you believe in?

JC: Well, I didn’t grow up in a place where anyone voted Conservative and could explain why they did. Growing up, Margaret Thatcher was a real bone of contention in the city. At that time, there were a lot of celebrities in Liverpool who had done well. They left Liverpool for London, and I think a lot of them backed the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher.

TM: I’m thinking of Ken Dodd, Cilla Black, Jimmy Tarbuck.

JC: There was always a lot of resentment towards them from people in Liverpool, and I think rightly so. People in Liverpool love to see their own do well, as anywhere does. But I think you’ve always got to remember where you’re from. I remember they were always called “professional Scousers” — they used it when they wanted, but didn’t fully embody what a Scouser was.

You have to try to help the people you grew up with — even if it means people in my position perhaps paying more tax to a Labour government, which might help a young mother trying to bring up two kids. I think people in my position should never forget where they came from. But there are certainly people who have played for Liverpool in the past — I’m not naming names — who have forgotten this.

TM: Are there secret Tory footballers out there?

JC: I think there’s a few of them!

TM: You say you’re not too involved in politics, but you backed Andy Burnham for the leadership. Obviously, Andy Burnham’s from the North West — he’s an Everton fan who came to Liverpool to talk about Hillsborough. I think that was a pivotal moment for him. Is that how you got to know him?

JC: I’m not sure when the initial connection came — I think it was actually before he gave that famous speech at Anfield on the memorial of Hillsborough, I think in 2009. We went for a meal afterwards — something at the town hall. And yeah, at the time, I’d have liked to see him get the leadership of the Labour Party.

But the reason I say I’m not fully into politics is that I’m a little bit wary of getting too involved in something that’s not my area of expertise.

TM: Gary Neville’s not shy…

JC: Well, he’s working with local MPs. He probably knows a bit more about what’s going on.

I’d like to lend my support on initiatives where you feel you help people. It’s not just about Labour and Tory. Sometimes you might need the Conservative government to get certain things passed, and I can use my voice, because of who I am, in pushing certain things through Parliament. We’ve certainly done that with the help of people on the other team. It’s about getting behind a cause rather than getting fully into bed with a political party. I obviously would never be shy in saying I would always vote Labour and I would love them to be in charge in the next general election. But I am a little bit wary of getting into something that I don’t know everything about.

TM: You don’t need to. The theory goes that the less you know about politics, the more informed your opinion is. You can just see it: you either know that the city is doing well or is doing badly. It seems that you think the city is currently in a worse state than it’s been for a while?

JC: We see how many food banks there are now around this area. How many people are on the streets? It does feel like it’s never been as bad — on the back of the Tory government and Covid. The kids not being in school. That’s not just a Liverpool thing, of course. And I think that’s why people become disenfranchised with the Government — [the Tories] have been in a long time, and we’re still seeing these problems in a lot of working-class cities.

TM: It does feel very different. If you go into Liverpool city centre, it feels wealthy, buzzing, like a proper European city. And then you come out here, and it definitely feels poorer. Do you think the problem with the Labour Party holding a conference in Liverpool is that you get busloads of people coming up — people like me — and they arrive in the city, they get a black cab down to the conference event, and they go, “Liverpool’s doing great!” and actually, it’s a bit of a façade? It’s the same with Manchester. We were out there last week and you get the tram out two or three stops, and it feels very different.

JC: I think you could probably say that about a lot of places. Obviously a lot of the money goes into the city centre. It’s not just for the people from the city; it’s for tourists. There’s so much work being done in Liverpool — and it’s fantastic. But I think there’s always been a feeling in Liverpool that there’s not just the North-South divide in the country, but in the city as well. So when you come north from the city centre, you’ve got Bootle, you’ve got Kirkdale, you’ve got Walton. There’s still obviously places that are finding it tough in the south end of Liverpool, but the areas I’ve just mentioned are always looking for help.

You think of the stadiums — what the football clubs do for those areas, the North end. What Anfield does for the area of Anfield is massive — Liverpool [FC] being there. And Everton does need to move stadium, and it’s going to be absolutely magnificent — almost in the city centre, just on the edge of the docks. But you worry about the impact that’s going to have on Walton. The pubs around there, the cafes before the game, all the supporters. It’s going to have a real impact.

TM: Liverpool has always had a council that’s been opposed to the Government, against the establishment. And now you’ve got the prospect of a Labour government coming in, and Keir Starmer being Prime Minister. But already I get the sense in Liverpool that Keir Starmer is not particularly well-liked. That he’s seen as having promised things — like, not to appear in The Sun — and then he’s gone back on it. He’s seen as too cynical. It sounds like a bit of a warning: don’t take Liverpool for granted, Labour.

JC: Liverpool will always be Labour. It’ll never be Tory; that’ll just never, ever happen. I think Labour probably know that. But I’m pleased the Labour conference is in Liverpool. I think it’s good for the city. I was at a Q&A with Wes Streeting a few nights ago and he was talking about a plan, for the next two or three years, that the Labour Conference comes to Liverpool — and I was pleased about that.

I understand where you’re coming from in terms of Keir Starmer. The situation is not so much to do with his policies as a Labour leader, I think a lot of it is to do with The Sun. And I get both sides of the argument. He should never have said “I won’t speak to The Sun” — and then do it. If you give your word to people in Liverpool and you don’t deliver, you’re always going to have a problem — whether or not it’s speaking to The Sun, which is obviously a big no-no in this city. From his point of view, as Labour leader, I can understand. You need the press on-side.

In terms of his policies, Liverpool is a Labour city and Left-wing. I understand the problem that any Labour leader would have, that being really Left-wing is not going to get you into power. There is that feeling with Keir Starmer, and probably was with Tony Blair as well, that they’re almost a Tory: not Left, centre-left. But then, what would you rather have: a centre-left or a Tory government? Because it’s been proven, certainly with Jeremy Corbyn, that being real Left-wingers there’s very little chance that you’re ever going to get into government. You become known as a protest party, really. And yeah, you can protest, you can fight, and you can be disappointed in Labour — that they’re not doing everything you feel they should be doing, or really Left-wing. But it’s still better than what the alternative is.

TM: Better to win?

JC: Better to win and have the chance to actually implement policies that will help people in these areas rather than being a protest party just fighting against the Tories.

Tom: Jamie Carragher, the Blairite! The centrist dad who says, “Be sensible”!

JC: Yeah, well, that’s the only time I can remember Labour being in! I know what happened with the Iraq War — that’s always going to be a stain against them. But I think he was a great leader, wasn’t he? He just had it, didn’t he? When you saw him in the despatch box. Labour winning three general elections in a row. That just doesn’t happen because, you know, Labour very rarely win. And they’re in a great position to win now. I’d still rather a Labour government be in, even if it’s not Left-wingers, which people in the city would like.

TM: You think the problem, then, with Starmer is not necessarily the policies — it’s the cynicism? To so obviously say one thing and then do the other? Because outside of Liverpool that’s the criticism as well, from the Left: he promised all this and he didn’t deliver it. 

JC: I mean, do you believe things politicians say? I just think it’s a lot of bollocks if I’m being totally honest with you. I take it with a pinch of salt whenever we’re promised something by a politician.

TM: How has Liverpool dealt with the Tory conference the other week — where they reversed on HS2 coming up to the North?

JC: I don’t think it’s something that anyone on the streets is talking about. I think it was always seen as something that was going to Manchester. So I don’t know how much we’ll be affected. But again, it just goes back to that North-South divide. When they’re saying they can’t afford to finish it — I’m just not having that at all. And I’m not daft. I know the costs have spiralled, and they always do on things like that. But they have to find a way.

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TM: There’s talk about the Northern Powerhouse, which is kind of connecting Liverpool, through Manchester, to Leeds and across to Newcastle. But there is this other idea, which is the Osborne idea, which is that you need to create a megacity in the North West, with Manchester at the centre, connected up to Liverpool and Leeds. But I sometimes think: I wonder if people in Liverpool would be okay with being thought of as a kind of suburb of Manchester?

JC: No, Liverpool won’t be playing second fiddle to anyone — certainly not Manchester!

TM: There’s kind of two divides. There’s the divide within the North: Liverpool versus the rest, with Manchester getting all the special favours. And then there’s the North-South divide generally. For your work, you probably have to go down to London all the time — to all these clubs in the South. But when you were growing up, the North would have been dominant in football. And now [in the South] you’ve got all the small teams — not to offend any supporters! — Brentford and Brighton and Bournemouth. Is that a reflection, you think, of the state of the economy generally?

JC: Teams in the Premier League have got money, no matter where you are in the country — even the teams at the bottom are getting £100 million, so they can all afford massive wages. So if you’re going to play for a Brighton or a Bournemouth now, and you’re a foreign player, you can earn massive money — and you’re also not far from London. Whatever I was saying about this North-South divide, I go to London quite a lot, and it’s one of the best cities in the world. I think it could even be number one. So I think that plays a part in players wanting to be closer to the South — maybe it’s easier to get back home, flight-wise.

You think of some of the clubs in the North I grew up going to. Sheffield Wednesday — what a giant football club. Bournemouth and Brighton aren’t bigger football clubs than Sheffield Wednesday in terms of support, the stadium, history. But the way the Premier League is going now, the influx of foreign players, means it’s a lot tougher for teams [in the North] to attract foreign players than the teams you’re mentioning down South that, for me, aren’t as big.

TM: The way you were talking about Liverpool challenging the status quo made me think about Brexit. Is there a sense in Liverpool that that’s a Tory project? Because, going back to the Eighties, Liverpool was a great port for the whole world — and then, with trade diverting to Europe, the main ports became Felixstowe and Dover, down in the South. But I don’t get the sense that there’s anti-European sentiment here?

JC: The way people feel in this city [about Brexit] is the way my mum and dad feel about the Tory government of the Eighties. Brexit is the one thing that really winds me up. It’s a disaster. And this city was probably one of the strongest in voting to stay in Europe because we realise what Europe is doing for the city — not governments, especially not Tory governments.

TM: Because outside of Liverpool, being anti-establishment is voting against the EU. The argument goes: we’re poor, or poorer than we were, and that has coincided with being in the EU. And you could say the same about Liverpool: we used to have a port that went to the rest of the world and then we joined Europe and all that trade went South, because the South is closest, and so the EU hasn’t been good for us. It’s strange that that wasn’t more of a reaction in Liverpool.

JC: No, no. EU money changed the face of Liverpool. The Albert Dock was just rotting away in the Eighties, and look at it now. We’re really proud of it in the city. You think of the cruise ships going into Southampton — we’ve got the cruise terminal here, we’re getting a lot of that business ourselves now, tourists coming in. So no, I’ve never felt what you mentioned. The local press were fully behind staying in. And I think people in Liverpool just got it. It just wasn’t good to leave the EU. No sensible person or politician can ever make an argument for Leave. I just never heard one.

TM: Speaking of punching out at the establishment, do you sense that online conspiracy theories — about Covid, about World Government — are taking root in Liverpool at all? Wasn’t Rickie Lambert running something in Liverpool the other day? 

JC: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories in terms of Covid. I mean, Rickie Lambert went to something, but I don’t think there were that many people there. And I think when there’s actually been people coming here to protest in big numbers about things, against something that we believe in the city, they were pushed back. I don’t think there’s a big thing in Liverpool about conspiracy. I would call it more distrust — about a government or people in the higher echelons. And I think often it’s proved right.

Look at what was going on in Covid in No. 10. The way they were all carrying on. MPs expenses going back, what, 10, 15 years? These are our leaders, these are the ones we’re supposed to look up to, they are shaping the country. And then maybe people in Liverpool are getting criticised because they’ve got no jobs or they’re on benefits, or they’re trying to fudge the system in some way. And you’ve got the people at the very top doing exactly the same. I think there’s something sort of built into us in this city, that you never take things too much at face value in terms of people in the prime position. And to be honest, it’s been proved right.

But as well as identifying several genuine perpetrators, the Yewtree overreached. In 2014, the police raided Cliff Richard’s home and the BBC was on hand to film it; no charges were brought and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing on Richard’s part. In 2018, the High Court ruled that the BBC coverage had infringed Richard’s privacy in a “serious” and “sensationalist” way.

Both Richard and Paul Gambaccini, another innocent who was arrested during Yewtree and released without charge, have argued that those accused of sexual offences should have anonymity to protect them from the stigma of the “sex offender” label. And in practice, the media has grown increasingly cautious about publishing suspects’ names, particularly famous ones.

Over the past few days, it has become obvious that this approach is as likely to inflame speculation as protect reputations. On Friday, The Sun reported that an unnamed “top BBC star” had been suspended over allegations that he had paid an unnamed 20-year-old “more than £35,000 since they were 17 in return for sordid images”, according to the unnamed 20-year-old’s unnamed mother.

The whole country became engaged in a high-stakes game of “Guess Who?”. There were so many candidates. Within 24 hours, one had been settled on in media gossip circles. Online, though, the guesses ran wild, with the words “nonce” and “paedo” freely dispensed. This was potentially career-ruining stuff: Rylan Clark, Gary Lineker and Nicky Campbell all issued statements denying being the presenter in question.

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But if you knew, the name still seemed so unlikely. Huw Edwards. Beneath the stentorian furrowed brow that has carried the nation through election night and the Queen’s death, the naked absurdity of male lust.

And there were still twists. On Monday, the young person involved made a statement calling The Sun’s report “rubbish” (and saying that The Sun had been informed of this before publication). The BBC opened an investigation, then suspended it at the police’s request. On Tuesday, another person told the BBC they had received “abusive and menacing messages” from the accused, after they met on a dating app. A detail that attracted less attention was that the abuse happened after the alleged victim had hinted on social media that they would out the presenter.

Then the police concluded that there had been no criminal offence. And finally, on Wednesday, Edwards’s wife issued a statement confirming that it was him, and that “Huw is suffering from serious mental health issues”. “The events of the last few days have greatly worsened matters,” she said. “He has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving in-patient hospital care where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future.”

The mood deflated at this point. It felt a bit like having stayed at a gathering too long, queasily sobering up among the cold canapes and dregs of booze. The Sun has announced it had no plans to publish further allegations. The BBC will continue its investigation.

There is no nice way to be accused of being a predator. But the toxic mix of celebrity and anonymity seems to have made this exceptionally messy: the scurrilous chatter about Edwards expanded to fill the void of information. By the time he was officially named, the shaming had grown so extreme that he began to look like the victim — and yet we still don’t know what, if anything, he’s culpable of.

In one sense, the Edwards story is a very old-school tabloid expose. It’s in the lineage of sports anchor Frank Bough, who was brought down by the News of the World in 1988 with the headline “I TOOK DRUGS WITH CALL GIRLS”; or Jamie Theakston, who was reported by the Sunday People in 2002 to have visited a “vice club”. A good old-fashioned British sex scandal.

But although the British public loves those stories, it also harbours a conflicting instinct that celebs deserve some privacy — especially if it’s about sex. If Edwards was active on apps (he has yet to respond to the allegations), it says something that no one he communicated with went to the press until The Sun broke its story. Being a bit sleazy, on its own, isn’t deemed disgraceful behaviour.

But that doesn’t mean the British public has no taboos. There was much focus on the youth of the individual Edwards is alleged to have received pictures from. Age gap relationships, even legal ones, are broadly disapproved of. The Sun quoted the mother referring to “my child”, even though the individual is well into sexual majority — a technique to foil identification by not disclosing gender, maybe, but one that introduced an unsavoury implication.

The reports about Edwards also referred to his “power” as a celebrity. His greater fame, like his greater age, was assumed to confer a seniority he was able to exploit. This is true of some kinds of celebrity: the YouTuber who grooms his fans, the popstar who chews through groupies. But it’s also a logic that, at the peak of #MeToo, saw cases such as a bad date with the comic Aziz Ansari rounded up to practically assault.

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It feels doubtful that presenting the 10 O’Clock News casts that kind of irresistible spell over young dating app users. Outside of the newsroom, it’s hard to imagine what power Edwards had to exercise. Conversely, anyone with compromising chats from an august national treasure has a one-click means of undoing them. The allegations against Edwards so far amount to unwise, but not illegal. There are certain things that are incompatible with broadcast gravitas, and it seems being incontinently thirsty online is one of them.

Edwards has suffered a humiliation that would be unsurvivable for many, personally as well as professionally. What he is accused of would appear to be a deep betrayal of his family; the way in which the accusations have been made has set him against his BBC colleagues, who at a minimum have seen their workplace brought into disrepute, and at worst have been dragged into the scandal on social media. And he has suffered in isolation, walled inside a formal namelessness that didn’t stop everyone from knowing it was him.

It is a strange fact that there are, out there in the world, actual paedophiles — men convicted of viewing the worst child sex abuse imagery — serving non-custodial sentences and living their lives. Meanwhile Edwards appears to have been comprehensively ruined by an allegation that so far amounts, at worst, to looking at pictures of someone he could have legally had sex with. This is not to say that his actions are beyond moral reproach. It’s possible to wrong other people without breaking the law.

It’s also possible to be both sinned against and sinning. But there is no proportionality in public shaming, and there is no privacy on the internet. Edwards was the perfect public figure for this scandal because everything about his image suggested perfectly controlled professionalism. How incongruous for the solemn man behind the desk to have appetites.

Those already committed to the “abuser” narrative will continue to believe the worst about Edwards; others will recalibrate him into a pure victim. The truth is probably messier. Whatever it is, it would have to be exceptionally bad to merit the destruction already inflicted. The problem is one of justice. Despite what Richard and Gambaccini believe, this is unlikely to be achieved in secret, any more than it is likely to be achieved by the febrile processes of social media.

I have never understood what the issue was with the headline. But then again, I don’t spend my time with Guardian readers or BBC news producers. Frankly, I didn’t care if the Belgrano had nosed into the exclusion zone or not. We needed to kill them before they killed us.

Simplistic, but I imagine the Ukrainians feel pretty much the same today.

To understand where that headline came from, you would have to be sitting in The Sun’s newsroom, back in the spring of 1982. Compared with today it was not just a different world but a different universe.

The fog of cigarette smoke had impregnated the walls, turning them a ghastly yellow. There was the reassuring clatter of typewriters proving the reporters were working. Phones were ringing. (What’s a phone, grandad?) Every time a phone rang there was a chance a reader had stumbled on a story that would bring down a politician or prove Jimmy Savile was a paedo. Those calls were gold-dust. There were plenty of them.

There was alcohol. The reporters would go out for a drink — but for the executives there was plenty of the stuff hidden away from Rupert Murdoch’s prying eyes. Although on one occasion, Murdoch dropped in unexpectedly on editor Sir Larry Lamb (my predecessor) and was “shocked” to see the amount of alcohol being consumed. “They’re drinking out of plant pots up there,” he said.

I remember going to one of Sir Larry’s afternoon conferences where it was clear he had been over-refreshing himself at lunchtime with a bottle or two of his favourite red. Surrounded by his acolytes at his desk (including me) he would, under normal circumstances, pick the story of the day and then hand draw Page One, complete with headline, on a blank piece of paper. Having created his masterpiece, Sir Larry would then pass the paper to the Night Editor who would take it back to the art desk to make it look good.

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Because he was pissed, Sir Larry didn’t draw on the blank page but on his blotting paper. There was silence as we watched this bizarre turn of events. Not realising he had missed the page entirely, Sir Larry then handed the blank page to the Night Editor who, being a brown-noser like me, said “Thank you Larry.”

Today’s HR wallahs (there are more of them than subs these days) would be flat-out with the goings on. There was the time one of the sports journalists returned to the office quite drunk around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, approached a female colleague and asked if it was true her husband was a doctor. When she said yes, he promptly unzipped himself and asked if he might be able to do something about this spot on his penis. Hard to believe, but when the management fired him, the journalists went on strike and eventually the chap was given his job back.

So that was The Sun, then.

It was also hugely successful. The paper was selling well over four million copies a day. Every day. The paper mattered. It had caught the riptide of the Thatcher revolution. Hostile to big state. Hostile to big unions. Pro flogging council houses. Pro big spending on the military.

Along came the Falklands War. There were two routes you could take. There was the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror position. Where is the Falklands? Is there a deal to be done? Can we fight the war without killing anybody?

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Then there was The Sun‘s position. They started it, we shall finish it. Do it to them before they do it to us. The only good Argie was a dead Argie. I inherited that kind of view from my father who had spent five years in a Japanese PoW camp. I hesitate to think what he would make of me owning a Lexus.

At one stage, the Argentine military regime was offering what looked like faux peace talks. The Sun’s response came via the headline: STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA. A classic, it became our catchphrase for the war. 

We decided to put the whole paper on a war footing. News editor Tom Petrie became Commander Petrie for the duration. Reporters were given ranks from private to colonel. I stomped around the newsroom in sergeant major parody referring to colleagues as “horrible little people”.

We invited readers to sponsor Sidewinder missiles. Joyfully it was reported that a missile fired from HMS Invincible with the words “Up Yours Galtieri” (the name of the Junta leader) had brought down an Argentinian plane.

We invented “Sink the Argies” computer games and Page Three girls were given military themes; “All Shipshape and Bristols Fashion.” Upscale stuff. Private Eye produced a mock The Sun with the headline: Kill an Argie, win a Metro. Not a bad idea. At morning conference, we contemplated doing such a competition. Strangely wiser counsel prevailed. That wasn’t always the case.

The Sun journalists were a militant lot, and the day the Belgrano was sunk inevitably they were on strike. But the printers, a bolshie collection of overpaid and underworked half-wits, would allow me to produce the paper and turned a blind eye to a couple of execs giving assistance.

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It must have been around 10 o’clock on that May evening, while sitting on the news desk with assistant editor Wendy Henry, when it was reported that the Belgrano had been sunk. Hit with two torpedoes fired by our submarine, the Conqueror.  

On hearing the news Wendy, an excitable talent, shouted: Gotcha! With headlines I have always found that instinct trumps intelligence. So GOTCHA it was. But as the evening wore on there was a suggestion that all 1,095 Belgrano crew had died in the attack.

Even for a hard-bitten soul like me, that seemed an enormous number, and I changed the headline in later editions to: Did 1,095 Argies die? Murdoch didn’t agree with the change saying he thought it a good headline. In the event 368 died.

Six weeks later, the war had ended. As with Thatcher, the Falklands had been a great success for The Sun. The paper-buying public liked our coverage and rejected the Daily Mirror’s timorous approach. The circulation gap between us grew swiftly to over a million copies a day. The cash, in both sales and advertising, for Murdoch simply crashed through the front door.

So where is The Sun four decades later? The alcohol has gone. The typewriters have gone. The smoke has gone. And most important of all, the circulation has gone. The crying shame is that the collective power and voice of ambitious working-class readers has been lost.

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True, The Sun‘s readers have social media, which to my mind is a joy. But the authority of a newspaper which could reach 12 million readers every day (that’s 12 million “likes”) has been lost for ever.

Supposing such a war happened now, what would the paper’s reaction be? Frankly there is an uncertain note on the trumpet. Even if the North Koreans took the Isle of Wight, I have my doubts they would get angry.

And does it matter what The Sun says in any event?

The paper sells around 500,000-600,000 a day. That’s a guess as Murdoch’s management at News UK refuses to disclose the numbers except to media buyers who in turn have to sign an NDA. It’s true they have a news website, but they try very hard not to cover stories which polarise opinions. They don’t want to upset anybody, which means they don’t please anybody either.

With the death of the print version of The Sun, goes the role of the editor. Clever, laugh-producing or ballsy Page One headlines don’t matter a fig in the online world. Nor does something called a news sense. There is now software which can change the running order of the site depending on the stories the reader is clicking on. 

That all makes complete journalistic (and commercial) sense but sadly, from my perspective, it does mean goodbye to Gotcha and all that. Mind you, the Argies will be delighted.

It is 40 years now since the outbreak of the Falklands War, one of the strangest, most colourful and most popular conflicts in British military history. Today this ten-week campaign to free the South Atlantic islands from Argentine occupation seems like a moment from a vanished age. But that was how it felt at the time, too: a scene from history, a colossal costume drama, a self-conscious re-enactment of triumphs past.

On the day the Invincible sailed, Margaret Thatcher quoted Queen Victoria: “Failure? The possibilities do not exist.” In the Sun, executives put up Winston Churchill’s portrait. And as the travel writer Jonathan Raban watched the departure of the Task Force on television, he thought it was like a historical pageant, complete with “pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs”. He regarded the whole exercise with deep derision, until the picture blurred and he realised that, despite himself, he was crying.

For many people the Falklands War was only too real. There were serious issues and genuine lives at stake, not just for the 1,813 islanders who had woken to find military vehicles roaring down their little streets, but for the tens of thousands of Argentine conscripts and British servicemen who were soon to be plunged into the nightmare of combat. And although polls suggest that about eight out of ten Britons strongly supported it, there were always those who considered it a mistake, a tragedy, even a crime. A certain Jeremy Corbyn thought it a “Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business”. The novelist Margaret Drabble considered it a “frenzied outburst of dying power”. A far better writer, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, famously called it “two bald men arguing over a comb”. That seems an odd analogy, though, for almost 2,000 blameless sheep farmers, who had no desire to be ruled by a junta that threw dissenters out of helicopters.

One common view of the Falklands campaign is that it was Britain’s last colonial war. But this strikes me as very unpersuasive. When we think of colonial wars, we think of wars of conquest by white men in pith helmets against brown-skinned underdogs. We think of embattled imperialists struggling to stave off a nationalist uprising, or fighting in defence of white settlers against a native majority. But the Falklands War was none of those things. There was no oppressed indigenous majority — except perhaps for the islanders themselves, some of whom had been there since the 1830s. As for the Argentines, their Spanish and Italian surnames were a dead giveaway. Indeed, few countries in the Americas had done a more thorough job of eliminating their original inhabitants.

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What of the British? For all the “Empire Strikes Back” headlines, they had actually spent the last decade trying to give the islands away. Less than 18 months before the invasion, Mrs Thatcher had sent the chain-smoking Nicholas Ridley to urge the islanders to accept a sovereignty deal with Buenos Aires. His words have a blackly ironic ring today. “Do you want the Argentinians invading you and us kicking them out in a state of perpetual war?… I mean, it’s all very well sitting here saying someone else must come and kick the Argentinians out. Of course we will, but is that good for sheep farming, for fishing, for looking for oil, for all your futures, for your children, and your grand­children and your great­-grand­children?”

On paper, much of what he said was perfectly true. Not unsurprisingly, however, it went down like a lead balloon. When Ridley flew home, the islanders saw him off with a loudspeaker playing Land of Hope and Glory, This Land Is Our Land and We Shall Not Be Moved. He didn’t come back.

Not a war of decolonisation, then. And still less a Victorian war of conquest. Yet there’s no denying that this was a war with a sense of history. On the morning the Task Force sailed, the Daily Mail interviewed a veteran of the First World War, Tommy Mallen, for whom it had been a day of catharsis. “I thought England was done for, spineless, a doormat for the world,” he said. “I’d pass the war memorials or see Nelson’s Victory and wonder what it had all been for. But I was wrong, thank God. We are still a proud country, and we’ll still protect our own.”

The fleet’s commander, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, said much the same. Two months later, bursting with pride after the successful landing at San Carlos, he too looked back to the age of Nelson. “What difference,” he wondered, “between Ardent, crippled and burning, still fighting and Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge all those centuries ago? Or between this and that October day off Cape Trafalgar as Nelson and Hardy walked the quarter deck of the Victory shortly after noon?”

The references to Nelson, the most romantic of all British patriotic heroes, were no accident. From start to finish there was something oddly 18th-century about the Falklands campaign, not least the fact that so much of it involved the high seas. One of its many ironies was that until the Argentines invaded, the Thatcher government had been planning to slash the Royal Navy to the bone. But the spectacle of the Task Force ploughing through the Atlantic was perfectly calculated to stir the hearts of a seafaring people who had grown up with tales of Drake and Nelson. And from the moment the fleet left, press and public alike relished the connections with Britain’s maritime history. In that respect, the news editor of the Sun, who took to wearing a naval cap and demanded that his subordinates address him as Commander, spoke for millions.

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Today much of the Sun’s coverage would have sensitive readers running for the hills. The “GOTCHA” headline, glorying in the sinking of the General Belgrano, was merely the most infamous example in a long series: the repeated admonitions to “STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA”, the paper’s “Argy-­Bargie” joke column, even its operation to airlift 50 gigantic posters of Page Three girls to the RAF base at Ascension Island.

Yet none of this would have seemed shocking to newspaper readers in 18th-century London. Britain fought at least seven major campaigns against the Spanish Empire in the course of the 18th century, from the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins’s Ear to the Seven Years’ War and the struggle against Napoleon, and the press coverage back then was much the same. On one side, the jolly, earthy, open-hearted Jack Tars, the defenders of individual liberty and plain-speaking Protestantism. On the other, the inheritors of Spain’s Black Legend: flamboyant, superstitious and unspeakably cruel. “A jumped-­up junta of barbarous men,” roared one Tory backbencher. “The very thought that our people, 1,800 people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals is enough to make any normal Englishman’s blood boil,” thundered another.

He was speaking in the spring of 1982, but he could so easily have been talking two centuries earlier. Indeed, it’s striking how often MPs reached for parallels, not just with the Second World War, but with the campaigns against the Spanish, the French and other similarly sallow and superstitious foreigners. “Let us hear no more about logistics — how difficult it is to travel long distances,” declared the Tory backbencher Edward du Cann. “I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. We have nothing to lose now except our honour!”

History never repeats itself, of course. But when you start noticing the Georgian resonances, it’s hard to stop. A few months after the Task Force returned in triumph, the social commentator Peter York claimed that the single most powerful “piece of everyday symbolism” in the country was the mock-Georgian front door, “strong and safe and solid… a revisionist burst of bourgeois individualism”. The members of Visage, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, with their whitened faces, billowing pantaloons and over-elaborate eye make-up, would have made superb extras in a stage revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. So too would the greatest sporting icon of the age, whom you can easily imagine roaring out “Hearts of Oak” on the deck of the Victory.

As the cricket writer Derek Hodgson put it: “Regency England would have recognised him instantly as the man who could ride to hounds from dawn, fight 25 rounds bare-knuckle of an afternoon, dine on a mountain of boiled mutton, roast beef, plum duff and cheddar cheese, washed down by ale and claret, and top it off with a bottle of brandy: a man who proclaimed one Englishman worth 10 scurvy foreigners. For Ian Botham read John Bull.”

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Even Margaret Thatcher, so often seen as a Victorian Gradgrind, had her Georgian side. When she moved into 10 Downing Street, she specifically requested paintings of Nelson, Wellington and George II. At a reception in the autumn of 1982, she gave the journalist Hugo Young a tour of the new paintings, proudly pointing out George I, Sir Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger and “other admirals and soldiers”. And when, in her memoirs, she discusses the moment she became Prime Minister, whom does she quote? Not Churchill, but Pitt the Elder: “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.”

Perhaps it was no wonder, then, that the Falklands War felt like an eighteenth-century throwback. In a country shorn of its imperial pretensions, struggling to find a new place in the world, it revived the image of a buccaneering, free-trading, maritime people, sometimes boorish, often vulgar, but always staunch in the defence of freedom. Here was the Britishness — or perhaps more accurately, the Englishness — of Rule Britannia, of James Wolfe at Quebec and H. Jones at Goose Green, swashbuckling martyrs in the national cause. It was cynical and sentimental, ruthless and romantic, fervently patriotic and often aggressively populist. Some people hated it. But deep down, most felt its emotional pull.

For almost two centuries it had been buried beneath a veneer of Victorianism, but it had never disappeared. “It must have always been there,” wrote the columnist George Gale on the day of victory, “for we have seen it flooding back.” Britain, agreed Margaret Thatcher, “has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.”

But it was an even more controversial politician who put it best. “A change has come about in Britain,” wrote Enoch Powell. “We are ourselves again.”

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the Falklands War in The Rest is History.

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

Sometimes, I can’t help but chuckle at their irreverence. And so it was last week with their “Taking the Michael” headline. St Michael’s Church in Bournemouth had renamed itself St Mike’s “in a trendy rebrand to entice young people”. Grumpy conservatives online — like me — pointed out that the “el” bit at the end of the word “Michael” is of one of the words for God in the Hebrew Bible. Michael — roughly translated — means something like, “One who is like God.” Given this, taking the “el” bit off the end seems rather unfortunate, especially for a church.

But like most headlines in The Sun, there is a streak of cruelty about it. St Mike’s is a huge barn of a Victorian church designed to seat 1,000 people, but now with a congregation of 20. Bournemouth has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the South West. The Vicar there, Sarah Yetman, has a tough gig and all power to her elbow for trying to turn things around. “We aren’t trying to alienate anyone by changing the name” she explains, “But I do feel that if we don’t take steps now to draw people in from those younger generations we will be lamenting what we have missed in the years to come.” “A bid to become more trendy” was the Daily Mail’s take.

So why did this tiny story attract such attention from the national press? Well, I suspect because it does say something rather important about the changing nature of the Church of England. “Taking the Michael” is just the latest in a broad transformation whereby formality of worship is being dropped because it is seen as a barrier to new younger worshippers. The big idea is that we should all get more chummy with the divine. The austere, intimidating God of fire and thunder, the God of the mountain top, the God whom we approach in awe and wonder, is being replaced with the friendly face of Jesus, more mate than majesty. St Michael was the angel of battle who defeated Satan in the ultimate celestial firefight of good vs evil. I don’t think he’s a Mike.

For the Daily Mail and The Sun, what is going on here is of a piece with the cheapening of our national life — which may seem a bit rich coming from them, but there you are. Trendy vicars are the new trendy teachers trying to relate to the kids with permanent (draining to watch) smiles, over the top, unrelenting enthusiasm, and awkward references to popular culture. Yes, I get it. I too want my children’s teachers to look more like Hector from the History Boys (without the fondling) than the Nineties era Tony Blair leaning casually against the photocopier in his stonewashed jeans. And the comparison is not just with trendy vicars. Our new Bishops want to be known as Ric or Pete or Rod. Names are all about relatability. And Christianity is about our relatability to God.

But here, of course, we stumble very quickly into some deep theological waters of the sort Christians have been arguing about since the first few centuries of its existence. It is a cliché — and indeed an antisemitic trope (See Richard Dawkins) — to compare the violent austere God of the Old Testament to the loving warm and cuddly God of the New Testament as captured in the person of Jesus. Old Testament bad, New Testament good — that’s not Christianity btw.

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But nonetheless, the central dynamic of Christianity is to be found in the interplay between immanence and transcendence, between the God who draws near and the God who is far off. And far off isn’t a bad thing. This is the God who hovered over creation at the beginning of time. The is the God of the unknown, the one who rather put Job in his place by saying that there are some things that will always be beyond his understanding. This is the God of the God’s eye view, looking at things from the widest possible perspective. This also is the mystical God of silence, there in the still small voice of calm. For Jews, this God is not even to be named. He is known as “Hashem”, the name. This is the God who hides his face from Moses.

Christianity doesn’t resile from any of this. But adds something shockingly different. God is manifest in a particular person, with a name and a face. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He is down-to-earth (quite literally) and makes God relatable in a whole new way. Jesus is God, and Jesus is my friend.

For the first 400 years of the church’s history, it struggled to express how both of these perspectives could be true at once, how God could be both near and far, immanent and transcendent. And what it came up with was the doctrine of the Trinity, not so much an answer to how these different perspectives co-exist, but rather a firm commitment to the idea that neither could be given up without giving up the heart of what it was to be a Christian. The Trinity is not any sort of philosophical answer but a kind of regulative guide to what orthodox Christianity looks like. “But play you must a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,” wrote Wallace Stephens. It’s a bit like that.

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I am not convinced that the whole Jesus-is-my-best-friend approach best carries all that young people want from the Almighty. There is nothing like spending an hour or so on your knees, somewhere vast and empty, to put your life into some kind of larger perspective and make you feel suitably humble in the great scheme of things. There is nothing quite like the order and majesty of catholic worship to summon a sense of holiness. This is the place where you can come with all your baggage, failures, stupidities, and hold them up to the altar without the distracting need for chat or explanations. This is the place where the sinner hears the convincing reply of silence. Even the deeply irreligious poet Philip Larkin could see what this kind of church offered: “Since someone will always be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

St Mike’s has spent some of the considerable money it received from the central church funds on a smart new website. It has the look of a Benetton advert with ridiculously good-looking 20-somethings in fashionable clothes set in interesting locations. Some of the clergy I know call this sort of thing “imaginary church”. On the website, there are no images of the church itself or the real congregation. So I looked for some. I found one of ladies in their 70s with tight platinum rinses and big coats keeping out the chill.

Being a vicar is extremely hard. And it looks like the Vicar of St Mike’s has a job that is harder than most. I wish her well. But even so, the new St Mike’s scares me for the future of the church. As numbers collapse, it is the small pools of musty holy silence that are being cut out first, ordinary churchgoers being sidelined, as central church finance is being pumped into smiley relatable imaginary church. People can find relatable anywhere these days, in every walk of life. Our culture is sick with the sugary taste of emoting professionals. Because, like diabetes, it eats us away from within.

I mean, cricket. The blanketed world of chaps and slips, silly mid-ons and dear old things, leather, willow, tea, cake and grimly Etonised surnames. The great Brian “Johnners” Johnston has been dead for a quarter of a century, but they still all call themselves “Gaggers” or “Buggers” or “Spaffers”, the fuckers.

Anyway, Cuntaggedon. Second Test in Pakistan, England captain Mike Gatting and umpire Shakoor Rana had a heated argument, certain words were exchanged. Specifically: “you fucking cheating cunt”. My memory tricked me into thinking it was Gatting who’d said it, as he always came across as the sort of two-curries-and-a-gallon-of-ale bloke who didn’t suffer cunts gladly. But actually it was the umpire.

The outrage was swift. And hilariously it was led by Kelvin Mackenzie, editor of The Sun, who thought it abominable that minors might see that word in a newspaper. Children browsing the Sun at the time could instead have engaged with the Murdoch rag’s relentless war on “poofs”. Or its campaign of hate aimed at “fat, jealous” MP Clare Short who’d objected to topless women on page 3. Still, Hillsborough was a couple of years off so to be fair Sun journalism hadn’t fully found its moral compass yet. Summary: tits in the Sun but no cunts.

Around the same time the C-Word was outed, something interesting was also happening to its F-word sibling: the Great American Fuck Shift from verb to noun. Its most notable airing was in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Dennis Hopper was cartoonishly terrifying as psychopath Frank Booth, and in one short sentence elevated fuck into a new wide-spectrum deployment as oath, transitive verb, adjective and noun: “Fuck! Fuck you, you fucking fuck!” Lynch’s screenplay offered Classic Modernist Profanity, wringing beauty from brute materials and repetition.

The whole point of taboo words is their utility. If you don’t have them to deploy in an emergency, in response to physical pain, or in anger at the latest embossed cuntery from Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfuckjumbo Johnson, what’s the point? And so it has been from the beginning. Let’s go back in time. Next slide please — mudskippers to homo erectus, cursing every evolutionary rung on the ladder…

Throughout history, all the top-shelf swear words have been proscribed by haughty aristocracy. Egyptian hieroglyphs are unsullied by profanity, as they mostly occur as examples of dynastic vanity publishing; no king or queen wants to be heard by the common people swearing like one of them. But the tradition of tomb graffiti is different, and in the vernacular. The clerk of works would be the last to leave, and it was his job to scrawl a blood-curdling curse upon any who dared violate that sacred place. Thieves would have been greeted by colourful appeals to the gods to punish tomb raiders, invoking violence from a wide menagerie of avenging animals, from donkey (fucked by) via elephant (flattened slowly) to crocodile (eaten while still alive).

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Why the miners will never win

By Ian Martin

How faithful are the written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey? Did the oral tradition include passages (“Revealed – Odyssesus’ Nights Of Steamy Sex With Kinky Circe!”) considered by editors simply too vulgar to publish? Who’s to say the Bible wasn’t cleaned up (“What Jesus Actually Shouted At The Money-Changers”) by the early church? Swear words, especially the worst ones in English, are routinely referred to as “Anglo-Saxon”. If we’re blaming the Vikings and Ye Olde English, imagine what the original, adult version of, say, Beowulf (“Then loud rang his voice: fuck you Grendel – AND your mum!”) must have been like.

A few centuries later, Shakespeare’s writing ribald sonnets as a young man — the Dirty Bard of Avon. Suppose Milton had destroyed the first and very angry draft of his masterpiece, “Paradise Bollocksed”? Imagine a letter from a teenage Jane Austen to a close and very smutty friend. Maybe there’s a letter in the Irish Times archive from a very pissed James Joyce, deemed too blasphemous and obscene ever to be printed. And T.S. Eliot would be on no-speaks with his friend and editor Ezra Pound for ages after receiving a filthy mockery of his masterpiece, humorously renamed “The Love Song of J Alfred Profuck”.

What I’m saying is: swearing’s always been there, behind the curtain. All those centuries of the printed word, and before that the millennia of the spoken, and profanity was always just a lapse in decorum away. Still, I wasn’t quite prepared for Swearing’s Great Fucking Leap Forward which happened, for me at least, around the turn of the century.

It was the internet, stupid.

Suddenly, the potential for comedy unmediated by basic human decency revealed itself in an information superhighway going up its own arse. There was a frontier spirit abroad, an infinity of notional space to infect. The internet was getting faster and moving beyond its original incarnation as a platform for dad-joke physicists and slow-loading animé pornography. You could say what you liked on the internet. Nobody was policing what you wrote and, crucially, hardly anyone was reading it. The chances of getting a complaint about either bad language or copyright infringement were as slim as Peter Mandelson. My underemployed brother and I set up a sweary satirical site, Martian FM, in 2000. Every week we banged out a sort of foul-language current affairs magazine. A few short months later we were nurturing a cult following of about 12.

All comedy on the internet at that time felt experimental because a) there was no style guide, no common code of practice to proscribe unacceptable words and b) there were no space constraints. This was mind-boggling at first. I’d worked as a journalist on and off for decades, had served a trade apprenticeship as a local reporter in the early Seventies. Heady days of hot metal and upside-down type and the pubs opening at half five. The First Law of Journalism wasn’t, as high-minded commentators insisted at media conferences, “to be witness to the truth for the advancement of civil society” or whatever. It was, as acknowledged by hacks and sub-editors everywhere: “fill the fucking space”.

Writing stuff that would sit in literally infinite space required its own self-applied perimeters. It’s worth noting that two of the funniest UK sites around at this time were The Framley Examiner, written by Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris in the style of a local newspaper, and TVGoHome, Charlie Brooker’s spoof Radio Times listings. The set-up for both used old, recognisable boundaries, little gardens in the prairie. Incidentally, “Cunt” had been normalised enough by this time to appear as a TVGoHome listing — a pretend series featuring the spectacularly horrible media influencer Nathan Barley.

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Swearing was part of a hardening of comedy around this time, a steady trend towards heartlessness you could trace on TV all the way from Morecambe and Wise to The League of Gentlemen. Perhaps the outbreak of foul language was simply a childish reaction to the childish political culture coagulating around the lying shit Blair and his centri-feudal entourage. Remember the bathos of Millennium Eve? The world’s computers didn’t default to the 14th Century because of some digital Colorado Beetle. And Cool Blairtannia bopped awkwardly into the 21st century under the dull tensile roof of the Millennium Dome.

Look — Tony, and Cherie, doing their Pulp Fiction twist! Here comes the 21st century, the economy’s moving up through the gears, Clause 4’s in the bin, neoliberalism’s sent boom-and-bust packing. And the Iraq War is three years off, so Blair still looks like a sexually active supply teacher. Soon, civilian carnage and endless prayer breakfasts with George W Bush would transform him into a haunted Pilates instructor.

By the time the Iraq War was underway in 2003 Martian FM’s audience had rocketed to several dozen. Along with other conscientious satirists we were making imbecilic jokes about Saddam Hussein and George Galloway sharing a tin of Quality Street. Armando Iannucci got in touch that year. He liked the site and, even more brilliantly, started praising it in interviews. We honestly thought that was it, the tipping point, visitor numbers would soar. It never happened. Readership continued to be the regulars — enough people to fill a small pub — and Iannucci.

One of our weekly features was a spoof of Hansard, the transcript of Parliamentary debate. We kept the same format, presented it as an official record of proceedings in the House of Commons, but called it Hansard Late. The premise was an account of proceedings after the cameras had been switched off and everyone was drunk. The toxic swearing was led by a fictionalised version of the Speaker at the time, very Scottish and very angry. It seemed to work best when he was spinning increasingly baroque and violent threats to keep order eg: “Order, ye plasma dumplings, fucking order! Order, ORDER ye trembling airbags, ye skeins o’ wet fucking SHITE!”

Then came The Thick of It. I’d done bits and pieces for Maestro Iannucci; now he invited me to “sprinkle sweary dust” over the first three Thick scripts. It was intimidating at first: the scripts had been written by Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Jesse Armstrong — the Holy Trinity of British comedy writers. In the end, I offered an alt to the line “He’s fucking useless” which went “He’s as useless as a marzipan dildo”. That got the green light, I carried on, became part of the team. For a laugh, Armando mythologised the notion of a “swearing consultant” for Thick, even though all the writers wrote swears.

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Given that the whole point was to swear imaginatively, a lot of people took a reductive view, including the BBC. With typical flat-footed cluelessness, some executive once praised the groundbreaking use of language in Thick, excitedly reporting that one episode alone had contained 145 fucks, a record for 29 minutes of television! Swearing reduced to a fuck-count; it’s absurd, when context is everything. Roche’s “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off!” or Blackwell’s “What is this, Tinker Tailor Soldier Cunt?” use scalpels, not hammers. In one ep a character finds out his colleague has betrayed them by leaking information and calls him a “mimsy bastard quisling leak fuck”. The fuck is there really just to tidy up the cadence.

I’m not saying they’re necessarily related, but there seemed to be an awful lot of compound swears appearing in the wild after Thick, far too many lacking internal logic. You can jam words together – arsewart, say, or cockpunnet – and as long as they “make sense”, however surreally, they work. But I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: “cockwomble”, what does it mean? “Wankpuffin” – where’s the logic? People have just put a single-syllable rude word with a double-syllable neutral word and called it bants. Not good enough.

We can do better than this. You can do better than this. Profanity is an incredibly powerful tool, not mere bants. So here, hastily arranged on my fridge, is a set of magnets I had made for a talk years ago on the subject. Help yourselves. Tip: lacing your expletives with innocent adjectives – eg “sanctimonious”, “incompetent”, “snivelling” – makes the nasty stuff land harder. Now fuck off.

The trouble is that it’s very hard to study. If you see that readers of Right-wing papers are more likely to vote for Right-wing parties, you can’t conclude that the one causes the other; it could just be that people who vote for Right-wing parties enjoy reading that they’re right to do so.

That’s why there’s been some excitement about a new report, not yet published or peer-reviewed but available in preprint form. Its authors saw the opportunity for a natural experiment: the impact of Merseyside’s post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun on Eurosceptic attitudes in the region.

In 1989, 95 Liverpool FC fans were killed in Britain’s worst football stadium disaster; a 96th, Tony Bland, died four years later, having been in a coma caused by brain damage from the crush. The Sun blamed the disaster on the Liverpool fans themselves, accusing them of urinating on police and picking the pockets of the dead, under a banner headline of “THE TRUTH”.

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It has since been shown that none of this was true and that the disaster was the result of failings by the police and other emergency services. Liverpudlians, appalled by the Sun’s coverage, boycotted the newspaper – not just Liverpool fans, but their Evertonian rivals and the rest of the city, too.

The authors of this new study reasoned that, since the boycott was mainly in the Merseyside area and the rest of the country was largely untouched by it, they could see the impact of the Sun’s Eurosceptic campaigning on attitudes to Europe. They looked at responses to the statement “Britain should continue its EC/EU membership” in the British Social Attitudes surveys between 1983 and 2004, and compared those in the 15 Merseyside constituencies to the rest of the country.

The study says that Sun readership on Merseyside post-Hillsborough fell from around 55,000 daily sales to about 12,000, although that is an estimate because News International did not release regional figures. It sounds believable to me, though: I went to university in Liverpool and most newsagents didn’t stock it; you’d see “don’t buy The S*n” written on walls or the backs of replica football tops. It was very much despised there, and understandably so.

But the study then goes on to say that the boycott led to an “8 percentage-points to a 15 percentage-points decrease in Euroscepticism” in Merseyside. And this is what caused the excitement. The authors argue, and the papers have reported, that this shows how sustained media campaigns have major impacts on public opinion.

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I am pretty sceptical. For one thing, when you look in the paper at the graph of attitudes towards Europe on Merseyside, Euroscepticism was declining pre-1989, and it continued to decline post-1989. There doesn’t seem to be a noticeable change at or shortly after 1989 itself; it levels off in the 1990s. The “control” group – a “synthetic Merseyside”, or conglomeration of other English areas weighted for similarity to the Liverpool area – also declines in Euroscepticism, just rather more slowly, and then increases for a bit in the early 1990s. Eyeballing it, at least, it doesn’t scream “Hillsborough did this” to me; it looks like some longer-term trend.

I’m also intrigued to note that, in the actual 2016 referendum, Liverpool (the city, not Merseyside) voted 58.2% Remain. Manchester, just up the road and (they’ll both hate me for saying this, but) relatively similar economically and culturally, voted 60.4% Remain. If somewhere between 8 and 15% of that Liverpool vote is due to the boycott, what drove the Manchester Remain vote? After all, they still read The Sun there. Alternatively, you could just say that most big cities tended, outside the North-East, to vote Remain. Or you could point out that both are big university towns, and that young people tend to be less Eurosceptic.

For another thing, the effect seems enormous. Let’s assume that the sales figures were correct, and that it did indeed drop from 55,000 daily readers to 12,000. If all 43,000 daily readers who stopped taking The Sun immediately became Europhiles overnight that would represent about 3% of the total population of Merseyside.

If we only look at the population of Liverpool itself – around the 450,000 mark – it’s about 10%, but the study does say it’s looking at Merseyside sales. And, still, it would need pretty much every single former Sun reader to have started as a Eurosceptic and become a Europhile for the 8 to 15% figure to make sense.

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This doesn’t mean it’s not true. You could tell some complex story about knock-on effects: several people reading the same newspaper, or the Eurosceptic at the pub suddenly going quiet and no longer spreading the word to his or her friends. But I am sceptical.

Of course, we still need to explain why Merseyside started out as more Eurosceptic than the country at large and ended up less. I could reach for my favourite explanation, which is “a lot of this stuff is essentially random and any explanation will be post-hoc storytelling”. But I think I might indulge in some post-hoc storytelling of my own, actually.

Liverpool is, traditionally, a hugely Labour city; of the 15 Merseyside constituencies, 12 are held by Labour, and two by former Labour MPs who have left the party since 2017; the seaside area of Southport, which is well to the north of the city, is the only one held by a Tory.

Liverpool seriously hates the Tories and it especially hates Margaret Thatcher. In the 1975 referendum, the Conservative party – led by Thatcher – largely backed a Yes vote to join the EU; the governing Labour party, led by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was split. Wilson backed Yes but (as in the 2016 referendum) Cabinet collective responsibility was put aside and several ministers campaigned for No.

In general, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Labour was the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. And, in Liverpool in particular, the Labour council was heavily influenced by Derek Hatton of the Militant Tendency, who voted No in 1975. It was only in 1983 that Neil Kinnock made Labour explicitly pro-Europe, but Militant and Bennite Labourites still fought back (Denis Healey and others formed the Labour Against The Euro group as late as 2002, although that was specifically against joining the single currency). Meanwhile, Tory Eurosceptics became ever more vocal over the same period.

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I can’t find a way of plotting levels of Labour Euroscepticism, but you could easily tell a story in which Liverpool’s wariness of European integration decreases at the same rate that Labour’s does, until around the John Major period when Conservatives were tearing themselves apart over Europe. At this point, even the previously Europhile Thatcher has swapped teams.

Suddenly, if you’re a Labour-voting Liverpudlian, you see that the hated Tories are associated with the anti-Europe side and Labour with the pro. So you answer the polling question accordingly.

Is that really what happened? Maybe? It’s a just-so story I came up with a few minutes ago. All we really know is that Merseyside shed its Euroscepticism more quickly than the rest of the country. That’s hardly surprising, in itself – it’s an ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan port city, it has three universities, it’s proudly Left-wing; I’m not sure there’s anything to explain.

But we like explanations, and we particularly like explanations that provide us with a clear antagonist who we can blame. After all, if the boycott made Liverpool pro-Europe, then The Sun made the rest of the country anti-Europe, and we can blame it for the referendum result. And in these Brexit-riven days, people will cling to this, even though the study doesn’t prove it was The Sun wot dun it.