Manchester United beat Wolves 1-0 last Saturday. It was the only known defeat of wolves during the weekend.

For the first time in months, we’ve had one or two unsubscribers recently. The reason has always been the same: they thought The Slog was wrong and/or over-egging the pudding. ‘It was just a case of crying wolf once too often’ one departing reader wrote last week.

Perhaps on all levels – constitutionally, economically, fiscally and politically – The Slogger will be proved wrong. It will transpire that the voting system is just fine (Bercow will win in Bucks), despite the forecasts of doom, we’re coming out of recession (we really do have a manufacturing sector), the debt can be paid off (the credit downgrade scoops are a fantasy) and people will vote in greater numbers than ever before (hence the narrowing Tory lead). Time will tell on all those and many other issues.

We shall see.

In the meantime, the weekend brought forth several developments germain to what The Slog is on about: that underling all those problems is a culture going vaguely mad. John Hargreaves the Matalan founder persuaded a group of banks and private investors to underwrite a business he can’t sell – while giving him an eye-popping £250M personal payout. Alistair Darling announced he was sticking to a fiscal approach outlined in 2008, as this is ‘still relevant’. The bonkers £1.2 billion investment portfolio of the once impregnable HBOS will be lucky if it realises £500 million. The attempted sale of 320 RBS branches has revealed a £3 billion funding gap – not including the £2 billion black hole that was the loan book. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that Greece’s bond issue was fully subscribed, even though it will cost Athens four times what a similar borrowing exercise did eighteen months ago. Kraft is about to close the UK Cadbury final-salary pension scheme…..while still trying to borrow enough money to pay for the deal. The Government has cynically hidden massive ward closures as part of NHS cuts. And Ed Balls has told schoolteachers that the education
budget hole is even bigger than the one whose existence he originally denied.

Anyone who finds those news items to be portents of a rosy future should feel free take The Slog out of favourites, or unsubscribe by typing the u-word at john@johnaward.net

The last seven years have taught me many things about humanity. One of these is that Homo sapiens would prefer, on visiting a fortune-teller, to be told about tall dark strangers, not small dark cupboards. Unfortunately, be it in Stafford, Iraq or Buckingham, open almost any door in our culture, and there will be a dark cupboard behind it. Shooting the messenger won’t change that.