HAT a delicious irony that should be brought to book over a cartoon. This is a newspaper that doesn’t do humour, so it’s not surprising that the disgraceful portrayal of the newly departed chair of the BBC, Richard Sharp, wasn’t funny, but was a pictorial version of its jaundiced writing. There is no place here for real humour because that demands a sense of can’t manage. There, the antics of the Right are too dangerous for laughter and those of the Left too serious to be guyed. Apart from Marina Hyde, it’s a joke-free zone. There’s no Matt to challenge the newspaper’s editorial stance; no intellectual, North London-based version of Maudie Littlehampton to put the woke in its place; not even a Giles to comment on the wider vagaries of the world. Instead, this painfully serious journal has a default mode that sees the worst in everything and belittles everyone who doesn’t fit its definition of politically correct.
