YES, ACTUALLY

In 1905 a young MP called Winston Churchill abandoned the Conservative Party to join the opposition just before that opposition scored a crushing election win which put it in power for 15 years.

Shortly after the Conservatives returned to power… Churchill rejoined the Conservatives. We thank you.

TERRY MANNERS has had a dream, well more of a nightmare really, that he was present at a board meeting of the Daily Getsworse, although it bears an uncanny resemblance to another newspaper of our acquaintance.

Like every good journalist, Manners remembered to take his pen to bed and has written a hilarious report of the imaginary meeting.

BOARD MEETING AT THE GETSWORSE

Palaces of the Press

By George, it’s our George starring as, er, Boy George (pity about the moustache)

By GEORGE DEARSLEY

It’s April 1984 and I’m squashed with several other Fleet Street journos in a doorway yards from the Libyan Embassy in St. James Square, where a day earlier WPC Yvonne Fletcher was fatally wounded by an unknown gunman.

The adrenaline is pumping. Could we also be shot? We’ve just had a row with television’s bouffant newsman Michael Cole who tried to push in and was roundly told to Foxtrot Oscar and find his own doorstep. 

Suddenly a colleague hands me a message from the Daily Star newsdesk ordering me to go to another location. I’m excited. Have we been given some secret information about the Met Officer’s murder? It could be a front page story. 

I’m whisked away in a black cab to the address … which turns out to be a top beautician’s salon. Apparently Boy George has just launched a new make-up range and because we share the same name I’m to be made up like the androgynous singer. 

I was fuming to miss out on the world’s top news story. When the woman wanted to shave off my moustache I adamantly refused. The stunt made nearly a full page. 

And two years later when I left the paper my colleagues framed it as a leaving gift. Looking back, maybe I should have been Karma (Chameleon) and lost the tache.

Proof that crime is nothing new

In praise of the Cheshire Cheese, a Pedigree pub
if ever there was one

PAT PRENTICE remembers his sojourns in Fleet Street’s historic hostelry and the odd types who frequented the hallowed halls of Dr Johnson’s favourite watering hole

GET TATCHELL!

Dacre’s order to reporter Hall

COCK-UP FOR THE CUP Express football ticket competition that went from bad to worse (no change there then…)

Expressman CHRIS GILL remembers a Daily Express World Cup tickets competition when everything that could go wrong did go wrong but was disaster averted? 

FIND OUT HERE

Me and Mr Methane

GEORGE DEARSLEY has used his PR skills to help several people up the ladder of fame and none stranger was Paul Oldfield, also known as Mr Methane, whom you might have been unfortunate enough to see plying his windy trade on Britain’s Got Talent.

Oldfield did have his uses by giving George useful story tips but eventually this dwindled … along with his fame.

BLAST FROM THE PAST WITH THE SULTAN OF STINK

Pete: I was in bed last night, just about to drop off, when suddenly, 'tap, tap, tap' at the bloody window — you know who it was?

Dud: Who?

Pete: Bloody Mark Menzies, all chained up, yelling ‘Peter, Peter, l've got in with bad men and I need £5K out of petty cash, please help.’

DRONE OPINION

How the rot set in at the Express and made the paper a laughing stock

THESE front pages sum up how the Daily Express became a joke — an affliction from which it has never recovered. They date from the era of Richard Desmond who decided that the weather (not to mention house prices and Madeleine McCann) were the best way to sell the paper. Well, it beats quality journalism doesn’t it? 

The crazy policy was led by Peter Hill and his successor as editor Hugh ‘ Nice But Dim’ Whittow, who were just obeying orders from a chairman who knew nothing about how to sell a once great paper. At the time the backbench and the subs despaired of the madness.

The present editor Gary Jones, who calls himself a Socialist, has taken the paper even further right down the S-bend with its unstinting support for the most unpopular government in living memory. Next stop the sewer.

Beaverbrook and Christiansen must be turning in their graves.

Randy monk goosing girls at a monastery? Take that with a pinch of salt, Bert

By GEORGE DEARSLEY

Journalists have been known to embellish stories to help their flow. But Newcastle freelance Bert Horsfall was a master of the craft. 

Facts may have been sacred to C.P. Scott but to Bert they were very much optional. I have told elsewhere in the Drone about Bert, who emigrated to Spain. But I was reminded recently of a story he filed about “the randy monk of Randa”. 

Bert stalked a monastery in Mallorca, where allegedly the saucy monk would goose female visitors. The complaints of inappropriate touching were so common that word had even reached the Vatican, Bert claimed. He quoted an irate former RAF wing commander from Surrey (who of course did not wish to be named) whose wife had been molested. 

Daily Star newsdesk executive Chris Benfield instructed me to check out all retired wing commanders from Surrey in a bid to find the woman’s husband for an in-depth interview. I had to remind Chris of Bert’s tenuous grip on reality.

How lucky I am to be old, by Hitch, 72

OUR MAN IN MOSCOW: Express correspondent Peter Hitchens in 1984

One of the ways my many social media critics try to insult me, says PETER HITCHENS in the Daily Mail, is by calling me old. They seem to think this is a “brilliant point” – that because I am old, I must be stupid. I respond by telling them I hope they will “one day be lucky enough to be old themselves”. 

Because in my 72 years, I’ve seen and done a fair amount. I’ve marvelled at the “deep blue stratosphere” from a Concorde flight deck, and seen the “fiery red and orange” of an express steam locomotive on a winter’s evening, back when that was normal. I’ve crossed the International Date Line backwards, between Siberia and Alaska, from Monday morning to the previous Sunday afternoon. I met Margaret Thatcher, who made it clear I wasn’t to “linger in her presence”, and was told by Tony Blair, at a press conference, to “sit down and stop being bad”.

I passed many times through the Berlin Wall and “stood in the freezing snow, warmed by a pair of Communist-built long johns, as Marxism-Leninism collapsed in Prague in 1989”. I’ve been frightened out of my wits by Islamist gangsters in Somalia, attended divine service in a nuclear missile submarine, and wandered amid the radioactive dust of a nuclear test site. 

I’ve seen “chain gangs at work, two American executions, one Soviet massacre and several Nazi concentration camps”. I’ve been chased down the street by the East German People’s Police – they weren’t as fast as me – and been refused entry to a “rather interesting-looking bar” in North Korea. So yes, call me old all you like. “Don’t you wish you were old too?”

DRONE PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS

Picture of the Year

Reform MP Lee Anderson advertises his new business. Allegedly.