Barking

A number of post referendum thoughts.

Firstly, the much maligned (by me) BBC showed they can be balanced. Even if Dimbleby looked as if he'd been slapped across the face with a wet fish as he announced the result. Maybe he was aiming for gravitas in a momentous soundbite. To be fair, I think they always are meticulously even-handed in campaigns like the referendum and general elections (though they can't ever seem to get a balanced Question Time audience, can they?). It's their everyday coverage that betrays their metropolitan groupthink. And, digressing briefly, hasn't the Glastonbury coverage been fabulous. It's been getting better by the year. Wasn't Adele's set super? Her final song, inevitably the wonderful "Someone Like You",  was something very special. I loved "Rolling In The Deep" with her - metaphorically, via the TV screen, you understand.

Secondly, print media isn't dead yet. Older people swung the referendum, with the proportion voting to leave increasing steadily from 27% in the 18-24 age group to 60% in 65+. As another aside, it's thought the turnout was probably much lower in younger age groups, just as in the General Election, when the turnout of 18-24s was a worryingly appalling 43%, against 78% for over 65s. "Stay-at-home young cost victory" said the Sunday Times today, a thought I had as BBC radio spoke to appalled Glastonbury-goers on Friday. "But how many of you voted?" I thought: "put up or shut up". Returning to my point, older people still read newspapers, which I believe were significantly towards "Leave". Not just the rabid Mail, Express and Sun but the Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) and Sunday Times also. Interestingly, the Mail and Times groups pointed different ways between their weekday and Sunday editions, showing how much the editor's opinion matters. The website Huffington Post estimated that the reach of the Vote Leave press was 4.8 million to 3 million for Remain, though they noted that the University of Loughborough, looking at the tone of the EU coverage in the papers, gave Leave a remarkable 82-18 advantage, weighted by circulation. Older people read the papers and vote, hence my feeling that newspapers were critical to the outcome.

But finally, the news story that brought a smirk to my furrowed brow on Friday morning was on the front page of the Daily Star. According to Natalie Rowe, a dominatrix who was on Big Brother (so a thoroughly reliable witness then), Chancellor George Osborne likes to be spanked on all fours until he howls like a dog. She's had things to say about George before, making claims in her 2013 book "Chief Whip - Memoirs of a Dominatrix" about George and cocaine in the 1990s. Somehow I think this is not the thing that points to the end of George's political career, as he tries to salvage what he can from the wreckage of the Cameron-Osborne project. A project which Niall Ferguson, writing in today's Sunday Times, says promised to represent our most effective government in 25 years.

David Cameron warned about "buyer's regret", of which we are hearing quite a bit. It's very hard to feel sympathy for anyone saying they didn't realise the implications of a leave vote: Project Fear arguably got the pitch and tone wrong (and was culpably short on optimism for the future) but surely any sentient being was capable of hearing the message.

It's not George but Dave who was barking in calling the referendum.