My daughter and I went to see the Paddington film last night. It is just as delightful as all who have seen the previews have said and written.

Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times last week of Paddington, the immigrant even Ukip loves, and how he had assimilated into a multicultural society, becoming more English than the English. 

I brought away a different image and found the film, intentionally or otherwise, deeply political.

Should I post a spoiler alert here? Possibly. If so, please take it as read.

The film starts with a Pathé News style documentary about an explorer wandering through the jungle of Darkest Peru, where he encounters and befriends a bear couple. "If you ever come to London," he tells them - having taught them English and a love of marmalade - "you will be assured a warm welcome."

Fast forward and we find the now-elderly bear couple living with their ebullient nephew, the bear-to-be-called Paddington. Disaster strikes and the little chap is packed off to London, that "warm welcome" promise echoing in his ears.
On the platform at the station that gave him his name, he remembers his lessons and raises his hat and remarks upon the weather, only to be jostled and trampled by commuters rushing about their business. When he is given a night's shelter by the Browns, their oily Rigsby-like neighbour is affronted. Apart from the hippie Mrs Brown, fellow immigrant Mr Grüber is alone in offering that promised warm welcome.

The explorer who chose to leave the bears to live in peace rather than take them home as "specimens" was, we later learn, ostracised for suggesting that anyone or anything who didn't do the crossword or take tea at Fortnum's could be regarded as civilised.
It is not a flattering portrait of Britain, then - or now. 

A jaundiced view? Possibly. One coloured by this morning's national newspaper front pages. 

A small country with ten national newspapers (a dozen, if you count the FT and Morning Star) might be expected to see its society accurately reflected on the newsstands. So what do we see today? Diversity? Multiculturalism? Do we see that warmth that Paddington was promised?

No, we see rejection, selfishness, triviality. Five papers splash on our terror of immigration; eight carry stories and/or photographs of people fighting to buy a cut-price coffee maker that will sit unused in a cupboard. The only paper to feature neither on the front - The Times - addresses a different kind of consumerism with an oversized cake and the word Eat! in huge letters.

"FREE!" "40% OFF!" "50% Off!" scream the puffs in tacit acceptance that - apart from the prospect of watching celebrities' sexual encounters in the jungle - pandering to greed is the only thing that sells.

And in the ultimate sign of selfishness, the Mirror tells us about a woman who left five children in the charge of her 14-year-old son to go on holiday to Australia.

This isn't a society to which I wish to belong.
Nor is it one I recognise.

In my cosy middle-class village we work hard, we pull together, we celebrate each other's achievements and go to each other's aid in times of difficulty. 
I refuse to believe that this approach to life is unique to our corner of Essex (yes, Essex - that much-mocked county of bigoted tattooed white van men and orange women in stilettos). I believe that it is true of communities all over the country.

I may be naive, but I am also confident that for most people immigration is not the most pressing concern.

(I would also venture to predict that if and when a referendum is held on EU membership, a greater percentage will vote to remain in the community than voted to keep Scotland as part of the United Kingdom.)

A rational appraisal of how we got to the point where people are fighting over a giant flatscreen television set in a free country where foreigners are vilified for wanting to come here and teenagers are banged up for being ill? 
That I would like to read.
In the meantime, it's time for a couple of those make-you-less-unhappy pills.

Oh dear, another disastrous business chief wrecking the company and waltzing off into the sunset with a bumper payoff.

This one, it seems, blagged her way into the job, cut Thomas Cook's market value by £360m in her brief stay and pocketed £8m for her trouble.
Not quite.

The departure of Harriet Green as the tour operator's chief executive is the main business story in every paper today (apart from the Daily Star). She's also on the front page of the Times, which follows up with a home news story, a business spread and a business commentary. 

It is one of those counter-intuitive statistics - like the one about more Poles living in New York (it used to be Chicago) than in any city other than Warsaw - that more business people read The Times than any other national paper, including the FT. So if The Times gives Green that much space we can be sure that it's not just another here-today-gone-tomorrow, pick-up-the-payoff story.

The Mail's headline, taken piece by piece, is accurate. But it gives totally the wrong impression.

Harriet Green did email the Thomas Cook out of the blue to tell him that his company needed her. She was right. It did. She is a turnaround specialist and Cook was in a mess. It had debts of £1.6bn, its market cap was £146m and its share price had fallen to 11p.

That was in 2012. Yesterday she left the company abruptly and its share price fell by 18%, wiping - as the Mail reports - some £360m from its value (now nearly £2bn). The immediate assumption of many was that the slump was because of her departure. How would the business manage without its saviour?
Cooler heads suggested that the company results, complete with a warning note on next year's profit expectations, also announced yesterday may have had more to do with the decline.
 
Is this labouring the point over the headlne? Probably. And I haven't even started on the first word yet. So let's move on to the text. 

This is a page three lead. She is an attractive woman who has done something unusual and it's fair for the Mail to tailor the story for its "lay" mostly-female readership. The breathlessness of the intro pars are understandable - and they do at least get across the point that Green had been a success rather than a par-for-the-course big-payoff failure.

The story is written by City Correspondent James Salmon, who sneaks quite a few businessy facts into the lifestyle narrative. The final two pars are jam-packed and along the way he tells us that Green's strategy had involved 2,500 job cuts and the closure of more than 300 travel agencies.

Neither the Guardian nor the Sun pulls its punches in reporting that Green had been sacked, or ousted. The Mail is hintier, pointing out that she had said only last week that there were many things yet to be done.

The paper is not renowned for its approval of women in the workplace and it tends to hold the belief that those who are successful must be strident, demanding, careless of their families and either unfeminine or glamorous wonderwomen.

Green falls into the latter category. In the Mail's book she is a fitness fanatic with a voracious work ethic who needs less sleep than Margaret Thatcher. She spends the week in a five-star London hotel away from her husband - the man she chose in seven seconds but whom she sees at their Oxford home only at weekends. She is in the gym with her former Royal Marine personal trainer at 5.30am and is a devotee of hatha yoga. 

We learn her height, that she likes of diamonds and designer clothes - and that fellow board members had become frustrated by the "personality cult" that she had "cultivated with outspoken comments on everything from working mothers to overweight staff". 
How much of that would we have been told had a man made a similar unexpected departure?

The bottom of the piece directs us to a commentary in the business section headlined "Why Harriet had to go" in which Associate City Editor Ruth Sutherland's admiration for Green is apparent, even while conforming with the Mail ethos:

The interview in question appeared in The Times Saturday Magazine a month ago. Was it "jaw-dropping"? No, it was an excellent read, thoroughly businesslike and balanced. Damian Whitworth talked to Green, to her staff and to her colleagues. To put that whirlwind marriage in context, she says that she chose Graham Clarkson in seven seconds but that he took more than nine months to reach the same conclusion. In other words, like many men and women before her, she took one look and thought "he's the one". They used to call it love at first sight. Nobody said it had to be mutual.

The Whitworth interview is strong - and recent - enough to have formed the backbone of most of today's coverage. All the rivals had to do was add the pejorative verbs and adjectives:

The Guardian was happy to oblige, emphasisng Green's "robust" management style and publishing more tittle tattle than the Mail: colleagues living in fear of her public humiliations; employees receiving dressings-down while her beautician gives her a manicure; "ballistic" demands of her brother, hired as a driver. Allegations which are all denied - after the mud has been thrown and stuck.
Jim Armitage in the Independent couldn't resist having Green "stomping around" in her Gucci heels.

But that, joyously, was that. The Express ran a straight story and a good commentary on its far-back City page. The Sun, too, avoided the clichés. The Times's coverage across the board was exemplary, with some nice work from Dominic Walsh and a charming little panel from Martin Waller on the curse of awards. Green recently won Veuve Clicquot's businesswoman of the year prize and Waller's piece recalls others who fell off the pedestal no sooner than they had been crowned. 

The paper had the advantage, of course, of that Whitworth magazine special - which was equally straight down the line.  (It even showed gender equality in giving us the athletic preferences of others in the Thomas Cook team, including Green's successor,) 

The Times has devoted much space to the disproportionate number of women in top FT companies' boardrooms. The Mail's page three heading aside, today Fleet Street's male-dominated business departments showed that they have moved into the current century. Now all we need is for those old boardroom bores, who might tolerate a roasting from a man but definitely not from a woman, to get with the programme.

The killing of Lee Rigby was one of those dreadful events that made us realise that the unimaginably awful could happen in our country, on our streets, almost before our eyes.

For some the natural response was to ask "How could this happen in our society, what have we done wrong, how can we put it right?" 

For others the automatic reaction was to find people to blame, to look at others rather than themselves, to seek vengeance rather than enlightenment.

Half of today's newspapers splash on the Intelligence and Security Committee's report on the murder. Its key conclusion was that while there were signs of the killers' intent  and mistakes by the security services - who were on their case - little, if anything, could have been done to prevent the eventual atrocity.

That is not the stuff of splash headings. Far better fodder can be found in the section of the report relating to "graphic" Facebook messages between Michael Adebowale and an extremist in Yemen. 

Ah yes, Facebook has blood on its hands. Facebook kept quiet about the plotting. It "never flagged up one of the killers crowing of a lust to murder a soldier"  and is "still failing to co-operate with the probe" reports the Sun. 
"Incredibly, Facebook had already disabled seven of Adebowale's accounts - five of which were flagged over links to extremism - without informing security services," writes the Mail. Facebook is a "safe haven for terrorists," highlights the Telegraph.

As several papers say, Facebook has 31 million users. That's quite a lot of accounts to keep tabs on. That FB had acted against several of Adebowale's profiles suggests that it is aware of the uses to which the site can be put and accepts a level of responsiblity for people's security.

That's not quite the same as being an ad-hoc arm of any particular country's security services, spying on its customers and snitching on them to the authorities. Is that really what our national newspapers want it to become? Papers that have been outraged by invasions of journalists' privacy by the police? Papers that have made much of how all-pervasive social media businesses have become, how they intrude into our lives and share our personal details?

Let's hope not. But the opportunity to have a go at those wicked "tax-avoiding internet giants" is not to be missed. The Mail asks why Cameron "cosies up" to them, saying that concerns about their links with Downing Street "reached fever pitch" in the summer with the appointment of Joanna Shields to the Lords. It must have been the fine weather that caused SubScribe to overlook this scandal. 

Lady Shields had been a big cheese not only with Facebook but also with Google and Bebo. What is more Cameron is a close friend of Rachel Whetstone, Google's head of communications, who is married to a man who used to be a policy chief at No 10.

What has this got to do with Fusilier Rigby? Heaven knows. 

The Mail also reports suggestions that publication of the ISC's findings had been manipulated to push through draconian anti-terror powers, but it gives greater prominence to demands that the Communications Data Bill, which would have required internet companies to keep records of every site their customers visited. That seems more relevant to the Rigby report - but instead of presenting those calls straight, the Mail puts them under the heading "Snowden leaks cost lives, say terror experts". 

And so instead of addressing a legitimate story in detail, the paper has used a great chunk of the space allotted for its coverage to beat its own ideological drum. 

Thank heavens for the more rational coverage of the Guardian, Independent and Times. And thank heavens, in particular, for the commonsense of Alan Travis who writes in the Guardian:

Gameoldgirl had a rare morning away from the laptop today. Up and on the train to the big city while it was still dark, it was a strange experience. Not getting up at 5.30am. Not paying a quid a mile for the journey from Essex into Liverpool Street (ouch!). Not even coming home with a piece of glass that now sits proudly on the piano.
No, the strange thing was that, while most people in the carriage had with strings in their ears and were playing with tablets and smartphones, there was a man in his fifties standing reading a newspaper. And it was the Daily Express. 
This website and its predecessor blog has had many a laugh at the Express's expense. This bit of nonsense from last year remains one of the most well read, and last month we had some fun with its little sister the Star and its mission to scare readers half to death.
There have been more serious concerns: women bulging out of bikinis on the front page of the Star are largely responsible for Tesco's decision to redesign its newspaper displays so that pre-school children are not confronted with body parts they should not be encountering for at least another decade. The jungle/Big Brother obsession is unfathomable - especially since Richard Desmond has divested himself of Channel 5, which broadcasts BB.
And then there's the Express and immigration, which is a real worry. It can write about statins and dementia and diabetes forever and it probably won't do any harm, but the poison on Europe and migrants is unpalatable.
Gameoldgirl has always rather fancied editing the Express. Yes, it's a fool's errand. But never mind that, it's not going to happen. There's something irresistible about taking over a team at the bottom of its game; where's the fun in inheriting a successful model? Ask David Moyes.
Returning from London, the editor of this website discovered that the sports blogger had gone all independent and written about the demise of the Express sports staff - and a sorry read it is, too.
The big question in all this - as the NUJ keeps asking the proprietor - is "If you don't love it, why don't you let it go?"
It's unfathomable. Money isn't in short supply at Northern & Shell after the sale of Channel 5. If he's not going to invest in his papers, why is he clinging on to them? Is it greed? Does he think that newspaper proprietorship automatically equals political influence?
Just imagine if he could be persuaded to sell and just imagine if a liberal, Centre-Left owner could be found to take on the Mail and the Telegraph and increase the diversity of Fleet Street at a stroke.
I think I'll put it on my Christmas wish list.

Protecting our privacy is becoming trickier by the day.
This week the Mail has reported that Russian websites are watching British families through their computer webcams and streaming their lives online.
Is this any more or less sinister than GCHQ monitoring our emails and phone calls? Or than police following and keeping dossiers on people not suspected of breaking any laws? 
We fret about privacy and security online and update our Facebook status with toothless assertions as to our copyright. But we don't read the T&Cs when we sign up for a new service or app. We allow our computers to remember our passwords, which means we forget them ourselves. We joke about the funeral, dating or slimming ads that crop up on our pages, and become irritated when ads for something we bought online a couple of weeks ago keep appearing. If you're so damn clever Mr Internet, you should know I've got this, and don't need another one. 
And when we sign up for a new app or program, we happily "sign in with Twitter" to avoid the faff of having to create another new profile and another immemorable password - thus giving the newbie access to shedloads of personal information just so that we can play Scrabble or Candy Crush with minimum fuss.
"I'd like to join your network," says a LinkedIn email from someone you've never heard of, but who seems to be quite important in their field. If they're grand enough and there are enough shared contacts, we might succumb. Madness.
Last week four people in America started a class action against LinkedIn for sharing information with potential employers - a service the website actively promotes by telling businesses: "Get the real story on any candidate” and “find references who can give real, honest, feedback”.  
Away from the computer, we collect "loyalty" cards whose real purpose is not to reward customers for consistent patronage, but to spy on their shopping habits, to conduct market research on the cheap.
It's all pretty frightening. Some might even choose to liken it to Big Brother (Orwell, not Endemol). As The Times did on Wednesday.

This spread, on pages 16 and 17, took a look at how Google was weaving its tentacles through every thread of its users' lives. I have read it several times and have yet to find the quote that makes the main heading, but that may be my failing rather than the paper's. The anecdote that provides the way into the main story is interesting: a couple decide to get married but keep the news as their secret. Before they know it, they are knee-deep in ads for diamonds and honeymoons. They conclude that Google must be monitoring their private chats and decide to remove the company from their lives.
There is no news story to justify this glorified case study, nor indeed, is there evidence to back up the page one write-off:

The newly betrothed Janet Vertesi is the only user quoted in the spread, and while she says that friends and family are asking her how to live without Google, that doesn't really warrant the "growing boycott" line.
The newsiest bit of the piece is a Pew Organisation poll that found that 91% of Americans surveyed felt they had lost control of how personal information was collected "by companies such as Google".
This survey of 607 adults was published on November 12. Its purpose was to see how people's perceptions of privacy and security may have changed since the Snowden revelations. The 91% statistic was highlighted as its most striking finding.  
Setting aside the fact that the sample was small, let us look at what the survey report had to say on the question of personal information. Indeed, let us reproduce that section in full:

So there it is. The word "Google" does not appear.
The Times story goes on to say that Google spent more in donations to midterm political campaigns than Goldman Sachs and that its financing projects aimed at finding a cure for Parkinson's and a pill to beat cancer. It might also have mentioned that it is running an Ebola appeal in which it gives $2 for every dollar donated.
Much is made, as might be expected, of the "don't be evil" motto and the big picture panel and sidebar focus on exotic parties, tigers, Stevie Wonder -  as though young men anywhere in the world who found themselves with riches unimagined might behave differently.
The analysis in the outside column mentions tax avoidance and the search results suppressed under the "right to be forgotten" rule - without mentioning that this is happening as a result of the failure of Google's appeal against a European ruling. Yes, it's censorship. But it's also obeying European law.

What many Times readers must wonder when they come across this spread is "What's this all about?"
There is no doubt that the pervasiveness of Google is troubling. It is a subject worthy of proper consideration. The whole question of our privacy needs looking at in depth. But this isn't it.

Google is the biggest player in the game and the knives are out. Earlier this month an organisation called Public Citizen published a paper called Mission Creep-y, which also addressed the company's growing influence. The video below shows a television discussion of that research.

All of this comes as Google tries to reach agreement in a four-year-old antitrust battle with the EU. European regulators were concerned about the way search results were appearing and in February the company appeared to have reached a settlement. But rivals, politicians and publishers were unhappy and on September 23 the competition commissioner Joaquin Alumunia announced that he had told Google that it had to come up with a better offer on how it would change its practices or face formal charges.
Funnily enough, News Corp's chief executive Robert Thomson had written to Alumunia a couple of weeks earlier urging just such a course of action. Google, Thomson said, was a platform for piracy. It was an "egregious" aggregator that was "willing to exploit its dominant market position to stifle competition". 
Google swiftly responded - and here is the FT's presumably impartial take on the spat.
News Corp wasn't taking any risks, and last month James Murdoch joined in during a session at the Mipcom television conference in Cannes:

If James was being "diplomatic", Dad has made no bones about his opinion of the "parasitic, content kleptomaniac plagiarists" of Google, not least in series of tweets over the years: 

In the current European campaign, it's not quite clear whether the problem is tax avoidance or market domination - neither topics on which News Corp can reasonably speak without pots and kettles being mentioned - but what is obvious is that the Murdoch company is uncomfortable with Google's spreading influence. Possibly rightly so. But it is worth noting that the Thomson and Murdoch interventions are concerned not with personal privacy - as the Times spread is - but with Google's perceived advantages and practices as a business rival.

The German publisher Axel Springer is equally unenchanted with the boys from Silicon Valley. In April its chief executive Mathias Döpfner published an open letter to Google chief Eric Schmidt in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying he was afraid of Google, and accusing it and Facebook of having a "totalitarian mentality like the Stasi or other secret police in service of a dictatorship". It wanted, he wrote, to create “superstate that can navigate its floating kingdom undisturbed by any and all nation-states and their laws”.
In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review this week Döpfner identified a divergence of opinion between America and Europe. The Americans thought Europeans were backward-looking and failed to understand that the tech economy was based on data.
Europe, he said, knew from history that total transparency and total control of data led to totalitarian societies.

So there are plenty who take issue with Google's trajectory. Whether it becomes News Corp and its papers to question other businesses that are dominant in their markets, that want to drive competitors to the wall or that don't pay their fair share of taxes is for others to debate. 
But as an observer of journalism, I found The Times's out-of-the-blue spread unsatisfying. The associated leader was quite restrained, emphasising the point that people do have a choice whether to use Google. Maybe John Witherow was not entirely comfortable with the note struck by his master's voice, yet felt obliged to beat the corporate drum.
There is a big issue here to be tackled journalistically, but it requires an overarching approach and heavy investment in personnel and money - both resources in short supply. 
Who can look at the entire question of privacy, personal security and surveillance without being accused of having a vested interest? 
Someone needs to.

A pretty woman in a red dress is a front-page favourite for certain newspapers, so the Telegraph backbench might have been congratulating themselves on a banker with this shot of Olympic star Jessica Ennis-Hill showing a bit of cleavage. Everyone loves Jessica. She should shift a few papers.
So there she was on the front page that was sent to the television stations and tweeted last night; a shaft of colour at the heart of the stories the Telegraph believes are the most important for us to know about today: the EU and immigration, the murder of Lee Rigby, overpaid footballers. And at the top there was another pretty woman - Jennifer Lawrence in a puff for an interview in the weekly review.

Ennis-Hill was difficult to spot, however, on the front page that potential readers doing their weekly shop at Sainsbury's will have seen. She was tucked up in the righthand corner under a big purple sticker.  
In choosing their Saturday reading, our shoppers were expected to decide between home-alone children in the Times, Isis in the Independent, a hospital crisis in the Guardian, VIP child abuse in the Mail - and an advertisement for a dress.
The Times was the last paper to swap advertising for editorial on the front page in 1966. It was a good commercial decision. Now papers are reversing the process with increasing regularity. It is a bad commercial decision.
There is no disputing that newspapers need advertising to survive. In the difficult financial climate of the past six years, businesses have cut back on their promotion budgets and, with newspapers desperate for a bigger slice of the smaller cake, savvy advertisers have been playing hard to get.
Full-page ads are expensive and readers are apt to turn over. A cheaper 33x5 in a broadsheet or a 25x4 in a tabloid means there is editorial on the page to keep the potential customer's attention, yet the ad still dominates. 
So far, so clever. 
With the market on their side, advertisers have become more demanding and we have seen a proliferation of hideous shapes. The worst of these so far have been those where the ad starts top left of a spread, runs across the centre - cutting the editorial in half - and then finishes bottom right.

Today the Telegraph has an advertisement in the middle of page 18, where an editorial picture might be expected to live.
This is an unwise precedent, but at least by the time the reader gets to the page he or she will have bought the paper. 
The far greater sin is to sell the front page. 
Newspapers may be desperate for advertising, but they are even more desperate for sales. Without sales, advertisers won't want to know - or will make increasingly wild demands about what they get for their money. That will in turn make the product increasingly less attractive and everyone ends up the loser: newspaper, advertiser, reader.
The front page is a newspaper's shop window. You'd have thought that was so obvious that it wasn't worth saying. If it pulls down the blinds so that the customer can't get a glimpse of what's on offer, that customer will go elsewhere. No casual reader will buy the Telegraph today on the basis of a monochrome dress ad. 
Jason Seiken wants to rule a digital world and he may have given up on street sales. They may well account for such a small proportion of circulation that the income from the front-page ad outstrips the lost revenue from casual sales.
But a newspaper sells on the basis of its journalism. To hide it under a commercial wrapper is to suggest that it is not valued. And from an organisation that is in the process of decimating its editorial staff, that's a worrying thought.
Editor's blog: Why is it "inevitable" that change equals job cuts?

When Fleet Street latches on to something it is always reluctant to let go - and politicians can generally be relied upon to tag along.
So it has been with the centenary of the Great War and the Tower of London poppies.
The photograph above is of Crawford Butler planting the first of Paul Cummins's ceramic poppies on July 17. You are unlikely to have seen it in print, but you can read the Royal British Legion's press release from the day here. 

 A set of photographs taken a couple of weeks later attracted more attention. Poppies had started to pour from the tower and flow into the moat. They still, however, had to compete with other commemorations of the start of the First World War planned for the first week of August.
Newspapers reported, as they have done repeatedly since, that there would eventually be 888,246 poppies to represent the British and colonial dead of that war. 
The memorial, which was brought into being through a collaboration between Cummins, the designer Tom Piper, Historic Royal Palaces and the Royal British Legion,  would take more than three months to complete, with the last poppy being planted today - Armistice Day. The work would then be dismantled and the flowers, which were being offered for sale for £25 each, sent to their new owners.

As it happens, Cummins's idea is not quite as original as we might think. Two years ago 10,000 pink and white ceramic flowers on metal stems blossomed outside Somerset House. They were the work of the Chilean artist Fernando Casasempere, whose installation Out of Sync depicted the coming of spring. It was in position for six weeks.
This year's Tower team  may not have expected their efforts to be quite as widely appreciated as it has been, but they seem to have had a fair idea - the figure of four million visitors first appeared weeks ago and has remained constant, though how anyone can put a number on people in a public place over a three-month period heaven knows.
As the installation grew and the time available to look at it shrunk, it was inevitable that a chorus would sing out and call for the poppies to stay forever. This was totally to misunderstand the premise of the artwork,  whose life was intentionally brief - as were those of the men it honours - and transient - as were the poppies that bloomed on Flanders fields the year after the ceasefire. 
There were also practicalities. Ceramics, like real poppies, don't like frost. They wouldn't survive the winter and, unlike the real-life inspiration, they would not reappear next year.
There was also the small fact that they had been sold. Charities whose task is to support the families of the fallen and those injured in the service of their country had come to count on the funds so raised. Were we to put aside the needs of the bereaved and wounded so that we could have a day out to swap Grandpa stories over a picnic?
This week we were told that parts of the installation had been granted a reprieve: the frames of flowers that flow from the window and across the drawbridge would stay put until the end of the month and then go on tour. Rejoice, rejoice! as Mrs Thatcher would have instructed.

The party leaders had recognised a bandwagon when there was one to jump on, and backed an extension so that more people (Londoners/voters) could see this wonderful spectacle. 
Nigel Farage turned up sporting a giant poppy on his cashmere overcoat at the beginning of this week and was so moved that he had to turn away so that the cameras could capture his tears.
David Cameron, who had allowed himself a Blair-like populist comment amid the faux outrage over Jonathan Jones's Guardian blog, was there with Samantha yesterday, looking suitably pious as they planted their poppies. He also apparently congratulated the Evening Standard on its one-day "campaign".
Now, far be it from SubScribe to pour antifreeze into the champagne flutes, but can we be sensible for a moment? We're in the mood for looking back, so let's recall those primary school arithmetic problems and apply them to this situation:

If it takes 8,000 volunteers three months to assemble and plant 888,246 poppies, how long will it take a similar number of volunteers to pick them and pack them away ready for cleaning and despatch?

There is no set answer, but you can bet it's not 24 hours. The poppies won't disappear by tomorrow night. The Telegraph suggested last month that it would take a couple of weeks. 
In other words, politicians and the Press have delivered to a sentimental public a bonus that it was going to get anyway.

I'm sorry if this sounds cynical. But there's an air of the circus around this and it isn't helped by the merchandising from businesses promising a sliver of their profits on the sale of poppy bracelets, poppy bags, poppy tea towels and poppy table mats.
Yes, many, many of the people in the crowds clamouring for a glimpse of the poppies were there to remember great-grandfathers who died in the war - or husbands, sons and daughters killed in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Equally, many were there just to look at the spectacle, to take selfies to post on Facebook with a bit of doggerel or a soppy caption.
Does that matter? Not a jot if they appreciated the art and it made them think. There's enough nastiness in the world for us to be able to accept a bit of social media syrup. 
But what of the politicians and the papers? What is the justification for the bullying of an art critic who dared to express a contrary opinion - especially as he has been almost universally misquoted as describing the poppies as a "Ukip-type memorial". It grieves a former sub to say this, but the "fake, trite, Ukip" stuff was in the headline (maybe, staffing being as it is these days, Jones wrote those too).
We can't expect harassed reporters, leader writers and columnists to look beyond the standfirst and the last par before they comment on what someone has written, so here's some help. What Jonathan Jones actually wrote in a considered article that has attracted 2,500 comments (by no means all unfavourable) was:

Still, Jones doesn't need SubScribe to defend him; he does that for himself in a subsequent post that you can read here.
For the Mail to attack the Guardian is not unexpected, but the Mirror, too, got in on the act this week when it criticised the paper because, alone among the nationals, it does not print a poppy on its titlepiece. For heaven's sake.
The Mirror also has its teeth in the BBC for failing to put the Joss Stone poppy single on its Radio1 and Radio2 playlists. This does seem a churlish decision from a state-funded organisation that is busy promoting its own charity record. But for the "intelligent tabloid" to splash on it one day and do a page lead follow-up saying essentially the same thing the next is a bit heavy-handed.
It is also, sadly, in tune with the tone of the "poppy fascism" that Jon Snow identified eight years ago.
Everyone must bow their heads and honour the dead. We, the Press, will ask questions of those who seek to profit (aka earn a living) from their efforts - but we will not hesitate to surf the waves of patriotism to our own advantage. Four papers have offered "free giant poppy posters" to try to lure readers; the Mail is giving away thousands of unique (oxymoronic) ceramic poppy brooches; the Times and the Mail are promoting luxury cruises, complete with butler service, that set off from Tower Bridge at a cost of between £6,000 and £23,000 per person. The Royal British Legion poppy logo features prominently in the centre of the newspaper ads, along with the promise of a £100 donation for every ticket sold. Corporate generosity knows no bounds.
Those Mail brooches are particularly interesting. Readers have to collect 12 unique (there's that word again) numbers over a fortnight to enter a lottery for one of the 3,000 unique ceramic brooches on offer. The numbers are being printed in the paper every day for 15 days and two must come from Saturday issues. The weekday Mail costs 60p and the Saturday paper 90p, so the reader must spend £7.80 for a chance of obtaining one of these "free" brooches. There is no mention of post and packing.
Should they be unlucky, "thousands more" will be released for sale over the coming weeks at £28. The paper says that it will donate £15 to the RBL for every poppy it gives away and that all profits from the subsequent sales will also go to the legion.
Laudable or opportunist?

Amid all this, there has been good writing.  The Guardian splashed yesterday on an essay by Jonathan Freedland comparing our act of remembrance with Germany's celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. (An anniversary as significant for today's generation as the start of the war 100 years ago, but one given short shrift by most papers.)
Ben Macintyre and Patrick Kidd have written movingly but unsentimentally about today's events for the Times. The Independent yesterday ran an extract from Chris McNab's book about the symbolism of the poppy. 
The pictures, too, have been stunning - especially today's of the rainbow. Tomorrow we can expect to see 13-year-old Harry Hayes planting the final flower in the moat. 

We have fallen in love with the poppy. Even the GCHQ snoopers we love to embraced the flower to honour the war dead with this rather splendid formation created by 1,400 staff in capes.
For all the above caveats, the Tower poppies were - and are - special. So here is an aerial tour to round off this day of peace and remembrance.

When Benedict Cumberbatch announced his engagement to Sophie Hunter in the Times BMD columns last week he was as much congratulated for his class and style as for his forthcoming nuptials.
The Times, however, was mocked for "throwing away" the story in two 
paragraphs on page 20. 
This was, SubScribe was very reliably informed, not an oversight or a lack of understanding of the story's news value, but a deliberate decision presumably intended to show a similar level of style and class.
What a shame, then, that the paper seems to have been cowed by the masses into running a page 6 basement today on Geri Halliwell's forthcoming marriage to Christian Horner, who runs the Red Bull Formula One team.
It's a far less interesting story, but perhaps the paper felt it was worth making more of this one because it was the second celebrity engagement in a week and could be used to reinforce the perception that the Times is still the place to make important announcements. Others who have used the classifieds, it reports, include David Mitchell and Victoria Coren and the actor Eddie Redmayne.
In the Battle of Cool, I'm afraid the Mitchells and old Spice don't really match Redmayne and Cumberbatch. Perhaps the Times could try to present itself as the place for biopic Oscar candidates.
Editor's blog The Times scooped by itself? Don't you believe it

Scoop of the day appears on page 57 of The Times and occupies just ten lines of space.
The formal announcement of Benedict Cumberbatch's engagement to the director Sophie Hunter delighted Twitter, especially rivals who chose to mock the Thunderer for missing its own story.
It didn't. There was also a picture story on the "summaries" page, with a cross-reference to the BMDs.
SubScribe is delighted to learn that it was not a miscommunication, but deliberate.For far from being a blunder this was cute editing.
The summaries pages (which just happen to have been invented by a website editor not a million miles from SubScribe Towers) are among the most read of the paper. They're almost as quick to digest as nibs, but they're just that little bit longer and there are pictures to draw you in. 
So the story was certain to be spotted, but it was not so obvious that rival night desks would see it and catch up.
They will all go mad on it tomorrow, of course, and the Times will reap the publicity because they will all make a fuss of how the betrothal was announced - and probably carry ragouts. 
The Times will meanwhile have had a 24-hour start on the rest of the pack. So what will be most interesting is what it comes up with tomorrow.

No doubt about the top half-term attraction last week: the Tower of London poppies had families squashed six deep trying to snatch a glimpse and a selfie of Paul Cummins's inspired installation.
How many were there to remember the fallen, how many wanted to see the spectacle and how many just wanted to know what all the fuss was about is hard to say. What is certain is that a piece of art had captured the public imagination on a scale unseen probably since the Tutankhamun exhibition rolled into London in the 1970s. It had been thought that four million would turn out to take a peek, but that may turn out to be a wild underestimate, given the clamour last week.
SubScribe thought in August that newspapers didn't seem to be taking much of an interest in the project, although they perked up once Wills and Kate turned up.
Then there was some sniffing about where the money from the sale of the poppies at £25 a pop was going. Only a pound a flower for good causes? How dare the artist, his team of workers and those who  risked their money to finance the venture take anything for their efforts? 
That million quid or so from the poppy sales will have been magnified several times by the raised profile of this year's appeal - especially with the withdrawal from Afghanistan last month. And there will be plenty of commercial enterprises that will have benefited from the installation. I bet the organisers wish they hadn't decided to clear it away so swiftly after its completion in time for Remembrance Sunday next week
Money. Have you noticed how everything ends up being reduced to its monetary value. 
We just don't get public art in this country. "Look at that!" we cry. "We could have paid for 12 nurses for a year with that. What a waste of public money!"
Yes, we need nurses. But a dozen more on the national strength won't make much difference to anyone, and what happens next year when the money that would have been saved by not buying the painting or statue or book has gone.
A piece of art lasts forever. Or should. 
Public art, usually sculpture, lifts the spirit, makes the humdrum more bearable. It's not there for the elite and is as available to the harassed mum with a screaming toddler on one arm and a baby in a pram heading for the shopping centre as it is for the duchess. It is indiscriminate. It is there to be enjoyed by black, brown, white, young, old, fat, thin, married, single, able-bodied or lame. No one can stop you looking. No one can stop you interpreting it in your own way.
But public bodies have to be brave to invest in art. There will always be someone to complain, as the Birmingham MP John Hemming did this week, that councils should instead focus on emptying the dustbins. The Arts Council is always the first to have its budget cut whenever there is a financial squeeze. The whingeing about the licence fee - the "scandal" that we should have to pay a hundred and fifty quid per family for unlimited access to everything the BBC has to offer - is incessant. Particularly from the corporation's rivals.

So this week there has been much debate about the depiction of a pair of Brummie sisters and their children in bronze outside the Birmingham library. What sort of an ideal of family life is this supposed to represent? 
Well, as SubScribe has written elsewhere, there was no intention to produce an ideal but to portray a "real" family.
The Mail, which was appalled by Gillian Wearing's sculpture, has squealed with delight at the poppies - now that millions have given it their seal of approval. On Friday it devoted a full page, a leader and a diary note to attacking the Wearing work. You could fairly say it was sneering.
SubScribe chooses the word because that is the one it tossed at the Guardian when one of its arts critics dared to suggest that the poppies might be a bit sanitised as a representation of the blood of war. Jonathan Jones actually applauded the fact that people were moved by an artwork, but he took issue with the number of poppies in the installation - one to represent every British serviceman or woman killed during the First World War.
It was, he thought, too inward looking, too nationalistic. What about the millions from other nations? If we wanted peace and  reconciliation, why were we concerned only with our own? As a payoff he said that if Cummings had wanted to depict the horror of war, he might have filled the Tower moat with barbed wire and bones.
It was an opinion, an art critic's appraisal of a piece of art. Not all of the piece was antipathetic, but it was the questioning sentences that upset the Mail and prompted a debate into which even the Prime Minister was drawn.
Yes, it was that serious.

Here is the Mail last Wednesday. The "sneering Guardian" didn't call anything fake or seek to replace the poppies with bones. One of its critics used some of those words, not necessarily in the same order.

Robert Hardman followed up with an essay on Thursday. On Friday and Saturday the Mail's leader writer and two columnists all sang the same chorus of condemnation of the Gillian Wearing family statue. Perhaps whoever put Wednesday's spread together thought that all newspapers insisted that all of its writers stick to the party line. The idea that someone who was allowed to write a blog on the Guardian website might express a view that hadn't been vetted and approved by the Secretariat was unimaginable.
The Mail was not alone in this, because by the time Cameron was asked to comment on the Jones view, other papers were talking about "the Left" and "Guardian lefties" wanting the poppies wrenched out out and replaced by barbed wire.
The Mail and Jones are both right - and both wrong. Both pieces of art make a political statement. But both are deserving of their place in our open spaces. Public art matters. The French understand it - look at the "papier mache" sporting figures on the bridges over the road from Calais to Boulogne, whose only purpose is to look nice and raise a smile.  
We are rubbish at it. We are too prosaic. We see accurate almost-photographic style representations of everyday objects as good art. We need educating. Bring on more public art in all its forms.