It must have seemed a good idea at the time at Telegraph HQ. In the wake of the BBC2 UKIP hit piece (“six months of filming, focus on four people”)the DT let loose their “showbiz editor” Anita Singh just to add a few knifecuts to the supposedly twitching UKIP corpse.

Well, folks, Anita delivered, in spades. Naturally she homed in on Cllr Rozanne Duncan’s “negroid” comments to imply that she had revealed the true face of UKIP – subliminally reinforced with a screenshot of a Times article on the subject. Then, just to add fuel to the flames she revealed that Ms Duncan not only smoked but also rolled her own fags….quelle horreur!!!!!!

But that was not enough for the “gifted and talented” Ms Singh. As a demonstration of her journalistic skills she showed a pic of Nigel Farage with a local vicar and poked fun at a UKIP official’s name…nudge nudge, wink wink, gedditt?

But for Anita the killer moment was when she was able to prove how UKIP members were so common and unsophisticated, dahling….they actually have collections of porcelain clowns…..oh  my gawdddddd. Who the hell are these people?????

Well, Anita, no doubt you and the other Telegraph hacks were screeching with laughter in the wine bar – there’s probably not a single porcelain clown in any part of Richard Curtis Land where you and your media/showbiz gaggle hang out. But in places like Margate and Thurrock and Clacton and Grimsby, well outside the metropolitan bubble, you’ll find quite a few….clowns, cats, shepherds…

Of course Cllr Duncan’s remarks were ill considered and the party acted quickly by expelling her. But if you look at it from another angle after six months filming that was the only major blooper that emerged – hardly a devastating indictment of the whole Thanet South UKIP membership.

But the fact that Anita Singh was so keen to sneer at the clowns says more about her and her media friends and their failure to grasp the significance of the UKIP surge than it does about the ordinary folk of the Kent coast.

A few days ago The Daily Telegraph sank to a new low in its coverage of UKIP. Of course it seems hardly possible that the circulation losing Telegraph could sink even lower in its coverage of UKIP. After all their hacks, no doubt under instructions from Tory HQ, have been merrily dumping on the party since early 2013 when Diane James nearly won the Eastleigh by election for UKIP and knocked a Cameron cutie into third place

Publicly dismissing Eastleigh as a blip, in private the editorial team reached out to Tory high command and offered to headline any item that appeared to show Nigel Farage and UKIP in a negative way supplied to them by Tory staff – be it true, half true or simply inadvertent. The Telegraph (and the Mail) gleefully went to work in the weeks leading up to the 2013 local elections.

UKIP won more council seats than they had ever won before.

Nevertheless during subsequent by elections, local elections and Euro elections the anti UKIP drumbeat continued – and the party continued to prosper both at the ballot box and the polls.

Finally the bright young things in the Telegraph officers mess have begun to grasp that their two year offensive has been a dismal failure and they have admitted such in a recent, rather pathetic cri de Coeur

If Labour’s performance in the long general election campaign has thus far been so risible, why do the polls remain so close? For the simple, frustrating reason that the British centre-Right is split. While Labour is stuck at around 30 per cent of the prospective vote, the Tories fail to build up a comparative advantage because so much of their support is sapped away by the Ukip revolt. Yet Ukip’s supporters ought to consider the warnings of businessmen and think carefully about the consequences of dividing the centre-Right and letting Labour back into power by default. Labour is anti-capitalist at a time when the country desperately needs innovation and enterprise. Its accidental victory could indeed be a “catastrophe” for Britain.

Yes folks, it’s the familiar Vote UKIP Get Miliband Ploy – the old ones are the best ones, after all.…

Ignoring for the moment the assumption that UKIP supporters are fans of big business, multi nationals and corporate tax avoidance let’s just ask ourselves why the Telegraph failed to answer the obvious question – why is so much Tory support “sapped away” by the UKIP revolt – and why, instead of burying their heads deep into Cameron’s posterior for two years hasn’t the Telegraph given some attention to analysing this phenomenon and made a serious and sympathetic attempt to understand it rather than encouraging the sneering, dismissive put downs peddled on an almost daily basis by their political hacks.

The answer, I fear, is that the Telegraph, like much of the metropolitan media, is targeting Richard Curtis Land, those parts of London where the bright young things supposedly chatter at dinner parties and network about servants, food, fashion and culture and where the Tesco shelf fillers, taxi drivers and hairdressers are peripheral to the action, like the sentries or country yokels in a Shakespeare play.

Trouble is that the Richard Curtis strategy isn’t working. The Telegraph is remorselessly losing circulation, alienating much of its old core readership without gaining the “bright young things” while UKIP is gaining support from those very “peripherals” who feel they have been left behind.

Sad for it was once a great paper…

At the end of yet another pointless article about education in the Speccie this gem appeared

I believe that Teachers become stale due to teaching the same subject year after year after year……I have often wondered if they would benefit from having a six/twelve month sabbatical (retaining their pay and pensions etc) so that they could work in similar occupations as their pupils might eventually choose.Then they might have a clearer idea of the importance of their profession.

Otherwise, they are like politicians, who attempt to run the country, but have never had a ‘real’ job.

As a former teacher (comprehensives 1964-1999) this “real job” remark used to make me smile as we managed an establishment of 1000 pupils, 100 staff (teachers and support) a large rambling estate and a £2m budget.

Nevertheless in the 1980s we duly obeyed our political masters when we were told how much we could learn about management from the business sector. So a lot of government funding went into arranging courses where we public sector drones could gather pearls of wisdom from management gurus telling us how their companies (IBM, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer) did it so well.

We gawped as those business suited golden boys and girls sketched their diagrams, lovingly caressed their bullet points and brainstormed us with bolt-ons and blueskies and, of course, thinking out of the box.

Naturally, being overpaid and underworked taxpayer bleeding public sector drones with little idea of the “real world”, none of us were nasty enough to even feel a slight tremor of Schadenfreude when, at the end of the 80s we learned that IBM, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer were underperforming quite badly due to management failures.

After all we didn’t work in the “real world”….