Clegg, Welby and Cherie Blair on Monday morning are as welcome as three farts in a spacesuit

Now that I no longer work for a living, I rather enjoy Monday mornings. There’s something about lying in bed listening to front gates shutting, car doors slamming and wage slaves hurriedly clip-clopping along a wet pavement on their way to a day of battles and boredom that doesn’t half cheer me up – I know it shouldn’t but it does. But in order to go on enjoying the warm glow that realising I don't have to go to work always brings, I may have to eschew all forms of news media at the start of the week.

When I retired just over three years ago, I tended to listen to the Today Programme first thing (when I got up early enough). I stopped doing that about two years ago when I realised that the endless stream of left-liberal propaganda invariably soured my mood until lunchtime.

Despite a lifelong aversion to watching television in the morning (partly as a result of once having to work on Breakfast TV programmes for almost a year) I took to leafing through the Telegraph while keeping an eye on the television screen. But while Today’s lefty groupthink smugness enraged me, the anodyne early-morning blatherings of TV news programmes left me feeling enervated: they drained the world of meaning and made existence seem oddly bleak. This could have had something to do with the “view” at the back of the BBC breakfast set – a strangely uninviting bucolic scene chosen, one presumes, to underline the depressing fact that the programme now comes from that throbbing hub of world events, Salford – or it could have been the endless succession of dreary northern nonentities bussed in from Manchester leavened with third-rate entertainers who happened to be appearing at the Bradford Empire (if it hasn’t been turned into a mosque).

I couldn’t even take evasive action by turning to Fox News. It’s the middle of the night in New York, and while I usually find shouty American positivity a tonic, presenters living a day-for-night existence tend to overdo it (there’s one black female presenter with scary eyes who exudes so much can-do pizzazz, I feel like hiding behind the sofa).

So now it’s just me and the Telegraph, which we pay to have delivered to our door (mainly so Mrs. G can do the crossword). The problem is that the print edition isn’t half as lively as the online version: rambunctious commentators seem to have to wipe their feet and mind their manners when writing for the paper. (I could take the Mail, of course, but that would be like mainlining right-wing heroin while eating breakfast.)

The other problem is that Monday appears to be the day for Nick Clegg to issue his regular weekly attack on the coalition government of which he is – sadly – a prominent member. Today, for instance, it’s a typically standard-issue left-wing attack on so-called free schools. He claims to be worried about “unqualified” teachers – while apparently untroubled that the state system’s qualified teachers have created a generation of British children who are amongst the most innumerate and illiterate in the developed world. (And using one failed Muslim free school as a stick with which to beat all the others is pretty ripe behaviour for one of this country’s most prominent apostles of multiculturalism.)

But I’ve learned to skate over Cleggie’s traditional Monday morning disloyalty. Unfortunately, this morning he was merely one part of an unholy trinity of left-wing bores droning on about the things that excite their ilk. The front page was occupied almost entirely by the head of my church, Archbishop Welby, compassioning about energy prices and about how the government mustn’t display even a hint of satisfaction later this week when growth figures will add to the suspicion that the economy is improving. Apparently, man does not live by bread alone. And the fact that the economy is improving doesn’t mean that we’re all benefitting. There was the usual silly guff about how society “distributes” wealth unevenly – as if apportioning wealth is handled by a committee of left-liberal journalists, academics, politicians and churchmen (if it isn't, of course, it jolly well should be!).  Was Welby appointed to his present post because of his dirigiste economic theories? If, rather than acting as a Labour Party press officer, the Archbishop should ever decide to tend to the spiritual rather than the material well-being of his flock, I’d really love to hear what he has to say.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I found Cherie Blair crouched, waiting to pounce, in the middle pages. Stay-at-home mums should be encouraged to return to the work-force by being "given" apprenticeships. If all stay-at-home mothers were frog-marched back to work by teams of taxpayer-funded "enablers" (probably armed with tasers) GDP would grow by 8% and the next labour government would have lots of lovely lolly to spend on the victim groups and pet causes favoured by super-rich left-wing human rights lawyers. Women of Britain - stop messing about at home looking after your children: get back to work and start filling those tax-coffers! (Cherie admits that she returned to work practically within minutes of giving birth to her four children so she could "beat the men at their own game", and yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to her that, far from being a role-model, her thrusting dynamism actually makes her come across as a repellent freak.)

Cherie Blair has always struck me as a ghastly, greedy, interfering, arrogant, pestilential ratbag who seems to imagine that being the wife of an extremely unpopular former prime minister gives her the right to tell us little people how we should live our lives. It doesn’t, love  – why don’t you start minding your own damned business, go back to hunting down bargains on eBay, and leave the rest of us alone?

Clegg, Welby and Cherie – any more of this nonsense and I may have to give up reading newspapers as well.