Kick-starting the day the Telegraph way

I'm one of those people who finds it hard to start the day without coming across something that raises my blood-pressure. It is why I read the Daily Telegraph. The FT has plenty of informative articles but it doesn't stir the blood anything like the Telegraph.

Most newspapers are designed to feed the prejudices of their readers. The Telegraph, long known as the Torygraph, concentrates its news coverage on items that will stir the interest of its middle class home counties bedrock. I am middle class and live in the home counties. Yet I must confess that much of the newspaper's coverage makes me heartily sick. It's not the anti-government, anti-Labour stories that get me going , it's the right-wing spin that's applied to every one of them.

Perhaps it has something to do with my northern working class roots, but I have tried hard all my life to adhere to a socialist, liberal ideal (so why are most of my friends Tories? One of life's oddities, I guess). It explains why I objected to a reader's letter yesterday, praising a news story that referred to "firemen" rather than the politically correct (always used in a disparaging sense in Telegraph stories) "firefighters."

I would like to see that reader arguing his point one day as he is hauled out of his burning house by a fire fighting woman who has undergone the same training and passed the same rigorous physical tests as a man. For sure, there are not many of them, but they do exist and for that reason alone, the collective term, firemen, can no longer apply if it is used assumptively.

I understand the reader and I know dozens of people who would nod their heads in agreement with his letter. But that does not mean that they are right.

In today's newspaper I noticed that the story about the nine-year-old girl, Shannon Matthews, missing from her home in Dewsbury, the town I come from, was down to a paragraph on an inside page.

Contrast this with the acres of news coverage on Madeleine McCann. The difference is that the chattering classes who write the columns (all home counties, middle class) in our broadsheets cannot begin to relate to Shannon's council estate upbringing in Dewsbury. Whereas every one of them will have a view on whether it is right to leave sleeping children alone on the kind of holiday that is probably beyond Shannon's dreams.

So why don't I drop the Telegraph and get the Guardian? You must be joking. I don't want a newspaper that treats anglers and shooters like war criminals. The Independent? Too sterile. The Times? I don't like Rupert Murdoch (although he does fish, mostly big game).

The Daily Mail? Apart from the Keith Waterhouse column I wouldn't give it house room. The Daily Express? No redeeming features. The Sun? The Daily Mirror? They serve their readerships but I can't agree with the way they go about finding - or "creating" - news. The Daily Star? Does it still exist?

I am a fan of the Metro because it's free and my children read it. I would always buy an Evening Standard over a handout because it just lasts the journey home from London.

But please don't ask me to change my Telegraph. I hate it and love it in the same breath. I appreciate the way it stands up to big government whatever its hue (although I wish the UK had signed up to the Euro). I love Boris Johnson's deliciously prejudiced and wonderfully written drivel, much of which I support although he would never get my vote. Its sports coverage is superb, although a bit overdone and its quirky blend of eccentricity and Englishness defines the breed for me. I suppose that's it. The Telegraph represents John Major's unchanging England of "warm beer and cricket" and there's something I like about that.

If you find any of this difficult to understand let me invite you to examine your attitudes to the BBC. The Telegraph readers love and loathe the BBC, but from a right-wing perspective. They love the institution and the quality of its output, but they loathe trendy liberals (are there untrendy liberals? Can I be one?) who, as the aforementioned reader stated, would insist on referring to a fireman as a firefighter. We all have our differences. It's what makes the world go round.