Watching Tony Blair appear on BBC's Football Focus was interesting (direct link to BBC online video here). Will the press pick up on his tongue-in-cheek references the fact that Alan Shearer announced his retirement at the end of last season but has since persuaded to stay on, which he has done to great acclaim? Or will the newspaper’s lobby correspondents consider football programmes to be beneath them, thereby missing this potentially telling analogy?

They will also have missed the BBC digging out of their archives the full original interview with Blair, from ten years or so ago, following which he was pilloried for having claimed to remember watching Jackie Milburn play for Newcastle when he was a kid. The press claimed this was an outrageous example of spin, as Blair was too young to remember that - only four when Milburn retired. Well, it now turns out that what Blair actually said was that he started watching Newcastle play as a kid after the Milburn era. He had never made the claims quoted in the press at all! So, far from this being a casebook example of political spin, it was in fact a casebook example of media distortion…