Tabloid money… get the mandarins back to the office

● A former housekeeper at Buckingham Palace has told The Sun how, when Prince Andrew was almost 40, his maid would still hide his teddy bears for him to find. Fair enough, says Rod Liddle in the same paper. “I, too, have a collection of 60 teddy bears.” Each must be put back after cleaning, exactly as it was. “If one of my servants fails… they are taken outside and beaten with a rattan cane.” Fail twice and they are shot. “We have lost 27 servants this way.” And staff are not easy to come by. “I have a vacancy at Liddle House for a stool servant… [requiring] an experienced servant to examine my toilet every day.” It pays £4 an hour – but, alas, still no interest. “Sometimes people forget how difficult life can be for deranged, pampered, parasitical types like me and Andy.”

● Say what you like about the Downing Street boozers, at least they turned up for work, says Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. That’s more than can be said for most of Whitehall. Working from home was supposed to be temporary. Now it is an entitlement. Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union, which represents senior government mandarins, sounded like the stroppy shop steward Fred Kite, played by Peter Sellers in the “brilliant” 1959 industrial relations satire I’m All Right Jack, when he branded the call to return to the office “insulting”. His members earn up to £275,000 a year, and he thinks it insulting to expect them to turn up for work. “You couldn’t make it up.”

● The BBC has always been “the Great Distractor” for the right, says Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror. So it’s no surprise the TV licence fee is back on the agenda. Boris Johnson, supping in the last chance saloon, has sent out culture secretary Nadine Dorries to tell BBC bosses “she has their testicles in a vice”. “That’s the laughably titled culture secretary who believes taxpayers fund Channel 4 and probably thinks Lord Reith is something a peer lays at the Cenotaph.” Tories always like to crow that they are in favour of public-service broadcasting, but that’s only if it can be bent to their will. Before long, the BBC’s Upstairs, Downstairs will feature the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, telling us what it’s like to live in a stately home during an energy crisis.