I was looking back over some old satirical news items I wrote a few years ago and found the evergreen Rooney Strike Hits Blind Boy Who Sees Again item. How times change. No longer the tabloid golden boy. I heard my family at the weekend talking about Rooney and his recent brush with the tabloids. That headline could now be changed to Rooney Miss Hits Blind Boy Who Loses Teeth or something similar. When Private Eye was at its best in the eighties under Ingram, it used to have an item that showed two ways the tabloids treated the same item, both angled differently depending on whether people wanted to read about the person on the up or the person being destroyed. My parents said about Rooney that like George Best, “They can’t handle it.” What they can’t handle is peoples’ jealously that ordinary working class people can come good. I was handed a recent Private Eye and was struck how it’s changed from satirising the media to being part of it under Hislop.  Their target this week was Alan Titchmarsh, a working class figure they have no chance in destroying, or have they?