The Schofield story is not a matter of national concern

I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had vague memories of his grinning, chipmunk-like face getting up to antics with Gordon the Gopher in the 1990s. I noticed when he was in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, because that was all over the papers. Occasionally I’d see a clip of him on breakfast telly. And then there was the thing where he came out as gay – which seemed to merit an Alan Partridge shrug – and the thing with the Queen’s funeral, which, again, was hard to get worked up about. He seemed an entirely harmless and unimportant part of the furniture of the world, like KP Skips or National Conservatism: dandy if you like that sort of thing, quite optional if you don’t. 

Then, a couple of weeks ago, it became impossible to escape him. Every newspaper had him on the front page with his grinning, chipmunk-like face.