I am in the doghouse. It’s nothing new. Usually, it’s Mrs Wife who confines me to the kennel for various domestic or marital misdemeanours; this time, it’s the mutt herself. Apparently, last Wednesday was National Dogs’ Day and I missed it, a calumny which has been neither forgotten nor forgiven. Every dog has its day? Not this year. She had a right sulk.

Supposedly, she was due a 24-hour pampering; according to the NDD blurb, ‘a pause - should that be a paws - in the calendar dedicated to celebrating the role dogs play in our lives and how we can give back.’ To which my robust defence would be, how exactly would she have noticed? We ‘celebrate’, we ‘give back’ every single day. She lives the life of bloody Riley.

In short, we feed her at one end and we scoop up what comes out of the other; not only a steaming imposition - literally so - but an ignominious obligation given I’m supposed to be the superior species. She has private medical insurance - we don’t - her own exclusive access to the smelly end of the sofa, two hefty walks a day and an exhaustive collection of casual boyfriends to roll around with in the burnished grass at the Pooch Paddock. Trollop.

There’s more; namely, a steady stream of cucumber off-cuts and stray strawberries, yoghurt pots to lick out, a personal grooming and massage service, a playroom of ‘chew-toys’ not to mention thieving squirrels to chase out of the back garden. And, in return, we get, what? A living room carpet that needs hoovering twice a day and a clogged vacuum cleaner. That woman moults her entire body weight once a week. I swear, I’ve found dog hairs in the loft and she’s been upstairs only twice in her life.

Food? A month’s supply comes in a sack. It takes two of us to heave it through the front door. Served twice-daily in a special ‘slow-feeder’ bowl, it’s gone in one wag of her tail. Then again, if she ate only what she caught herself, she’d starve. Even pheasants run faster. I once hastily messaged an absent wife to tell her that her dog had ‘chased a rabbi across the field’ and lost him. A rabbi? Look, rabbi, rabbit, it makes no difference. She’s never caught either and she never will.

For the record, she - Willow - is a three-year-old Golden Retriever. Also for the record, she retrieves sod all. Balls, sticks, frisbees? Zip, no way and nada. Yes, she’ll chase them, grab them, give them a considered chewing but if you want them back, you fetch them yourself. Assuming she’ll let go. ‘You’re a fucking retriever; have you no shame?’ I tell her, to which she just rolls over, wags her tail and waves her paws in the air. You hate to sound judgmental but we’re talking dumb blond.

On the upside, she does speak five languages. Well, I say ‘speak’. What I mean is she understands five languages. You can ask her to ‘sit’ in English, French, Spanish, German or Italian and she’ll cock her ears and plonk her peachy butt on the floor. Admittedly, there’s a small, discreet, visual command which accompanies this - an extended forefinger - but we don’t let our stupider neighbours see that. Instead, we tell them she can not only read Proust but translate him into colloquial Italian. Consequently, she’s the talk of the parish.

A guard dog? Not so much. In fact, not at all. A burglar looking for the combination to the safe would need to come armed with nothing more than five raspberries. She’d tell him everything. An alarm dog? Better; indeed, so good we know the postman’s coming when his van’s three hundred yards’ away, this while an earwig scratching its backside at the bottom of the garden prompts a fusillade of barking that could drown out an apocalypse. Attentive is one word; indiscriminate is another.

In fairness, she’s calmer now than she was. When we first got her - an 11-month-old ‘rescue’ with a lengthy rap sheet - she was a wild child. She treated the garden as a buffet and ate two roses and half a buddleja, which prompted a lengthy chat. Not only that but she dug a trench in my lawn; only the swift intervention of Mrs Wife stopped me from burying her in it. Unattended in the kitchen, she once snaffled five eggs - shells included - and left us a brown omelette in the living room. She still owes me £1.20 for the eggs.

Walks? Back then, we never knew whether either of us would make it home alive. I have dragged her out of gorse bushes, plucked her from hedges, hoiked her out of ditches and, once, lost her for an hour only to find her - tracker device - swimming amiably round a lake with two Canada geese and eight ducklings. It took another hour to get her out. On a good day, she’d come back covered in brambles, leaves, grass, teasels, mud, puddles and sheep shit; on a bad day, hosing her down took twice as long as the walk, indeed, anyone who doesn’t know what soap tastes like has never washed a dog.

Recall was The Big Issue. Naturally inquisitive, hopelessly distracted, she went her own way, often into adjoining fields, occasionally into neighbouring parishes. Remedies were sought on the Interweb. ‘Every Golden Retriever I have worked with has high levels of novelty-seeking behaviour,’ wrote one dog-whisperer. ‘Which means that whilst it’s very easy for them to be interested in pretty much anything new, its very difficult to hold that attention and keep them interested in anything specific.’ In other words, it was just like a day out in town shopping with The Wife and The Daughter.

She also had a bloke up the road called Percy - a young, muscular Golden Retriever; no question, a bit of rough - who, like her, also enjoyed a rumble. The two of them used to sumo-wrestle in the lane while the traffic piled up in both directions waiting for them to scrap it out, her footwork versus his close-quarter grappling technique. One particular set-to lasted half a mile while ears were nibbled and the two of them rolled about in a ditch. We could’ve sold tickets.

So, no question, in her youth, she had - shall we say - a reputation. Twice, I took her to vote in the village hall; twice she spoiled her ballot paper. These days, mercifully, things are a little more adult. We have ‘free range’ walks where she trots ten yards in front and looks over her shoulder every so often to check I’m still there. Recall’s nothing more than a chirpy whistle, she now leaves unattended eggs alone - lesson learnt - and in the May local elections, she voted ‘Liberal Democrat’ instead of eating her ballot paper. We appear to be progressing.

And yet, she’s still an insatiable party animal. She flirts with other dogs, with people walking other dogs, with people walking without other dogs and with anyone who rings the front-door bell. The guy who came to fix the broadband spent twenty minutes kneeling next to the router having his ears syringed; the electrician was here for a hideously expensive hour replugging the hallway and a further hour - mercifully, unbilled - wrestling on the floor with Willow and Willow’s rancid bone. Jehovah’s Witnesses? Not a problem. We invite them in and leave them in the living-room with the dog. They’re gone inside two minutes.

Squirrels are her one blind spot, awkward since the woods behind the house are littered with the buggers. Invariably, there’s a five-second stare-down on the path and a lumpish lunge, whereupon said squirrel scuttles up the nearest tree, sits on a branch and sticks out its tongue. Frankly, I’m with Willow. This is cheating. To compensate, we bought her a cuddly lookalike - Cyril the Squirrel; bite-size, squeaky tummy - and she gets on rather better with him. Yes, she chewed off his ears but Mrs Wife, nobly, sewed them back on and, to his credit, Cyril’s hanging in there, although he can no longer hear his own squeak.

Car journeys? She leaps into the boot while I’m loading the first suitcase. Pubs? I once lost her in the ‘Hare and Hounds’ only to find her sitting on a barstool with a dry Martini chatting up a dozy Labrador. The seaside’s good, although keeping track of a Golden Retriever on England’s Golden Sands can be tricky; footpaths bisecting ripe corn-fields, similarly, can be fraught. You need to wait for the harvest to find her again.

But she’ll walk anywhere, anytime in all-weathers. Nay, she insists upon it. Storms, gales, tornados; she’s out there, ears streaming behind her like banners on a battlefield and her flaps down to keep the rain out of her arse. Yes, it’s good exercise for all of us, which is why she looks like a string bean but, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s her hooter that’s getting the workout. Like any other woman, she needs to know what’s going down in the ‘hood, which is why every walk is nose-first.

And yet, despite all this - perhaps even because of all this - we remain utterly smitten. How can you not love someone who’s always so stupidly pleased to see you? You nip out to grab the empty bins? You’re away for a week in Belgium? It matters not. You’ll be woofed back on board and whipped through the front door by a lashing tail; front paws dancing, bottom wiggling and, always, a face-full of Cyril. Trust me, even my own mother never does this.

Your dog - certainly, our dog - listens and never judges; no one appreciates the genius of my conversation as much as she does. Whatever I feel like doing - walking, romping, snoozing, watching the rugby on TV - she feels like doing it too. Wherever we are, she wants to be there. She’s intuitive, she’s emotionally supportive; she treats me like Napoleon. Indeed, it can be tough trying to be the person your dog thinks you are.

But it’s her unswerving, unfailing positivity that so hopelessly endearing and, these days, so essential. Increasingly, life is fragmented, disconnected. There’s an ugliness out there; stress, misfortune, division, hatred, squirrels. Yet a dog’s love is unconditional, her faithfulness unflinching, her tail always wagging. She is a pure presence in a wicked world, however much some may argue that she’s nothing more than a thwarted wolf. One day, hopefully, one very distant day, she’s going to break my heart. Right now, though, amores perros; in other words, love’s a bitch.

Conflicting explanations as Karoline Leavitt steps away from the White House. Is she leaving to spend more time with her family or with the truth? Either - or both - is possible. Or is it simpler? Namely, that being abandoned by her boss as a live decoy for Iranian rocket launchers has somewhat dented her enthusiasm for Project Trump? Look, let’s not waste too much sympathy on someone who, in the aftermath of the Minneapolis ICE shootings, described Renée Good as a ‘lunatic’ and the ICE officer who murdered her in cold blood as ‘absolutely justified’. But, then again, if your Line Manager knowingly abandons you on a death flight to save his own orange/yellow skin, then, presumably, you’d start questioning your career choices.

Certainly, the timing’s a mite suspicious. Less than a month after returning from maternity leave - no hint then of needing ‘to spend more time with the family’ - Leavitt will now be gone in just over a fortnight. And all this ahead of the mid-terms, when Trump can least afford any White House churn, and from a woman who repeatedly touted herself - fatuously - as America’s model Working Mom, fatuously given she’s married to a multi-millionaire and she ain’t paid in peanuts.

And, again, let’s not shed too many tears here. On her first day as the 36th White House Press Secretary, she told the assembled hacks that she was committed ‘to telling the truth from this podium every single day’, only to immediately spin a line about $50,000,000 of US taxpayers’ money funding condoms in Gaza, which Fox News then claimed were being used by Hamas as balloons to float explosives into Israel. Astonishingly, not a single word of this turned out to be true but it set the tone perfectly.

Good riddance, you say? Yes, well, you’d imagine Trump will swiftly find someone else to wear a pendant cross and lie through their gleaming, white teeth for him. Or will he? The role used to be straightforward enough - never apologise, never explain, always be as rude as possible to Kaitlan Collins - but there now appears to an ‘unwitting patsy’ or ‘convenient sucker’ clause in the job description, a sort of ‘take one for the President’, In-The-Line-Of-Fire vibe, this while the President himself hides in a truck full of potato salad and takes off on a different flight-path. I won’t lie, it’s not overly appealing.

But, then, has there ever been a story which so perfectly encapsulates the grotesque gulf between what Trump claims to be and what he really is? Or more accurately, given the yarn will have surprised absolutely nobody, reinforced it? President Bone Spurs doing a runner? The Commander-in-Chief, no less, the man who boldly threatened to ‘blow Iran back to the Stone Age’, cowering in a catering crate with his diaper nurse? A man who demands unswerving fealty leaving his closest and most loyal staff - Rubio, Bessent, Miller, Leavitt, Cheung - together with sundry other administrative and senior military aides and the entire White House press corps to, unwittingly, get vaporised on his behalf? Seriously, if you’re astonished - correction, if you’re even remotely surprised - then you’ve not being paying attention.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t itemise what happened. We’ve all seen it, we’ve all wet ourselves laughing. Trump’s explanation was that he was simply following orders - in this case from the Secret Service - a line which, historically, hasn’t always been a water-tight defence. But he then went on - preposterously - to say this: ‘I think, actually, the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that we - that they would be more likely to go for.’ So the Secret Service fucked up, too? Exactly how much room is there under this bus?

Apparently, the intelligence tip came from the Israelis, who’re not shy when it comes to making Trump look like a complete pillock. The Iranians, supposedly, were going to blast Air Force One out of the sky as it left Ankara post the NATO summit. Really? Then riddle me this. Why exactly would Iran want to eliminate the man whose serial stupidity has given their regime more international leverage than they’ve enjoyed in years? If the enemy’s being led by a blustering buffoon, why on earth would you seek to take him out?

None of which, of course, explains or excuses why Trump was perfectly happy to let someone else - 100+ someone elses - get atomised by a missile addressed to him personally. Put it this way, if Lil Marco thought that clunking around the White House in a pair of shoes two sizes too big for him was the ultimate humiliation, then he now has a whole new perspective on holding one of the great offices of state in a Trump administration. The White House, of course, is now claiming that Rubio was the only person on Air Force One who knew about the ‘threat’ and the subterfuge, which, if true, must’ve made for an interesting flight. ‘Chicken or fish, sir?’ Not a question, you’d imagine, he’d have sweated on.

I’m not sure how Trump spins this behind closed doors at the White House. Because - God forbid - were I Stephen Miller, I’d have a bundle of awkward questions, given there were any number of ways Trump and the Secret Service could’ve finessed this, each of which would’ve put absolutely no one at risk. There’s also the pecking order of those whom Trump decided to ‘save’ and to ‘sacrifice’. The aforementioned ‘diaper nurse’ or ‘Executive Assistant’, Natalie Harp; Dan Scavino, a Deputy White House Chief of Staff; Walt Nauta, the Director of Oval Office Operations and the bullish Defence Secretary, Pete ‘Hard On’ Hegseth, were all on The Panic Plane; Stevie was on The Flight to the Bottom of the Black Sea. Trust issues? I think there might be a few.

And the lesson for the rest of America? I’m not sure diagrams are necessary. If this is how The President is prepared to treat those who’re nearest and dearest to him on a daily basis in White House, then just how much do you think he cares about you? About gas prices? About medical care for the sick? About innocent people being imprisoned or murdered in the streets? We’re talking about a bloke who’s enriched himself off the Presidency, and who continues to enrich himself to the tune of billions of dollars, while adding record-breaking trillions to the National Debt. Folks, you’re ALL on the decoy plane and if you seriously think that the Supreme Narcissist gives a flying fuck about you, or about anyone else, then you’re utterly deluded.

And whatever else Karoline Leavitt may be, she’s not utterly deluded. What’s poetic, of course, is that a woman who shamelessly peddled lies on behalf of the President for eighteen months has now walked away because, you assume, she herself became the victim of one of Trump’s most egregious untruths. We await the rest of America showing the same sense of critical awareness.

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