I AM writing this on Tuesday morning, confident that nothing of any significance will be announced before you read this. In the mean time, my thoughts go back to a miserable evening nearly 40 years ago in the East End of London, when I was part of a police line protecting the Murdoch plant at Wapping from the striking printers and their allies.

This was a ritual played out every night as Murdoch broke the power of the print unions who had dominated the old Fleet Street for decades, threatening to strike at the slightest infringement of their ever increasing privileges. But, by the mid ’80s, it was possible for a state-of-the-art computer system, one almost as powerful as the phone in my pocket today, to do all the layout and the typesetting that had until then been skilled jobs tightly in the hands of the unions.

And Murdoch, overnight, moved his newspapers from their old homes in central London, where the offices were built over a printing press, to a new, purpose-built, heavily fortified complex in Wapping, where no printers were needed. Hence the pickets, which, every night, tried to stop the distribution lorries leaving the plant — and the police who protected the press baron’s operation, along with the young man writing a book about their work.

That struggle was the beginning of a revolution that has now come full circle. There are no more printers, of course. There are hardly even any newspapers, in the sense of printed sheets of paper. Instead of the papers, we have the websites; instead of the printers as the guild of magicians whose craft is essential if the paper is to appear, we have the programmers behind the website, and the network engineers.

On The New York Times, the programmers are threatening a strike for demands that would have made a Fleet Street printer blush. They want money, of course: a four-day work week, along with annual bonuses. They are already paid significantly more than journalists. They have also asked for “a ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news”, according to the newsletter Semafor. And, just as the Fleet Street unions forbade any coverage of their own activities in the papers that they controlled, the NYT tech workers’ guild wants the right to censor readers’ letters.

As I write, they were threatening a strike that would cripple the paper’s election coverage.

BACK home, the debate on assisted dying continues beneath the headlines. The New Statesman’s medical correspondent, Dr Phil Whitaker, represents an interesting position: he thinks that this is a bad law about a good practice. He starts by saying that, as a doctor, he would welcome a change in the law.

“It would improve immeasurably what we already do. . . Doctors already cause some patients to die more swiftly than they otherwise would. . . The problem with the doctrine of double effect is that it is clinicians, not patients, who control the decision. . . Patients must experience great suffering before a clinician will do anything that might actively shorten their life.” He wants to give patients, not doctors, that choice.

But then comes the twist. “Leadbeater’s bill is the right legislation at entirely the wrong time. A doctor who knows their patient well — not just their medical case, but also their character, opinions, relationships, beliefs and circumstances — is best placed to ensure any decision to request assisted dying is well founded. In the 2000s, this kind of doctor-patient relationship was the norm — now it is the exception.

“In the earlier years of my career, patients would receive good quality, responsive palliative care at home, delivered by district nurses and GPs, and backed up by specialists from the local hospice. More than 50 per cent of district nursing capacity has been lost over the past 15 years, and we’re now so short of GPs that in many parts of the country, home visits by doctors are unobtainable.”

It is left as an exercise for the reader to estimate the odds of the NHS’s being restored to full health before euthanasia becomes a vital part of the services that it offers.

FINALLY, what would you pay to learn that the King thought that the Church of England had been “corrupted by loathsome political correctness”, and has thought so since 1998? The Mail on Sunday made play of a letter he wrote to a now dead friend expressing this sentiment, which has just come up for auction; but what struck me about the story was that the letter fetched only £170. It seems a very low price for something that gave so many readers so much pleasure by reassuring them they’d been right all along. “King Charles is right, the Church of England is corrupted and the Archbishop of Canterbury is an evil antichrist,” one commenter helpfully explained.