These are hard times for sweating hacks. Not a cloud in the sky, not an MP in town and — worst of all — not a whiff of a silly summer story in sight.

We can usually count on a few sharks off the Cornish coast but even they seem to have thought better of it this year. Japanese knotweed is pretty scary, and doing its best to get us all worried down in the West country but it’s no substitute for a dorsal fin or two off St Ives.

And now we’re cruelly told yet again there are no little green men from space. The Ministry of Defence has released files on UFO sightings reported in the 1980s and 90s, available on the National Archives.

Quite promising, some of it. Two men, for example, claim an alien with a lemon-shaped head tried to lure them into a glowing red spaceship as they returned from a night out in Staffordshire in 1995.

That generated a 15-page dossier, while the famous December 1980 sighting at Rendlesham Forest US air force base in Suffolk led to a former chief of defence staff warning Margaret Thatcher’s government not to be too scathing in its dismissal because the incident remained unexplained.

But as usual, however dramatic the sighting, we’re always told it was a weather balloon or something equally as disappointing. No master races, no alien abductions, no cigar-shaped craft or anything remotely exciting.

One day perhaps they’ll give us something to go on — and we all know they’re out there, don’t we? But until then we’ll just have to rely on daft squirrels popping up in tourist photos and the antics of celebs and politicos in the South of France to keep us going in the silly season.

Roll on the Autumn.

The online release of MPs’ expense claims has only served to further dent their already battered reputation.

Forty-two days after the Daily Telegraph began to investigate MPs’ expenses the Houses of Parliament finally got round to publishing official details of them. Or rather it didn’t, as lots of key information was blacked out.

Britain’s newspapers spelt out their condemnation - in black and white - of this supposed exercise in freedom of information.

The Sun labelled MPs “Blankers”, the Daily Mirror led with the headline: “Blackwash”, while the Daily Mail posed the question: “Just how stupid do they think we are?”

Commons officials insisted that the information that had been blacked out was done to protect MPs’ security, but the consensus of Britain’s media was that the political classes had shot themselves in the foot.

“Yesterday’s exercise in obfuscation suggested the House of Commons has learnt nothing,” opined the Daily Telegraph’s editorial, with the paper promising to publish an uncensored version of every MP’s expense claim on Saturday.

“The Portcullis House edition of the dossier does not so much slam the door behind a bolted stallion as painstakingly construct a new stable in order to house a dead nag,” wrote the Guardian.

The farce was meat and drink to cartoonists. The Guardian’s Steve Bell captioned his cartoon with the statement: “Justice must not only not be done, it must not be seen to not be done.”

Even advertisers got in on the fun with a Volkswagen advert having most of its words crossed out.

Lest your mood has been overly blackened, remember that at least we have learnt a new word from this very British political scandal. Hands up who knew what the word “redacted” - to make ready for publication; edit or revise - meant 42 days ago?

The question is now how are MPs going to redact their reputations?

The recession is bringing back the strangest characters.  Rising from their graves like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead are people we thought had been buried decades ago.

The Milky Bar Kid is one, Persil mum is another and, inevitably, the Hovis bread delivery boy struggling up his cobbled hill while the brass band plays on.

What next? Bing Crosby singing about Shell perhaps or the famous Smash-peddling Martians who thought it was so funny that Earthlings bothered to peel potatoes?

Advertising experts believe nostalgia works because it takes adult consumers back to a time when they were young and without any worries. Never mind recession, the old ads say, these are value brands that have stood the test of time.

Marks and Spencer has been trying a similar tack with the launch of its 75p plain jam sandwiches. “For those who haven’t eaten one for years, one bite takes you straight back to your childhood,” runs the blurb.

The old ads are peculiarly effective transports to the past. Some of us go so far back we can still hear the jingle from Esso Blue adverts and remember those gobsmacked housewives comparing the whiteness of their newly washed sheets with Daz man. Ah, takes you back …

Are there any old adverts that you would like to see come back?

(Hamlet cigars - Ed)

Bleary-eyed commuters passing through Clapham Junction station in southwest London on their way to work this week were among the first to witness the opening blast of one of the most remarkable advertising campaigns to have hit the capital in recent years.

No, not Flu Man sneezing his germs all over us but a short message in huge black lettering that simply says: “Sorry for losing touch.”

The only clue as to who is so publicly donning the hair shirt is a small drawing tucked away in the corner of the hoarding featuring the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, the  logo of London’s only paid-for evening paper, the Evening Standard.

The message is an attempt by the paper to reconnect with its readership now that it is under new ownership and will appear in the next few weeks on the side of buses and on the underground. Other slogans will say Sorry for being negative, for taking you for granted, for being complacent and for being predictable.

Not the hardest word at all then, though one that seems likely to cause considerable offence to the paper’s former editor Veronica Wadley.

The campaign comes in response to market research, commissioned by the newspaper’s new editor, Geordie Greig, which found that Londoners felt the paper was too negative and did not meet the capital’s needs.

Russian tycoon and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev bought the loss-making Standard from the Daily Mail and General Trust in February and media analysts have long predicted it will become less right-wing in its political stance. Some expect it to go more upmarket in an attempt to distance itself from the free sheets which have cut so badly into its circulation.

But few can have predicted such a public confessional as this. The “Sorry” campaign will run for three weeks in the run-up to the 181-year-old paper’s relaunch later this month.

After a year in which so many have been clamouring for a ”sorry” from miscreants ranging from bankers to MPs and even debt-laden prime ministers, Londoners may actually soon find themselves becoming sick of the word.

The unusual foray into politics by Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, in suggesting there should be no more tax cuts or spending rises in next month’s budget, has been widely interpreted by the newspapers as a blow to Gordon Brown but a source of secret satisfaction to the Treasury.

Chancellor Alistair Darling, several say, was not happy with Brown’s reported budget plans to offer voters more jam before they had digested the 25 billion-pound fiscal package in last Autumn’s Pre-Budget report.

King’s message was interpreted as bad news for Brown just as the Prime Minister embarks on a whrlwind tour of the Americas to drum up support for agreement at next week’s G20 meeting on a major international programme of fiscal stimulus.

Most papers support the Governor.

“Mr King was right and timely in his message,” said the Times. “Fiscal profligacy by the government since well before the last election has sharply constrained the ability of UK policy makers to borrow and spend more.”

In a comment piece, the paper’s business editor David Wighton notes: “Mr King’s intervention hardly strengthens the Prime Minister’s hand as he tries to rally support for further measures at the G20 meeting.”

Damian Reece in the right-wing Daily Telegraph commented: “King was right to warn the government over further public spending splurges. Given the long-term damage Labour has helped cause to the economy and sterling, we really can’t take much more punishment.

Some papers highlight the extraordinary nature of King’s intervention into the world of politics.

“His warning yesterday about the dangers of a further fiscal stimulus, which he said would increase the already alarming levels of public borrowing, was unprecedented,” noted Daily Mail City Editor Alex Brummer. “King has trespassed into very dangerous territory. He has placed himself at the heart of the battle over how best to deal with the worldwide economic slump.

“By challenging Mr Brown on budgetary policy the governor has exposed the sharp differences over the conduct of economic policy at the centre of government. This potentially calamitous public row can only add to the nervousness of financial markets about the ability of Labour to navigate through the worst crisis in generations.”

Brummer added: “The governor could well have an ally in the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, who is known to be less gung-ho than the Prime Minister, who is desperate, as host of the forthcoming G20 summit, to follow President Obama’s lead in advocating more public spending.”

The Independent said “nothing as overt as yesterday’s warning has happened in ages.”

“Reluctantly,” it added, “Brown is being pushed by Mr King into the same camp as Germany and France, both of which have already enacted quite big fiscal packages but insisted they won’t go any further. ”

“Should King be saying these things? Letting the public finances go to hell in a handcart is surely a matter for Government and voters? Well, maybe he should be keeping his counsel, but Mr King was asked a straight question, and it would have been disingenuous to have given an answer he didn’t believe in. What was he supposed to say? Go for it boys?”

“It’s only a pity Mr King didn’t sound these same warnings three years ago when they were still capable of doing some good. Instead of which the Government was allowed to go for broke, when it should have been reining in.”

The Financial Times noted: ”Mr King’s warning puts him in a position where he could be accused of constraining the options of elected politicians and puts the Treasury on notice that the Bank might feel the need to take offsetting action if a second stimulus package was proposed.”

The Daily Mirror was critical of King. Under the heading “Merv’s far too Nervy,” it said the Bank of England was in no position to lecture Brown.

“If (it) had cut interest rates faster we might not be in such a deep recession,” it said in a leader column. “The caution and indecision of the country’s chief banker … has been a handicap in this global financial crisis.”

“Tough times demand bold action — not the caution and delays that are the hallmarks of King’s governorship of the Bank of England.”

The system was bust, something had to be done and what Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did on Monday with their bank rescue package was a bold and sound move, newspapers agreed.

But many worried about how the government will now use its huge stakes in the banks and several had words of warning.

“Gone is Mr Bean but don’t turn into Stalin,” said the Daily Mail, noting how the financial crisis has transformed Brown’s political fortunes from the days when Lib Dem Deputy Leader Vince Cable launched his infamous jibe in the Commons.

“It is imperative that ministers keep well out of the day-to-day running of the banks they now control,” the paper said. “But can they be trusted?”

“Will they find it impossible to resist forcing banks to lend unwisely — for example to ailing industries in Labour marginals?”

Some papers noted that Brown has already talked of making banks restore their mortgage lending to 2007 levels, a rate of lending, some suggested, that might reinflate the housing bubble.

“The prime Minister is now the ultimate paymaster of institutions that are responsible for a substantial share of British mortgages and deposits,” said The Times.  “The measure of the rescue will not just be a short-term restoration of confidence but evidence that the banks’ behaviour is not perverted or politicised in years to come.”

The Sun added its own warning, saying: “The banks cannot power the economy back to life with the dead hand of governmental red tape bogging them down.”

Yet change there must be. The papers were united in their applause for the conditions attached to the package that aim to bring to an end the era of fat-cattery, such as no cash bonuses for two years and a return to more prudent lending.

Several asked why the bank directors who had let the crisis build up for so long were getting off so relatively lightly and some demanded reforms to the system of bank regulation itself.

The Financial Services Authority has been found wanting, said the Daily Telegraph. ”As was the case before 1997, the Bank of England should be re-established as the banking regulator,” it added. “The Bank of England, too, should seek to boost its expertise at the top: it needs a governor with hands-on experience of banking.”

The Guardian borrowed a title from Tom Wolfe when it called the banking meltdown “Bonfire of the Certainties.” It said what needed to be changed was not any particular type of financial instrument but the behaviour of bankers themselves.

“Now that the British public has an interest in the banking industry, it has a right to define how banks can best serve its interest,” it said.

A lone voice in the debate over whether government should interfere in the running of banks, the left-leaning paper added: “Ministers should direct banks to lend on preferential terms to projects of vital public interest, such as energy infrastructure.”

As MPs prepare to vote on cutting the time limit for abortions, the Daily Mail says the current system “shames our nation”.

Foetuses are being aborted at a late stage in their development when they would have had a good chance of survival outside the womb, the Mail says in an editorial.

“An attack on women? Utter nonsense. The campaign to cut the time-limit is an attack on an everyday practice that shames our nation,” it says.

Rubbish, says Times columnist David Aaronovitch.

There is no significant evidence to support the claim that the foetus is more viable at up to 24 weeks than in 1967 or 1990 when the law was last changed.

“If viability isn’t the test - as it was claimed to be back in 1990 when the limit was reduced from 28 weeks - then the judgment must be that some folk simply don’t like abortions and wish to restrict them as much as possible,” he writes.

There is little doubt that the “temperature of the debate about abortion” has changed in recent times, says the Independent.

“The introduction of 4-D ultrasound techniques, showing foetuses of just 12 weeks with apparent facial expressions, has dramatised the debate,” it says in an editorial. “So have couples coming back from hospital and proudly showing off photos of their baby at its 12-week scan.”

But there is an even more pressing matter than the upper time limit for abortions, according to a Daily Telegraph editorial.

It says that only a small number of terminations take place at more than 22 weeks. However, there are 200,000 abortions in Britain each year at 12 weeks or less.

“Governments routinely launch campaigns telling us not to drink, smoke, take drugs or eat to excess; yet there is no sense of a similar effort being expended on advising women about the medical and psychological trauma of abortion,” the paper says.

Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley says the debates over abortion and research on embryos highlight a wider divide between the two main political parties.

She argues that there is a real difference between a progressive, pro-science Labour government and a backward-looking, “finger-wagging” Conservative opposition.

“If the reactionary arguments are successful, throwing out vital medical advances and criminalising frightened, often young, women, then it will mark a real turning point,” she writes.

“Whatever you think of the New Labour years, it has been a decade of social liberalism, when racism, homophobia and anti-science voodoo became steadily less respectable.”

The Daily Mirror is alone among the papers in giving unqualified praise to Chancellor Alistair Darling’s 2.7 billion pound solution to the damaging 10p tax row.

“Once critical Labour MPs hailed it as a masterstroke,” the paper said. “Hopefully it signals the start of a concerted fightback by a prime minister who has been on the ropes for months.”

The Daily Mail says the original decision to scrap the starting 10p rate of tax was “A mistake, yes… but fatal? Hardly.” It says Darling and Prime Minister Gordon Brown “deserve credit for choosing the right means to help those who suffered,” by raising the tax threshhold.

But the Chancellor might want to avoid the rest of the dailies, especially the one printed on pink paper. Darling’s tax announcement “ has shattered any residual idea that Mr Brown’s administration can run an orderly fiscal policy,” says the Financial Times.

The paper concedes that “in policy terms, the plan to put up personal allowances makes sense.” However, it adds that the political cost is heavy — the government will no longer now be able to attack the Conservatives over unfunded promises of tax cuts. “This is a significant weakening of the election campaign armoury,” it says.

The Daily Telegraph, somewhat grudgingly, saying that the Chancellor “deserves congratulations” for doing precisely what the paper had urged last Friday. But it adds that Darling’s statement was “a purely political damage-limitation exercise”, timed “to save Labour’s bacon” in next week’s Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

On a similar theme, the Times suggests that the late MP Gwyneth Dunwoody’s final service to the Labour Party has been in death rather than life. “It’s hard to believe that Alistair Darling would have made the statement he did on the 10p tax rate yesterday if it were not for fear of a massive defeat” in Crewe next week, Dunwoody’s former seat.

The paper calculates that the 2.7 billion pound price is the approximate equivalent of cutting the basic rate of income tax by 1p in the pound.

The Guardian notes that Darling effectively announced an emergency budget that “gave more money away than any real budget since 2001.”

The Independent says the 10p tax saga has been “an object lesson in bad government“. “What began as a cynical attempt to curry favour with the middle-classes has backfired in the most explosive manner,” it says. The Daily Express agrees it is “no way to run a country“.

The Sun asks who will be picking up the tab for the change. Unless Darling raises the money elsewhere, it draws the inevitable conclusion –”We will all pay more tax“.

The papers are nearly all agreed that Chancellor Alistair Darling’s 2.7 billion pound fix for the 10p tax row is the day’s main story.

“Darling seeks end to 10p tax backlash” reports the Financial Times, noting that the move will still leave 1.1 million poorer households worse off following the abolition of the lowest tax band in last year’s budget.

For the Daily Mail the tax giveaway is a “2.7 billion pound gamble” to appease fury on the Labour backbenches over the scrapping of the 10p starting rate.

But the papers also find room for other stories: Drivers face a 185 pound tax to park at work, says the Daily Telegraph of a government push to cut traffic congestion. The paper reports that Nottingham city council will be the first to introduce the “workplace parking levy as an alternative to road pricing.

The Sun reports that Yorkshire ripper Peter Sutcliffe is making a legal bid for freedom from the secure Broadmoor hospital, claiming his human rights have been breached. It says Sutcliffe, jailed in 1981 for killing 13 women, wants to be declared sane and given a release date.

The Independent opts for an analytic lead, suggesting that “Britain could once again be haunted by the spectre of stagflation“. It says a combination of stagnant output and high inflation not seen for decades will dog policymakers for months if not years to come.

By contrast the Daily Express says there is “Now a race to cut prices“, reporting that supermarkets Asda and Tesco and mortgage lender Nationwide have all unveiled plans for a host of cost-cutting deals to help “Britain’s hard-pressed families.”

The Times publishes a revealing photo of Housing Minster Caroline Flint — exposing her briefing notes on the state of the housing market as she walked to a cabinet meeting. “Safe as houses? Not this minister’s private papers” runs the headline over the picture. You can see a magnified image of the notes themselves on the front of the Telegraph.

The Guardian reports that Spain is being forced to ship drinking water to Barcelona to cope with the effects of the worst drought in the country since records began 60 years ago.

The Daily Mirror leads with the arrest of a 19-year-old man over the weekend murder of 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen in a southeast London bakers, while the Daily Star says police are following a reported sighting of missing Madeleine McCann on a flight to Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Commentators are revelling in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s effusive praise of Britain and drooling over the fashion sense of his wife but several see stormier waters ahead — specifically in the second half of the year from July when France takes over the presidency of the European Union.

Leader writers see problems in the two countries’ approach to Europe, particularly over France’s desire for closer European defence co-operation and a permanent EU president.

“The excitement generated by the Sarkozys’ visit will soon give way to prosaic confirmation of the old divides,” was the Daily Telegraph’s opinion.

“Gordon Brown is decidedly cool towards the EU and he could soon find himself at odds with a man who has an extremely ambitious agenda for the French presidency,” it added.

The Independent took a similar line, despite underlining the similarity between the domestic political positions of the two leaders.

Both, it noted, were men who had spent their entire lives working towards the top job but having reached the peak, now find themselves falling out of favour with their electorates.

“In that respect (Thursday’s) meeting could be an occasion for two drunks to prop each other up,” the paper said.

“They are leaders with fading home support in need of some foreign successes to imbue them with the role of statesmen,” it added.

The papers were united in welcoming Sarkozy’s lavish praise for Britain, the Anglo-Saxon economic model and the help London had given Paris during the past century.

What a contrast!

They contrasted the warm sentiments with the frosty relations between the two leaders’ predecessors, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac who fell out, primarily over Iraq.

“Enthusiastic overtures from a French president are hardly unwelcome in Britain, even if an immediate use for them is unclear,” said The Times. “The problem is that what he appears to envisage goes not just beyond what Britain wants, but what he can deliver.”

How, for example, the paper said, would Sarkozy’s hints about bringing France back into NATO’s chain of command after its 42-year absence, square with his idea of an EU army?

The Financial Times noted a wealth of issues continued to threaten Anglo-French relations, not least the Common Agricultural Policy, immigration controls, Britain’s EU budget rebate, mad cow disease and Iraq.

“The history of Anglo-French relations is littered with grand promises of fresh starts that quickly turn mouldy,” it observed.

“That said, (Sarkozy’s) seemingly heartfelt appeal to upgrade the ‘entente cordiale’ to an ‘entente amicale’ is both welcome and timely.”

And “le bling?”

One thing all the papers agreed on was the assured fashion sense of Sarkozy’s new wife, former supermodel Carla Bruni.

Under the headline “French Dressing,” The Independent, like many other papers, ran a picture gallery of the new First Lady of France, concentrating on the demure grey outfit she wore on arrival at Heathrow.

The reader could be forgiven for thinking one of three things about that ensemble, it said.

“That she had swapped outfits with an air hostess on board, that she had spent weeks studying pictures of Jackie Kennedy and the classic pillbox (hat), or she had renounced being the president’s wife and had taken holy orders. Or possibly all three.”