An Ipsos MORI poll has found that only 49% of politicians trust that their fellow politicians tell the truth.

This figure is optimistically high however, compared to the percentage of the general public who believe politicians – just 18% on last years MORI figures.

Apparently a staggeringly high number of politicians,18% of them, still trust bankers, and this obviously includes the dopey ones who gave the totally untrustworthy Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) £45 billion of taxpayers money six years ago, to see it all lost in excessive salaries, bonuses and fines for dishonest dealings with its customers.

Whoever said that politicians and nappies should, for the same reason, be changed often had it about right.

Food fraud is now more attractive to organised crime than trafficking drugs – with the potential profits the same, the likelihood of being caught much less and lighter penalties for the few who do.

This is the conclusion, featured in the Daily Telegraph, of a new 18-month investigation and recent report on the findings from Prof Chris Elliott of Belfast Queens University, who points to the driving down of prices by supermarkets as incentivising processors to cut corners, and the cutting of local authority enforcement services to dangerously ineffective levels as being other contributing factors.

The worryingly poor performance of the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) is also cited. In the ten years before last years horse-meat scandal broke the FSA had not tested any product for adulteration with horse, and missed the inclusion of an illegal cancer-causing dye in hundreds of food items in 2003, something that French and Italian laboratories picked up.

Good to see that the nice people at TV Licensing, collecting the increasingly invidious and questionable license fee for the BBC, continue to get a well-deserved kicking from MPs and campaigners for the heavy-handed way they try to bully money out of people who don’t need a licence, the better to bolster the £3.7 billion they get in annual funding, and to make excessive pay-offs to former BBC executives.

The author’s own experience, following a few months when a TV was installed at his office for an editing job and the licence fee was paid for that year, is no doubt typical – 35 wasteful letters from various (fictional?) nonentities at TV Licensing in the 12 years since, threatening visits and detector vans. When they have been advised, in 2001 and 2004, that no TV equals no licence requirement they have written back to advise that a percentage of the criminals they deal with lie about this and that they will therefore be investigating anyway.

Time was, prior to commercial TV, Freeview and the internet the BBC might have deserved their easy money in compulsory and legally-backed licence fees but the model now needs an overhaul.

From the fashion experts who launched, and withdrew, handbags adorned with swastikas in 2007 comes another gem.

This time it’s a baby top looking like the uniform worn by Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Nazi concentration camps – a black and white horizontally striped T-shirt with a yellow six-pointed star on the left breast, evoking the star of David that Jewish prisoners were forced to wear.

Following criticisms of insensitivity, thoughtlessness and a lack of education and awareness from Jewish organisations the Spanish chain quickly withdrew the product and pledged to destroy all the stock, apologising for offence caused but claiming that the design was inspired by Westerns and part of its Cowboy Collection for kids.

Encouraging to hear that marketeers at Air New Zealand have finally listened to some good sense from their passengers and belatedly scrapped the safety video featuring bikini-clad models demonstrating seat belts, life jackets and oxygen masks.

The move follows more than 11,000 complaints since its launch in February that it was made using serious safety matters as an excuse for some naff and inappropriate sexualisation, which was giving wrong messages to children on flights, and offending those with religious beliefs and body issues.

Meaning that the all-important safety messages were being undermined by the distraction of the content, a useful caveat for all us clever marketeers who can sometimes lose sight of the objectives…

If you really want to find out which wine you like the best, and how much you are being influenced, perhaps unknowingly, by aspects other than taste, you should arrange to try a selection blind.

The author recently invited a dozen friends and neighbours who all liked and drank the soft Merlot red wines to blind-taste a range of a dozen Merlots, including two blended with Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz grapes, priced from £3.49 to £7 a bottle and all bought from very local supermarkets and shops. The reveal was only done after they had scored the wines on a scale of 10 for personal preference so no well-known influences such as the country of origin, the label, the alcohol content, the price paid, the name of the wine or the retailer supplying were in play.

There were two joint winners, an Echo Falls 2012 with an ABV of 13% from California available at Iceland and other retailers at £5 a bottle, and a Yellowtail 2013 with an ABV of 13.5% from Australia and costing £6 a bottle from Asda and others. Ranking second was a Sainsbury’s Winemaker’s Selection 2013 with an ABV of 13% from France and costing £5. And well worth considering at the price was a Budavar Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon blend with an ABV of 12.5% from Spain and costing £3.49 a bottle from Aldi, which was ranked third.

Curiously, or perhaps not for the cynical, none of the three wines carrying the marketing ploy “Reserve” on the label did well, an Asda “Reserva” from Chile at £7 ranking seventh, a Sainsbury’s “Heritage Reserve” from South Africa at £5.90 (down from £7.40) ranking tenth and an Asda “Grand Reserve” from France at £7 ranking eleventh.

We read that Studio City, a new $2 billion gambling, entertainment and retail resort in Macau, has hired director Martin Scorcese to make a short film to promote it, which will include the likes of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in its cast list, and which will premiere at next year’s opening.

De Niro, fans of the 1995 Scorcese film Casino will know, convincingly played the unsavoury character of Las Vegas casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein, this largely based on that of the real-life Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a professional sports better, Las Vegas casino boss and associate of organised crime. Rosenthal was also an associate of psychopathic Chicago hit-man, boyhood friend and Las Vegas enforcer for the mob Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro, convincingly played in the film as Nicky Santoro by Joe Pesci, and meeting the same violent and deeply unpleasant end.

Question is, and without seeing Scorcese’s promotional film, will this potential association with the nasty face of gambling be a safe bet for the image of a new casino? Watch this space.

Fascinating to read, in Max Clifford’s book READ ALL ABOUT IT, (Virgin Books 2005) how the celeb’s publicist was so proud of his part in exposing paedophile rock star Gary Glitter, real name Paul Gadd. Apparently Clifford “punched the air in triumph” when Gadd went down for four months in 1999 for possession of child abuse images, though on a charge of actual child abuse after ingratiating himself with the child’s parents he was acquitted when it came out that the victim of the alleged abuse had sold her story, through Clifford, to the now-defunct News of the World, thus tainting her testimony.

As readers will know Clifford is now serving eight years for, er, a series of sex assaults on girls and young women, in one case reportedly going to a young girl’s house and ingratiating himself with her parents, before taking her out in a car and molesting her, so his published view on Gadd’s downfall in 1999, as he punched the air in triumph, make most interesting reading.

“It meant he was known for the vile sick person he is and that wherever he went parents would watch out for him”.