The first thing you need to ask yourself before writing an article for the Daily Mail is this: are you indignant? If you are not indignant, then you are in no state of mind to start writing for the Daily Mail. But don’t worry – there is an easy way to become indignant. Simply look around at the modern world and compare it to the vision that you have of the 1950s. You will find that many things are very different now – these differences are what you should feel indignant about. Remember: to you the 1950s is a Golden Age and today is an awful time to be alive because the country is run primarily by upstart children with knives and drugs and sexually transmitted infections.

I just mentioned children. This was a mistake. The world children can only ever be used in the Daily Mail if it is prefixed with the word ‘our’ and contextualised within a paranoid rambling about how unsafe ‘our children’ are now compared with how safe they would have been if this were the 1950s. Our children are in danger for many reasons: paedophiles, computer games, drugs, knives, some more paedophiles and, most importantly, youths. Youths are different from children; they don’t congregate in groups like normal people, they meet in gangs. Youths are essentially feral. Roaming the streets with knives and drugs and sexually transmitted infections, youths wait to pounce on our children and give them knives and drugs and sexually transmitted infections. This is very worrying, and never would have happened in the 1950s.

In most cases a writer for the Daily Mail can work out their viewpoint on a matter by simply asking: What would Winston Churchill think about this? But there is one very important exception to this rule – drinking. Churchill was a notorious alcoholic, harbouring a casual attitude to intoxication that will not be tolerated by a Daily Mail writer. As far as they are concerned until about five years ago nobody in Britain ever drank more than two pints of beer a week. Remember: drunkenness is a disgrace, particularly if someone is young and looks like they’re having a good time. When writing about young people drinking you should, if at all possible, somehow relate it to any wars, past or present, in which British soldiers died. This makes the drinking look like a callous act of ungratefulness, when in fact the two things are completely unrelated.