Ever thought The Sun read like an alcoholic rant? Well...

Following the publication of this column, only two national newspapers will have declined to cover David Yelland's confession that he edited The Sun in the grip of uncontrolled alcoholism - The Sun and The Times.

Yelland recently admitted that he edited the Sun between 1998 and 2003 while drinking up to four bottles of Chardonnay a day. "How did I do that if I was so drunk?" he said. "The answer is I did it because I was so drunk - the two habits went hand in hand."

Yelland says that a mean-spirited, hypocritical drunk was just the man for the job. He wrote in The Observer that "The Sun was a dangerous place for me to be, because my addictive traits were big box office. I was actually paid to rush to judgement, paid to lash out and attack - it was perfect territory for the drunk."

His confession was honest and pointed. While he was making everyone else's life a misery, he did not have it easy himself. Along with his alcoholism, Yelland's his wife left him, then died, leaving him to bring up their son.

Yelland apologised in The Mail and The Observer for some of the personal attacks - on Lenny Henry, Ian Botham and Sophie Rhys-Jones. He could fill a book with the apologies he still owes. I started going through copies of The Sun that Yelland edited. The celebrities he attacked over "booze" alone would fill this column for weeks.

Disgustingly, his paper attacked the army for treating alcoholic soldiers. Under the headline "Army boozers are treated at Priory clinics," Yelland's Sun raged in August 2001 "that SOLDIERS with drink problems are being treated at exclusive Priory clinics - with taxpayers picking up the bill," calling this a "scandal" with soldiers treated like "VIPs." In 2003, Yelland himself was secretly ushered out of The Sun editor's office into a private clinic.

Under Yelland's drunken stewardship The Sun didn't just sniff out alcoholic soldiers and celebrities. As he himself says, "my job was to pick out people the country could judge to make us all feel better. One day it would be a paedophile, another a fallen politician."

And under Yelland The Sun specialised in attacking the left. You might have thought that when the Sun cried: "Yet again the left was proved WRONG" over the "triumph" of the Afghan war, these were just the ramblings of a wine-soaked hack. They were. The war was such a triumph that we have been able to fight it again and again for nine more years.

If you read Yelland's "Sun Says," which call war opponents "the handmaidens of Osama bin Laden," guilty of "nothing short of treachery," you might have thought this was drunken drivel. It was. You might have suspected that Yelland's attack on "ageing, wandering, whingeing foreign correspondent John Pilger" for being "sickening, unpatriotic and WRONG" was entirely fuelled by booze, or that his rant at the "old hack Paul Foot" for his "bilious outpouring" on the war was the ideological equivalent of vomiting in the gents. It was.

His most worrying point is that, drunk as he was, he "had 320 people on staff who were paid to agree with me. I had the prime minister on the phone agreeing with me."

Yelland's accomplices were Rebekah Wade (now a News International executive), Trevor Kavanagh (still a Sun columnist), Andy Coulson (now the Tories' communications director) and Richard Littlejohn (now on the Mail).

They all went along with Yelland's drunken rubbish and made no complaint. If any other institution - a school, say, or a hospital, or a minor government department - were found to have been run by a drunk there would be an inquiry. Why did none of the deputy staff step in? What harm was done?

Rupert Murdoch's paper simply carries on regardless, intoxicated by its own hate.

People power - the Tory way

The Conservative Manifesto promises "people power," the chance to "be your own boss," and to mobilise the "Big Society."

There is a small example of what this means in the Tory approach to libraries. Cameron talked about libraries in a speech he gave about the "post-bureaucratic age." This is apparently "something very exciting," with the "potential for transforming our lives."

Cameron said that the "old, top-down, big-government solutions aren't working" and placed special focus on libraries, saying that, "today, all people can do is rage when a far-off bureaucrat decided to close a well-loved library because it wasn't making enough money."

This is very odd, because public libraries don't make money at all. They are not shops. Video rentals and fines can offset some small proportion of costs, but no-one who believes in public libraries talks about them making money. They are there to make us better read, not to make us cash.

In fact it turns out that the bureaucrats who are closing well-loved public libraries are Tories. In Southampton the council is slashing library budgets and closing a library in Millbrook, one of the city's poorer areas. Local parents and other readers have done what Cameron suggested and marched to the town hall to express their disapproval.

And the Tory council has ignored them, claiming that the library closure is part of a "regeneration" improving the estates.

The Conservative council overlooked the protest and said that locals did not view libraries as "a priority." It said that getting rid of books would make the council "leaner and meaner and more efficient than ever."

What happens next in the "post-bureaucratic age?"

According to Cameron, "whenever a publicly or commercially owned community building or amenity faces closure ... from libraries to parks, post offices or pubs ... local people will get the first option to buy it, protect it, run it, own it and keep it open."

So that's the people power answer - the government will close down services and give us the chance to pay for them with a whip-round.