IS A working-class hero still something to be? In an age of social media pile-ons and Twitter spats is it even worth putting your head above the parapet these days?

Well, food blogger Jack Monroe admitted on The Food Programme on Radio 4 last Sunday it helps if you know how to mute the trolls

“It’s like walking into work and having to walk through a picket line every day of people standing there and telling you that you’re the worst person in the world …” Monroe told Leyla Kazim. “And realising one day that you could just go in through another door. That’s been transformative.”

The writer and campaigner has long been one of the most articulate voices in the battle against food poverty. There have been times in the last couple of years when it felt like the only people who cared about the subject were Monroe and footballer Marcus Rashford.

You do wonder if the UK government does. Even faced with scarifying predictions that some 1.3 million people in the UK will be pushed into poverty over the next 12 months (adding to the 14.5 million people who are there already), it seems pretty sanguine about the current cost of living crisis.

But Monroe is fighting her corner. At the end of January, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) announced that it was going to change how it collected and reported on the cost of food prices and inflation to more accurately track how low-income families are affected by rising prices. Monroe had been instrumental in pointing out how inaccurate the ONS methods were when it came to reflecting the impact on food price rises on low-income families.

“Nobody’s buying 45p rice because they like it,” Monroe pointed out. “They’re buying it because they have to.”

That plain-speaking may be why Nigella Lawson, no less, was so keen to sing Monroe’s praises on The Food Programme.

“She burns with a holy rage, and rightly so,” Lawson suggested, “but her compassion and sometimes painful vulnerability seem to give her the resolute strength and passionate dignity of a warrior queen.”

Monroe’s own self-analysis was a little less grandiose. “I’m outspoken. I’m sweary. I’m not shy about who I am and what I stand for. And not everybody’s going to love that and that’s fine. I don’t need to be universally loved.”

Of course, her real superpower is her ability to take the simplest ingredients and make a decent meal with them, and to then share that with others.

“Anyone can cook with filet steak and Beaujolais,” she said at one point. “But if you’ve got a can of 28p tomatoes, a can of 17p kidney beans and a dusty half jar of curry powder and you can turn that into something your three-year-old will eat, you’re a genius.”

Talking about working class heroes … There was an end-of-term feel about Five Live’s football chat show The Monday Night Club as the season approaches its climax. As a result, blokey banter was front and centre.

It is ever thus, you might say. But I don’t mind blokey banter when it’s about football. Sometimes it’s even funny, though not always intentionally. During the subsequent commentary of Crystal Palace against Leeds United, Jonathan Pearce began to tell his co-commentator Chris Sutton about his record of predicting who will be relegated from the top league.

“You know I talk about a manager’s success rate,” Pearce said. “I’ve got a nought per cent sex rate.”

It took him a second to realise what he had actually said. “Sex rate?” He thought about it and then added, “That as well.”

Listen Out For: What Really Happened in the 90s, Radio 4, Monday to Friday, 1.45pm

Robert Carlyle fronts this new series that looks back at the 1990s and asks how that decade shaped the world we live in now.