ON September 11 2001, terrorists hijacked four planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

A total of 2,996 people lost their lives. And one civil servant lost her job.

Jo Moore was a press officer at the Department for Transport who, on learning of the terrorist attacks, suggested: “It’s a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.”

There was understandable, widespread disgust at the idea that the horror could be turned to anyone’s advantage, and before long she had to resign.

But no-one need have been all that surprised. In trying to ensure the best publicity for the department by burying the negative stuff, maybe she was just doing her job.

And burying bad news and ensuring one news item overshadows another is nothing new.

In October 1990 Britain joined the European exchange rate mechanism, or ERM. It was the wrong time and we crashed out two years later, on a day recalled as “Black Wednesday”.

But the date of joining had had nothing to do with economics and everything to do with news management.

It was the last day of the Labour party conference and the Conservatives were keen to knock Neil Kinnock’s speech off the top of the news list.

Everyone following the news in the mid-1990s will remember the “War of the Waleses”, as Prince Charles and Princess Diana vied for the attention of the media and tried to shoulder each other off the front pages.

Charles would make a speech or grant an interview. And so Diana would appear at some function in a particularly revealing dress or – which many people found especially creepy – get her photo taken in a hospital watching a heart operation. The War of the Waleses was waged until her death.

I recalled all this while reading of “Operation Save Big Dog”.

Apparently “Big Dog” is a name Boris Johnson has invented for himself, and the operation is about trying to bury the bad news of rule-breaking parties in Downing Street by making other announcements and promises which he hopes will push “partygate” further down the news agenda.

Instead of expecting us to believe he went to a party and didn’t realise it was a party, he is trying to distract us with other stories.

The trouble is they haven’t worked. The freezing of the BBC licence fee was an early effort, announced by his culture secretary Nadine Dorries among the usual Tory threats to the BBC’s future, though I’ve never understood why a prime minister who owes his career to the BBC is so hostile towards it.

No-one had heard of him until he appeared on Have I Got News For You.

Then there was the tale that asylum seekers were going to be sent to Ghana – rather undermined when the Ghanaian government said it was the first they’d heard of it.

To me the most entertaining element of Operation Save Big Dog is transport secretary Grant Shapps’s promise to cut the number of announcements on trains, with a “bonfire of the banalities”.

Are announcements on trains really the greatest grievance of modern times?

For blind people they can be very helpful, not to mention sleepy people like me. I’ll inevitably nod off on train journeys from London to Carlisle, and am quite glad to be roused by an announcement that the “next station stop is Penrith North Lakes”. Otherwise I might wake up when the next station stop is Glasgow Central.

If Johnson really wants to do something to improve rail travel and win positive coverage high up the news lists, he’d slash the price of tickets – among the most expensive in the world.

Not only would he be helping commuters and tourists. People might suspect that he’s more serious about the environment than David Cameron turned out to be.

Trains would be the ideal way to travel if they were only cheaper. And they’d cut our carbon emissions substantially.

The Campaign for Better Transport staged an experiment where one traveller set off from central London to central Glasgow by train and the other went by plane.

The train passenger arrived just two minutes later than the flyer, and created an estimated 20kg of CO2. The flyer created 137kg. And yet, crazily, the train ticket cost twice as much as the flight.

The money being wasted on HS2 could be redirected to subsidising our existing trains. And then maybe some would agree with Johnson’s brand new communications director Guto Harri, who claims the Big Dog is “not a complete clown”.