WEEKEND WIDDY
Random Thoughts and Musings
WELCOME to Weekend Widdy, which as regular readers will know is a collection of short pieces of the sort which used to appear around my main article on my Daily Express page. It is free to all and comes out at any time during the weekend but usually on a Sunday.
First, an apology. I warned readers last weekend that Widdy on Wednesday would be late because of diary constraints but I am sorry to say it did not happen at all. So next Wednesday will be a bumper edition, with subscription payers getting twice as much in their segment. I shall be looking at Reform policies for the local elections and related issues.
I am sorry for James Mackey, the new Chief Executive of NHS England, who was snapped sleeping on a train and then widely ridiculed. The episode reminded me of a probably apocryphal story which was popular among MPs in the age of the all night sittings. A constituent rang his MP at 9am, to be greeted with a sleep-drenched voice, which told him to ring back in a couple of hours.
The man was outraged and fumed that he was at work so he expected his MP to be. The MP then rang him at 3am the next night and, in response to the man’s expostulation, said that as he was at work he expected his constituent to be too! Certainly in those days I often took an afternoon nap and Mackey is more than entitled to do that if he has been working all the hours God sends.
Once, when I was doing Strictly Come Dancing, the Daily Mail ran a picture of me asleep on a train with my mouth open. At least James Mackey managed to doze off with his shut.
There is, however, a serious side to all this nonsense. If we want high achievers in public life then we are not going to get them if this is how the press treats them.It is a ludicrous distraction from the big issues involved in trying to make a 1940s system work in 2025. Mackey must already be wondering why he is bothering to try.
It seems that not a day passes without the police arresting innocent citizens just because they have upset someone. Hard upon the arrest of a respectable couple for committing the grand crime of bothering their daughter’s school by sending too many emails, comes an arrest of a mother for confiscating her children’s I-pads.
As usual, there was no attempt to ask basic questions in the woman’s home but instead she was hauled off to the police station, searched, finger-printed and flung in a cell. The mind boggles at the sheer lack of any common sense or proportionality. Inevitably the silly saga ended with the police concluding what any of us could have told them from the off: a mother has a right to confiscate her children’s I-pads. Oh. you don’t say, Officer?
Along with teachers, the police are the first to moan about parents who do not take responsibility for their children so why did they go out of their way to undermine this parent’s authority? To tick a box for an arrest? Or because it is just so much easier than arresting burglars? Shame on the lot of them.
When Virginia Giuffre accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault she also accused a lawyer called Alan Dershowitz. Unlike the prince, Dershowitz stood up to her and she withdrew the claim saying that she may have “made a mistake”. Eh? That is surely not the sort of thing which you can make a mistake about ?
Now, the lady has left hospital despite telling the world that she had only a few days to live. She also claims that her husband is a violent abuser but the Daily Mail is asking why therefore Perth’s courts made her not him the subject of a restraining order and why their children live with him, not her.
I do not know the answers to any of these questions but I reckon Prince Andrew, who has consistently denied all her allegations, must be wishing that instead of handing over a large cheque, he had said “see you in court”. Of course the reason that was not an option was the imminence of Elizabeth II’s jubilee celebrations but precious few thanks has he received for putting his duty to the late Queen first.
While on the subject of the Royal Family, it is sheer paranoia for Prince Harry to suggest that the reason he lost his security detail was because the Royals wanted to keep him in this country. He lost it because he is no longer a working Royal by his own choice.
And why on earth was it necessary for him to fly over here at all when he was not required to speak in court? Well, it grabbed headlines which should have instead been given to the King and Queen in Rome but it seems to me equally paranoid to think that was the motive. He almost certainly just wanted to publicise his grievance, a not unusual course for our whinging prince to take, and photographs of him arriving at court would fulfil that purpose.
Thank heaven he is the spare and not the heir.
Yesterday, I addressed a local election meeting for Reform at Cheriton Bishop, a village on the North side of Dartmoor. The sleepy little place produced a packed audience, lively questions and a superb tea. Hope was in the air and the chap who took the minutes was 16. So Starmer may get a shock when he lowers the voting age: the young may prove less left-leaning than he assumes.
Apparently weight-watchers is about to file for bankruptcy after its business has been hit by Ozempic and Wegovy. It must have seemed pretty safe when it started in 1963 and prosperity was leading to weight gain after the stringencies of post war rationing and shortages. After all, people would always need diets.
Everything changes: bathing in a tub with bars of soap gave way to showering with gels and foam; blankets were overtaken by duvets; videos yielded to DVDs; public telephones were rendered redundant by mobiles.
Probably only undertakers can safely claim that people will always need their services, but I think weight-watchers should hold on a bit longer because when people discover that after these miracle jabs the weight comes back on, they may conclude that the old ways are best.
Finally, following my story last week of how I wrongly construed the plural of octopus as octopi instead of octopodes, a kind reader emailed me to the effect that in science it is always octopi. So science can be wrong. Will somebody please tell the wilder apostles of climate change?