Columns

Are homosexuals and transgendered people more at risk from natural disasters than the rest of the population? I dare say there is a robust tranche of right-of-centre opinion which holds that they are indeed more at risk and that by and large this is a very good thing. Natural disasters are sometimes called ‘acts of God’ and those of a deeply conservative disposition may be inclined to see them as a punishment from the Almighty for grave transgressions of a sexual or gender nature. It is God doing what God does best – a spot of appropriate smiting.

One of the many good reasons to want every new generation to study the second world war is that it forces you to confront your own cowardice. Last weekend, my husband and I went to Prague – the first time we’ve been away together since the birth of our son eight years ago. We wandered the city and ended up crying in a church crypt – as you do on a romantic mini-break. The church was the Czech Orthodox cathedral of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius and, as we discovered after we had entered, the scene of the final, bloody showdown of Operation Anthropoid, the mission to assassinate SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the butcher of Prague’.

Rosie Duffield’s magnificently rancorous resignation of the Labour whip has reduced the number of MPs on the government side who are able accurately to identify what a ‘woman’ is by about 30 per cent. This is, then, a grave loss to Sir Keir Starmer, who could have wheeled Rosie out every time he was asked the tricky question and told his interlocutors: ‘Ask her, she seems to know. I haven’t a clue. I have been shown diagrams, of course, many of them in full colour. But a proper definition still eludes me because, for me and the vast majority of my colleagues on the left, such things as diagrams and scientific facts are easily trumped by the post-truth wish--fulfilment pleading of shrill lunatics.

Old tortoise that I am, my head usually yanks back into my shell when people start talking about artificial intelligence. One reason for this is laziness in the face of the challenge of learning to understand a deep and complex subject. I’m not proud of that. But of another reason I’m unashamed. Societies standing at the brink of a massive leap forward in technology have never been much good at predicting where the innovation will lead. The printing press, telegraphy, typewriting and motor car; the wireless and television; the telephone, the tank, the mobile phone… who would have guessed usefully at the landscape into which these inventions would usher us?