Harry Mount

Forget the cigar, the homburg and the V-for-victory sign. If Winston Churchill were around today, he’d be pounding the streets in T-shirt, shorts and chunky trainers. Jogging is an almost compulsory obsession for any Tory alpha male. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are forever out running; Michael Gove has lost a drastic amount of weight racing around west London; and Boris has revealed he’s down to 15 and a half stone, from 16 and a half. He’s also declared he’d freeze obesity taxes on fattening food — the answer to losing weight was more exercise, he said — and admitted to failing to keep up a vegan diet (he likes cheese too much). But he is certainly looking slimmer since he started going out with Carrie Symonds, 24 years his junior.

 Montego Bay, Jamaica When the Kennedy clan were children, JFK and his siblings would tear off their clothes before leaping from the pier at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts — safe in the knowledge their servants would pick up their discarded clothes. That used to strike me as the ultimate in entitlement before I ended up here in a hotel in Jamaica. I’m being waited on hand and foot in a way that wouldn’t have disgraced the Kennedys — or a 19th--century duke. Someone’s just rung to ask when would be a good time to fill my fridge with beer. A driver is waiting to take me on a tour of Montego Bay. When a friend, also staying here, forgot her diary, her butler brought it from her room to our breakfast table.

The Celtic Tiger has come and gone. Over the past 30 years, billions of pounds poured into Irish houses and then drained out again. The ruins of Ireland have slumbered on through the peak, the trough and the current blessed recovery. Medieval castles, Georgian country houses, Victorian lodges… They cling on, disappearing under the ivy, slowly crumbling, in demesnes across the island of Ireland. As Robert O’Byrne, aka the Irish Aesthete, writes in his new guide Ruins of Ireland, we tend to think Ireland lost most of its great houses as a direct result of the Troubles of the early 1920s. Several hundred did get burnt to the ground then.

How lazy, snobbish and wrong it is to mock Gibraltar for the lager and fish and chips clichés. Yes, you can get lager and fish and chips there; nothing wrong with  that. The pint of lager I had in a pub in Gibraltar Main Street was excellent. And the funny thing is that, unlike consciously ‘British’ pubs in Rome or New York, there was no ersatz feel to it. It was exactly like a pub in Britain, down to the two middle-aged office workers in shirtsleeves, exchanging dull office chat, breaking off occasionally for low-level, awkward flirting with the barmaid, who was in her twenties. That’s what’s so gripping about Gibraltar: you move, in an instant, from carbon-copy Britain to a completely parallel, foreign universe.

Over the past 20 years, the old British trait of self-deprecation has been killed off. And in its place, boasting is booming. Last week, I was told by an 80-year-old Scottish businessman what a successful shipping tycoon he is, how wonderful his poems are, and why young women find him so attractive. Over a three-hour dinner, he never drew breath, never asked a question and only ever talked about his brilliant self. Tycoon types have always shown off, but now the habit has migrated down the generations and from men — the traditional show-offs — to women. I can no longer face seeing one old friend in her thirties, because every time I see her she says: ‘You know what? I’m bloody good at my job.

England didn’t just lose the World Cup. When it comes to male nudity, the country has also lost its sense of shame. Everywhere — on the Tube, in buses, on the streets, in the pub — men are striding around topless. On Sunday in north Oxford I saw a man skiing topless, on roller-skis, with poles, down the Banbury Road. It’s as if Adam and Eve never ate from the tree of knowledge. Yes, it’s very hot. And yes, in the summer of 1976, men took their tops off but only in particular situations: on the beach, on a building site or in their back garden. I must admit that I cycle with my shirt open in this heat. But because I’m moving at speed, no one is exposed to my mottled flesh for long.

This week, Prince Edward was paying tribute to a much-loved Queen. Not ‘Mummy’ — but Queen Æthelflæd, Alfred the Great’s eldest child, the Lady of the Mercians and one of our greatest, if largely forgotten, Anglo-Saxon leaders. If it wasn’t for Æthelflæd kicking the Danes out of Mercia during her reign from 911-918, we’d all be speaking Danish. You could call her the first Brexiteer. Æthelflæd died in 918, 1,100 years ago this week, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, heart of her Mercian kingdom (roughly equivalent to Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire). In the West Midlands some people call her the Founding Mother of England.

When you think about Peter Stringfellow, aka 'Stringy', it's hard to think about anything other than topless women. Stringy, who's just died aged 77, made a fortune first out of music clubs - early bookings included the Beatles - and then out of women who'd mislaid their tops. Not the most salacious of pursuits, you might think. And the sleaziness of the image wasn't helped by the foot-long mullet and the taste for leopardskin-print outfits. Certainly, on the outside, all those trashy clichés rang true in 2000, when I interviewed Stringy for The Spectator shortly after his 60th birthday.