Rod Liddle

I see that on the issue of gay conversion therapy, the Prime Minister has been floating around all over the place, like a giant albino blimp which has suddenly come adrift from its moorings. I believe Boris is now of a mind to ban conversion therapy for gay people but not for trans-gendered people, having already flip-flopped twice. This decision seems to have enraged many more people than it placated and lots of LGBTQI etc groups are shrieking with despair. Could I suggest, then, that the Prime Minister flip-flops again? Rather than banning gay conversion therapy, the government should examine the benefits of making it compulsory. I realise that for many people this would be a controversial move, but that fact alone should not dissuade ministers from going ahead.

Delighted though we all are that Benedict Cumberbatch has decided to allow a Ukrainian family to live in one of his houses, did he have to trumpet this to the entire population of the country? Surely these sorts of decision are best kept to oneself, no? But then, they’re always doing it, the luvvies – proclaiming their saintliness in order to protect and advance the brand, one supposes. Benedict should know that there are more than 100,000 ordinary people in this country, people who have never received a Bafta, who have offered their homes to Ukrainian refugees and they don’t go bragging about it on national media. People such as myself, for example. I have applied to take refugees in, to do my little bit, but it would not occur to me to advertise the fact publicly.

Having just dusted down my Geiger counter and argued with the family about whether or not there is room for our dog, Jessie, in the cellar fallout shelter, I thought I would check in with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to see how long we’ve got before our recently acquired small paddock sprouts its first crop of Cobalt-60. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was begun in 1945 by the physicists who, having devoted several years of their lives to the Manhattan Project, suddenly realised that their striving might not be, in the end, exclusively beneficial for the human race. As the most lionised of them, J. Robert Oppenheimer, put it at the time (without a great deal of cheer): ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

My most important new year’s resolution was cast aside this week. I had vowed that in 2022 I would eschew writing about the infinite idiocies of the woke and concentrate instead on bringing to light important, worthy causes. In other words, it was a pledge to make the world a better place, instead of just moaning. Wednesday gave me an excellent opportunity to put this plan of mine into action, because it was ‘World Spay Day’. A group of animal rights charities had come together to nominate this day in order to raise awareness about the many, many millions of cats in the world that need spaying.

You have the advantage over me. It may be that you are reading this now in your makeshift fallout shelter, hair falling out and bleeding from the gums as the nuclear winter descends. More likely you are saying, rather smugly, to your neighbour: ‘I knew he was taking the piss. He’s a right one, that Putin.’ Or perhaps Vlad’s forces are already in London, having swept through western Europe in about eight hours, the Germans for once outdoing the French with their alacrity to surrender. Well, that should see an end to Stonewall and the Tavistock Clinic, no? Every cloud, etc.

I must offer my support to Luke Main and Dr Joanna Brunker, who as a consequence of their fervent Christian beliefs refused to sell their house in Surrey to a gay couple. It shows a certain principle, no? I recently sold my house in Kent and being a Christian should really have made a similar sort of stipulation — but the truth is that such is my avarice I’d have flogged the property to the campest old queen in the country if he’d offered a few quid over the asking price. As it happens, we did discriminate against some potential purchasers, by taking against them because they were down from London, or neurotic, or had loathsome children. But then I believe the law allows one to do that.