Rod Liddle

The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that Covid originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed upon us by Chinese scientists. I don’t know either way, but I would suggest that a suspicion that the virus was man-made, given the proximity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, scarcely qualifies as a lunatic conspiracy theory to be banned from public utterance. But that’s what the Big Tech companies decided — almost certainly for political reasons.

A terrible thing, to be torn. Last Sunday was International Day to End Obstetric Fistula, a very painful condition affecting the nether regions of women who have just given birth. I very much wished to observe the occasion in some way, but Sunday was also World Turtle Day, which naturally commended itself to me as well. Having thought about it, my hope was that those suffering from obstetric fistulae and the turtles might put aside whatever differences they may have and waddle together in a show of unity and I could commend them both at the same time. Better still, however, would have been if last Sunday had been designated International Day to Bomb Minsk. I sometimes feel that the people who choose what stuff to campaign about tend to miss the bigger picture.

Experts tell us that we are facing a mental health ‘time bomb’ in the UK, partly as a consequence of Covid restrictions and partly because we have a Conservative government which has as its apparent main priority a malevolent desire to see people go insane and, hopefully, kill themselves. I am paraphrasing the experts here, all of whom hate the Tories and want more money spent on their area of expertise, i.e. mental health.

Not for the first time, our Prime Minister has executed a very sharp U-turn. Last month, heralding the achievements of AstraZeneca, Boris Johnson professed that the vaccine had been made possible because of greed, echoing the phrase used by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street that ‘greed is good’. Now, though, he seems to be of the mind that greed is very bad indeed. He pronounced himself ‘horrified’ that six Premier League clubs intended to form a European Super League, from which, following the American model, they could never be relegated, in order to trouser even more outrageous sums of money for themselves. He was not alone: the entire country reacted with disgust and fury.

We have a government which is basically libertarian in its instincts, despite its current affection for telling us what we can and can’t do on a daily basis. This seems like a paradox or a non-sequitur, but it isn’t really, because in a sense it is a coalition government between libertarian politicians and a big-statist regulatory medical clergy. It is an interesting political marriage, a marriage of expediency. And it will soon become very strained. The government is about to run into big problems over its rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which many scientists believe could have a causal link to the prevalence of blood clots in a very small minority of the people who take it. The European Medicines Agency is about to announce the official finding into all this.

I am having very little success in getting my collection of cartoons of great religious founders published. Perhaps it is because I am not known as a draughtsman and publications are notoriously conservative in hiring new talent. It is all very dispiriting. My drawings are, I think, puckish and yet respectful. For example, there is one of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the man somehow regarded as divine by Rastafarians. He is depicted in a game of ten-pin bowling with Benito Mussolini, the controversial former leader of Italy. Both men seem to be enjoying themselves — Benito is holding a pint of lager while Selassie is biting into an almond Magnum, waiting their turn to roll.

Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy, has been talking to the press about one of her hobbies. Apparently she likes nothing more than playing the role of a ‘unicorn’ — the third partner in a sexual liaison. She explained: ‘Finding the strength to explore these more complicated, passionate aspects of my personality became the key to harnessing my voice and creative spark, which in turn helped me better cope with depression, anxiety, and the lingering cognitive effects of adolescent anorexia.’ This is a fascinating approach to curing eating disorders, I think. Caroline’s dad, if you remember, is unable to tuck his shirt into his trousers without lying down on a bed and obtaining assistance from a young lady.