The Spectator

The unclued lights can all be followed by STREET.

Sofa so good Phillip Schofield has said that his career on the TV sofa is over. Who first sat on one?  – BBC Breakfast, first broadcast on 17 January 1983, famously featured a red leather sofa which presenter Frank Bough told his audience was the ideal way to present a news programme. But the history of the TV sofa goes back a lot further. The Tonight Show, first broadcast on NBC in 1954, featured one from 1964 onwards – a surviving clip from that year shows presenter Johnny Carson standing in front of a blue cloth-upholstered sofa. Death and taxes How much does inheritance tax raise, and how many people pay it? – In 2021/22 the tax raised £6.1bn. This is double what it raised a decade earlier.

Toothless inquiries Sir: You rightly say that inquiries in Britain have become a form of cover-up (‘The politics of panic’, June 3). This is clear as we contemplate the delay in reporting on the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the £200 million spent on the Bloody Sunday report published 38 years after the event, the seven-year delay in concluding the Chilcot inquiry, and the shaming fact that Sweden has reported on its handling of Covid before our inquiry has even begun.

The unclued lights are card games, as is the puzzle’s title, SNAP. The pair is 15A/29. First prize Mark Rowntree, Greenwich, London SE10 Runners-up Frances Whitehead, Harrogate, N. Yorks; Alan Pink, Crowhurst, E.

Terf wars Who was the original Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)? – The practice of some women’s groups in excluding trans women began almost with the advent of trans women themselves. In 1978, the Lesbian Organisation of Toronto refused membership to a trans woman who identified as a lesbian – saying it would only accept ‘womyn born womyn’. – The term ‘Terf’, however, dates only from 2008, when it was used in a blog post by feminist writer Viv Smythe in response to a ban on trans women attending the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (a ban which had been in place since 1991). – The festival, which had been going since 1976, was boycotted by some and was last held in 2015.

Goodbye, Jeremy Each week I opened The Spectator at Low Life in part to read that brilliant column and, more recently, to see how Jeremy Clarke was coping with his deteriorating health. Always hoping the column would be there; that he had, despite excruciating pain, penned us another. Like very many of his regular admiring readers, I had found the last two weeks disturbingly sad and last week we learned that he has died and is free at last from his suffering. As an oncologist, during a career treating thousands of patients, at first ones with prostate and other urological cancers, and later ones with breast cancer, I have seen the ravages of metastatic cancer in its many and varied forms and observed how people cope in their individual ways.