2 Wednesday November 10 2021 | the times
times2
A
recent NHS report
revealed that people
as old as 90 are
being treated for
cocaine abuse and
that the number
of over-60s in
hospital after caning
the devil’s dandruff had increased by
518 per cent in a decade. Hmm.
Now this is obviously a serious
matter about which we must not be
facetious. No smirking, please, just
because a few years ago a random
test of bingo hall lavatories in the
UK found surfaces awash with
cocaine (although at least we now
know what the bingo callers mean
by “43, down on your knees”.
That’s certainly settled an
argument for me.)
We should probably
steeple our fingers,
set our faces to
“disappointed”
and tell grandma
we’re sending
her Kleenex
hankies to the
lab. I despise the
smug, middle-class
dinner party coke-
snorters who think
a few Fairtrade bananas
and a direct debit to
Amnesty offsets them bankrolling
a trade in human misery, so why
should oldies get away with it?
And yet, and yet. I am watching
Ed Balls’s BBC series about life in
a Scarborough care home and, if you’ll
allow me a moment of rank hypocrisy,
I think, on balance, I’d prefer to blow
whatever savings I had left going out
on a Class A high than on another
multipack of incontinence pads and
a hefty standing order to Shady Pines.
Don’t get me wrong: my admiration
for the heroic carers in Balls’s films
is boundless, just as it was for the
wonderful people who looked after
my dementia-ravaged mother in her
care home. But no one wants to fade
out miserably this way. No one.
One man, a former truck driver with
dementia, has so far spent £500,000
on his care, having had to sell his
house to fund it. If he had cancer
he’d pay nothing. Knowing this
situation is being replicated
Bottoms
up to get
the cops
Here’s a tip for anyone
who can’t get the police
to come out and
investigate their
burglary. Go to the
nearest police speed
camera, lower your
trousers and aim your
bare bottom at the lens.
A Swat team should be
with you in minutes.
Darrell Meekcom,
a terminally ill retired
university lecturer
from Kidderminster,
discovered this when
he set about ticking
off his bucket list,
which included
mooning at a mobile
police speed camera.
Within 20 minutes,
he claims, six (count
’em) police officers
arrived at his home and
wrestled him to the
ground. To be fair, you
can’t expect police to
know someone’s health
status from their bare
buttocks. But it does
seem a little OTT.
Especially when in
May it emerged that
one million burglaries
have gone unsolved in
the UK. Some forces
won’t send out unless
the intruder is still on
the premises, but
a rogue bottom is
obviously a different
matter. Still, now
you know how to get
their attention. As
our American friends
might say: by
fanny power.Harry’s
blind eye
for Diana
storyline about
Princess Diana in
the forthcoming series
of The Crown.
Jemima Khan
withdrew as a
consultant in protest, so
why can’t he vote with
his feet, they say. Haha
— good luck with that!
If he put principles
ahead of wonga he’d
have flounced off weeksago over the puerile
splat of ordure that is
Diana: the Musical
(available on Netflix).
In a crowded field
it is easily the worst
musical I’ve seen. To
give you an idea, Diana
sings, “Harry, my
ginger-haired son/
You’ll always be second
to none,” and when
Diana is being chasedby the paparazzi they
sing: “Better than a
Guinness, better than a
w***/ Snap a few pics,
it’s money in the bank.”
Eh? I’ve seen B-list
pornos with more
gravitas. Harry and
Meghan are expert
complainers, but with
£100 million at stake
I’ll bet you a tenner
a blind eye is turned.Royal experts have
urged Prince Harry to
tear up his £100 million
deal with Netflix over
a “disrespectful”
everywhere in the UK thanks to our
unfair system, is it any wonder if an
elderly person fingers their savings
book and thinks: “All those rainy
mornings at the bus stop schlepping
to work? I’ll enjoy it while I can.
Bring me some E’s and whizz.”
If a minority of retired people are
resolving to be not Skis (Spending the
Kids’ Inheritance) but Skids (Spending
the Kids’ Inheritance on Drugs) or just
burning through the care home fund
while they can, then I can’t say I’m
surprised. As they used to say where
I grew up: “If you ’aven’t got it, they
can’t tek it off you.”
I used to think that when they said,
“70 is the new 30,” they meant Botox,
Viagra and the SilverSingles dating
app, not people using their
triple-jabbed Covid
vaccination cards to
chop up their lines.
Remember
when the former
chairman of the
Co-op bank, the
Rev Paul Flowers,
then 65, was
photographed
napping during
a four-day ketamine
and coke bender
with crisps balanced
on his nipples?
In 2016 he seemed like an
outrageous outlier, but maybe he
was simply a trailblazer. It was soon
followed by reports of care home
residents dealing LSD and cannabis.
In Worcester one resident was
investigated by police after claims
that he was selling crack cocaine
from his room. Well, it sure beats
the 8pm Horlicks trolley. I can’t
pretend I wouldn’t be first in the
queue, disguising it as Canderel.
Incidentally, I recommend watching
Inside the Care Crisis with Ed Balls,
for which he spent two weeks working
as a carer in that nursing home.
Noteworthy, isn’t it, that when certain
ministers take second jobs to “enhance
their experience” of the wider world
they never take jobs like this, which
actually would make them better
politicians and more able to help to
fix the care crisis, but instead tend to
“advise” banks or wealthy corporates
for a fat wad of cash? Funny, that.Carol Midgley
Hard partying or care
home fees: I know which
I’d blow my savings on
F
or Sky News’s editor-at-
large Adam Boulton it
has been another day of
all-out politics. Minutes
before his thusly named
daily show, All Out
Politics, begins at 11am
Jacob Rees-Mogg
performs a breakneck U-turn over the
parliamentary ethics row. Hours later
the MP at its centre, Owen Paterson,
resigns. On such days, Boulton says,
his job is “action-painting”, splashing
the news in broad-brush over his
canvas, filling in the background from
his decades of experience and then
over-painting as new facts emerge.
Back at his pied-à-terre in Covent
Garden, however, it is now 6pm and
Boulton is looking back not on today,
but his 33-year career at Sky News.
Britain’s doyen of rolling news, for 25
years the station’s political editor, its
host for general and US elections, and
invigilator of its first leaders’ debate in
2010, has news of his own. Boulton, 62,
is leaving Sky at the end of the year.
Why? “Well,” he says awkwardly,
“it’s a kind of mutual decision.
Basically, just looking ahead, having
been at two start-ups, first with TV-am
and then Sky, I think it looks like the
direction which Sky News wants to
go over the next few years is not one
that’s a particularly good fit for me.”
He refers me to an article his boss,
Sky News’s head John Ryley, recently
wrote in Press Gazette, a last rites for
the age of the “all-powerful anchor”.
Reporters were now experts, he wrote;
the votive anchor’s role had shrunk.
“He’s made it quite clear he believes
the future of news is digital, is on the
platform for phones and is very
strongly based around data journalism.
At that point you do start thinking.. .”
He acknowledges a problem. For
decades Sky News broke the news.
Now Twitter, unobligated to check its
sources, does. Yet, I say, a complicated
breaking story over parliamentary
standards still needs explaining. He
agrees. “When it blew up that basicallythe government was backing down,
that was quite exciting, but also what
I enjoy is being able to contextualise
that almost immediately from a basis
of judgment and experience.”
Boulton, who has interviewed every
prime minister since Alec Douglas-
Home (he was admittedly no longer in
office), has plenty of both. Why lose
that? “Well, it’s certainly worked so far,
but change arises. How many people
these days know who Bernard Ingham
is? You can’t do an Ancient Mariner
and grab them by the lapels and say,
‘Bernard Ingham would never have
behaved like that.’
“But also, let’s be honest about this,
there’s always a changing of the guard
in television. Television is very
sensitive to the idea of diversity.”
Except towards older people, I say.
“Well, maybe. I was joking with one of
my old bosses about this and he said,
‘You’re white, public school, Oxbridge
male, what’s not to like?’ But I don’t
complain about that. I was political
editor for 25 years. Then Faisal Islam
did it. Beth Rigby’s there now.
“We all think we got there on merit.
I like to think we did, but nonetheless,
on balance, a disproportionate number
of people like me got there on merit, if
you see what I mean.”
But, I say, when we think about Sky
News anchors, the ones we know are
him, Dermot Murnaghan and Kay
Burley, and they’re all over 60. “We’ve
had our day,” he says simply. Is ageism
at play? “I don’t know about that. Jon
Snow [of Channel 4 News] is 74 and
he’s going. Huw [Edwards] is in his
sixties; he’s suggested he may not be
very long at the BBC. I think there is
a changing of the guard going on, and
that may be reasonable.
“The irony of it is that as far as we
can tell the demographic of people
watching television is about our age,
but I don’t make any complaint about
this. My position is I quite understand
people want to develop the channel for
the next generation.
“I think All Out Politics is a veryI’m leaving
Sky: we baby
boomers have
had our day
After spending 33 years at the channel,
Adam Boulton is departing Sky News.
It’s over for the public school, Oxbridge,
tled an male old guard, he tells Andrew Billen
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