The Times - UK (2022-04-30)

Watching porn in public

should be illegal

Janice Turner

Page 29

Carol Midgley Notebook

moderation as the government

nags us to do and you get a

fiscal spanking. Where’s the

incentive, eh? May as well get

leathered.

Now I’m not completely

stupid. I don’t expect a half

to cost exactly half that of

a pint because glasses

must still be washed,

bartenders paid, tables

wiped, etc. But this kind

of mark-up is blatant

prejudice. Consuming less

is so often penalised, my

favourite example being

that an XS cashmere

jumper costs the same as

an XXL despite using a

fraction of the wool. As a

student I used to drink

pints. Maybe I should

again to avoid what my

friend calls a “lady’s drink

tax” (I know men drink halves,

too. Don’t cancel me). Pint

please, with an extra glass.

I

wish to report that I have been
the victim of outrageous
discrimination. I am feeling
“othered”. Why? Because I drink
halves of lager, that’s why. At a
bar the men ordered foaming pints
of Estrella at £5.60 each. Then came
halves of the same beverage which
cost, bafflingly, £3.40 each. They
charged £6.80 for two halves — a
full £1.20 more than if exactly the
same amount of fluid had been
poured into one pint glass. This rip-
off — sorry, “adjustment” — applied
to all beers. So try to drink in

Pub drink

rip-offs? You

don’t know

the half of it

Pillow fright

‘H

ow often

should you

change your

bedsheets?” asks the

BBC website. Ooh, I

like this question

because I can swear,

in all honesty, that it’s

once a week. But

that’s not because I’m

Martha Stewart

houseproud, merely

that after six days the

bed has become a

forest of dog and cat

hair and I fear divorce

papers might be served.

Pet-free friends tell me

they change sheets

fortnightly.

The BBC says that

“nearly half of single

men” admit they don’t wash

bedding for four months, often

longer. Do you think it ever occurs

to these men to wonder why they’re

still single?

Wisdom of Delia

‘R

ecipes are ten a penny and I

couldn’t see any point in

spending my life trying to

think of more,” said Delia Smith,

explaining why she retired. She has

said the same about endless TV

cookery shows. Preach it, Delia,

though at least you don’t have to

review all this terrible TV food porn

like someone I know. In my view she

should have got a damehood purely

for saying that modern cooking is

too “poncey and cheffy”. Hear, hear,

and hallelujah. I had a “tasting” meal

(so little food, so dragged out) in

which one course was literally one

cherry tomato sliced in half dabbed

with a drop of “jus” in the middle of

a big plate. On the upside it was

hilarious. The squirt of washing-up

liquid required to clean it probably

cost more. Delia has also railed

against those pretentious six dots of

sauce on the side of the plate. Even

worse is when they smear it and you

wonder if a pigeon got in the kitchen

and unloaded mid-flight.

Ironing the carpet

I

did a double-take upon reading

that “insurance claims for carpet

burns are down” due to working

from home. Blimey, do copulating

couples really expect Aviva to

compensate them for friction injuries

to the knees? But, no, it meant claims

for iron burns to the carpet which

have plummeted because fewer

workers get dressed for the office

now. Hold on. Do people iron their

clothes on the carpet? Do they iron

their actual carpets? I’m confused.

Still, I can promise my insurance

company that I’ll never make such a

claim. I never iron anything and

haven’t switched mine on since about

2017, filing it under “Life’s too short”.

@carolmidgley

tipped the balance in Putin’s mind,

surely misreads Putin’s mind. No

such balance existed. I can picture no

plausible alternative British policy

towards assisting Ukraine that would

have stopped this despot.

Besides, in history “Steady on!” has

not always been wrong. It would

have been wrong in the 1930s; right

before Suez; right before the Vietnam

war; wrong before the first Gulf war;

right before the invasion of Iraq; and

right before the Libyan intervention.

If (for instance) you think it’s obvious

that we should, or obvious that we

should not, pile in to the defence of

Taiwan if China invades, then full

marks for your certitude, but forgive

the rest of us some hesitation.

Wallace should know better than to

be upping the ante now. A steadying

hand can hardly be expected from

Truss as her only hope of leading her

party is to maximise the support of

the crazies on the Tory benches.

Anyone can bark of freedom and

make speeches about standing tall in

the world, and Truss barks for Britain.

Anyone can talk like a soldier and

win admiration for hot speech, and

Wallace is well-placed to. But in

circumstances of mortal danger,

mature candidates for No 10 will

recognise a geopolitics that is tinder

dry — and put away the matches.

Gung-ho Tories should stop the bidding war

A reckless auction of bellicosity is no way to conduct this undeclared leadership contest between Truss and Wallace
ROB PINNEY/PA

invasion would be inevitable and

almost instant. Re-read most

contemporaneous western

journalism, including most defence

specialists’ commentaries, and you’ll

see that while that counsel of despair

was, in retrospect, wrong, it was not

stupid, ignorant or cowardly to

suspect there was little we could

usefully do.

It is now being put about by the

“why didn’t they listen to Ben?”

brigade that Moscow might never

have invaded if it’d thought the free

world was readier to help President

Zelensky. This vastly underestimates

Putin’s catastrophic ignorance of his

own armed forces’ incompetence,

and of the Ukrainians’ calibre and

patriotism. The idea that if Wallace

(or Fallon) had persuaded colleagues

somewhat to beef up British military

assistance then this would have

Liz Truss is ramping up the rhetoric on

Nato expansion and war reparations

“Words matter,” writes Sir Roderic

Lyne (for four years our ambassador

in Moscow) in The Times on

Thursday. “[British ministers’ words]

are gifts to Vladimir Putin and his

propagandists.” Sir Roderic sees

ministerial rhetoric, and the strategy

it implies, as driving iron into the

soul of a nation... “[leaving] Europe’s

largest country as a perpetual and

embittered enemy”. But Lyne’s

intelligent hesitation is lost in a wind

that’s been blowing ever more

strongly in recent weeks: a wind in

which there’s more than a whiff of

belligerence.

I notice the birth of a new

orthodoxy: the hindsight-induced

belief that at the start of this war

virtue reposed in those who cried

“Forward!” while those who cried

“Steady on!” should now hang their

heads in shame. Ben Wallace has

attracted around himself a media

and political circle, orbiting his

not-inconsiderable ego, who

promote, to his career advantage,

that view. Examples are dug up of

parliamentary colleagues who

resisted his proposals for urgently

arming Ukraine long before the

threat of Russian invasion became a

reality. Not to be left out, friends of

Sir Michael Fallon, a previous

defence secretary, have been telling

journalists that Fallon’s warnings

about Russia and Ukraine, too, were

not acted upon. Friends of Wallace

have been busier. Disgracefully, they

have publicly blamed senior civil

servants and the intelligence services

for curbing Wallace’s attempts to

send more weaponry, earlier, to Kyiv.

These stories may well be true. But

it’s so often the job of Whitehall and

of British intelligence to urge caution.

At the time, it appeared to many that

Putin was very likely bluffing; and

that if he wasn’t, Ukraine’s collapse in

the face of a massive Russian

‘W

e will keep going
further and faster,”
snarls the foreign
secretary, Liz Truss,
in her Mansion
House speech on Wednesday, “to push
Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”
Even Crimea? Yes indeed, growls
the defence secretary, Ben Wallace,
on Sky News a day later. Ukraine’s
territorial integrity “of course,
includes Crimea”.
Beat that, Truss. “The war in
Ukraine is our war,” she woofs.
“Heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes
— digging deep into our inventories,
ramping up production. We need to
do all of this.” She then throws out a
general invitation, to Georgia, Moldova
and the western Balkans, to join Nato.
Golly. Over to you, Ben? Wallace,
promising war-crimes tribunals, is
not to be outbid. To pre-empt
Russian attack, it would be
“legitimate under international law”
to hit targets within Russia itself.
And “Britain is assisting and finding
artillery for Ukraine”. Losing his
nerve momentarily, he adds that at
present British-sourced weaponry is
“mainly” being used within Ukraine.
By now Truss is on fire. “There
must be nowhere [sic] for Putin to
fund this appalling war,” she
continues at the Mansion House.
“That means cutting off oil and gas
imports once and for all.”
Once and for all? Lest there be
doubt, she lets reporters know (The
Times, April 28) that “it is understood
that Truss is determined that any
settlement is agreed on unfavourable
terms to Russia in order to deter

another invasion”. Truss, we report, “is

pushing for Russia to pay reparations”.

Reparations? Good God. Like what

we did to Germany after the First

World War in the calamitous Treaty

of Versailles? Rub the whole Russian

population’s nose in it? In this

21st-century bidding war the

competition is getting intense. Any

advance on reparations? You, sir, the

balding gentleman in the Ministry of

Defence? No? No reparations?

Going, going... gone! Reparations —

to the blonde lady in King Charles

Street.

This auction of bellicosity is no

way to conduct an undeclared Tory

leadership contest. Make no mistake,

that’s what we have here. Against the

background of a hideous European

war not far from our own island, a

war in which thousands have been

killed, whole cities are being razed,

millions of refugees have fled, and

the sole culprit, Vladimir Putin, 70

this year, who may be mad, remains

in control of the world’s biggest

arsenal of nuclear weapons and has

been cornered by his own idiocy into

a position where he has little left to

lose... against this background,

everybody should be treading on

eggshells in the language they use:

everybody, including columnists.

I see now the aggression in columns

I wrote when this invasion began,

and think my words, in retrospect,

careless. There is an instinct, as

things get brutal, to become more

brutal in one’s language. The instinct

should be resisted. The bloodier

things get, the more carefully we

should tread in what we say.

The bloodier things get

the more careful we

should be in our words

When geopolitics is

tinder dry you should

put away the matches

Comment

Matthew

Parris

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