Peter Rhodes: Denying the referendum

CONFUSING headline from Sky News: "Aussie teen mauled by crocodile trying to impress British backpacker."

ANYONE else suffer from morning sickness yesterday? It was the result of waking up to the BBC announcing, with all due reverence and solemnity, that Ireland's "man of peace" Martin McGuinness had died. For the record, McGuinness turned to peace only after every other avenue, including bombings, beatings, knee-cappings and ethnic slaughter, had been exhausted. According to one claim, he fired the first shot at British troops on Bloody Sunday. He was an unapologetic fighter, an ice-hearted IRA warlord who inspired terror and turned a legitimate civil-rights movement into a guerilla war that dragged on for 30 years and claimed 3,000 lives. Heaven protect us from men of peace like him.

NO-ONE could accuse Michael Heseltine of hiding his agenda. As he revealed on Any Questions (Radio 4), the Tory big beast believes the EU referendum result can be overturned and Britain need never leave the European Union. This is the voice of old-fashioned patrician rule, the belief that while we are all entitled to vote, some voters should be taken more seriously than others.

WHAT Hezza fails to explain is that if he and Tony Blair and all the other referendum-deniers got their way, how would the 17,410,742 Brits who voted for Brexit react? Does he think they would tug their forelocks deferentially and say: "Gawd bless you, your lordship, for showing us the wise way and saving us from our thickness?" If so, he does not understand the Brits. If this vote were overturned, I fear blood would be more likely than thankfulness.

A COUNCILLOR in Walsall said she favoured hiving off one electoral ward "because people from that area are always seen as being a bit foreign, really." Some folk have demanded a public apology. But I'm not sure the word "foreign" in this case was used to mean anything other than the character of different settlements just a few yards apart. Such things matter, especially in places like the Black Country where local pride can border on insularity. The proudest boast of any Blackcountryman is: "Ar bay from bloody Brum" (I am not a resident of Birmingham) and the closer he lives to Brum, the prouder he is not to live in it.

POLITICAL correctness strikes in Westminster where Roger Gale MP was castigated for calling his office staff "girls." As we should all know by now, calling women girls both infantilises and degrades them, making them appear the playthings and possessions of the outdated patriarchy which controls our society and all that stuff. I always feel sorry for women who object to this word, for presumably they never have a night out with the girls.

AS the education cuts bite, some schools are abandoning German lessons. It is sad although, as a colleague who endured five years of German once told me: "German is a useful language but has too many fahrts to be taken seriously."

IF we had known then what we know now. What odds do you think the bookies would have offered you in the 1970s on Chuck Berry living to be 90?