Peter Rhodes on panic-buying, gender-changing and the not-so-noble side of the Home Front

When I last droned on about car insurance, you may recall I was on the verge of biting the bullet and staying with my current insurer, even though they'd hiked the premium by eight per cent. Instead, I phoned them. The upshot was that they increased my annual mileage allowance by 2,000 miles, extended my policy to cover driving other cars and raised my premium by just £1 a year. Go on, haggle.

Did anybody not see this coming? A 23-year-old started life as a girl, transitioned through surgery and medication to become a man and now, having abandoned hormone treatment, identifies as a woman. She is suing the NHS clinic responsible on the grounds that, as a teenager, she was not “challenged” enough about her desire to become male. Her lawyers will tell the court that children such as she was cannot give informed consent for such procedures. The clinic says it “welcomes” this legal examination to clarify things. And so should we all.

Until now, anyone daring to question gender-transition, including medical staff, has been denounced as “transphobic” by the small but noisy trans-activist lobby. This stifling of dissent may explain why hundreds of young transgender people are now seeking help to return to their original sex. They have been through hell. As this column noted on October 7 last year, “While these cases are individual tragedies, the financial outlook for the NHS is terrifying. Five or ten years from now, how many sad transitioned young people will be suing the Department of Health for wrongly advising and treating them?”

I got the time-scale wrong. This ethical and financial nightmare is right here, right now and you and I and every other tax payer must foot the bill. (If you resent paying you are, of course, transphobic).

Meanwhile, coronavirus marches on. I am aware, thanks, that it is no laughing matter but doesn't it make you smile just a bit to see a nation preparing to mark the 75th anniversary of VE-Day and to celebrate the courage, resilience, self-sacrifice and community spirit of the wartime generation, while frantically stripping supermarket shelves of tinned food and antiseptic gel?

On the other hand, the wartime generation wasn't composed entirely of angels. I was once researching a book and ploughing through hundreds of back issues of local and national newspapers from 1939-45. I was amazed how many court and tribunal cases involved soldiers deserting from their barracks, civilians refusing to do war work in city factories, publicans watering the booze and plucky Brits fiddling the rations on an industrial scale. The nation that produced heroes like George Mainwaring also produced plenty of spivs like Private Walker.

And if you don't recognise Captain Mainwaring as a hero, then you don't know your Dad's Army.