Peter Rhodes: A form of Holocaust denial

A READER says the preacher who suggested the anti-Brexit MP Anna Soubry should burn in hell "is just trying to do his job saving lost souls." Well, that's one theory. In my experience, if you mention souls and salvation to most vicars they shuffle their feet and look embarrassed.

I MENTIONED the spat between militant gender-neutral activists and a toy store which portrayed boys as super-heroes and girls as princesses. This non-gender nonsense is not a new thing. I knew a trainee reporter back in the 1980s who was stridently informed by the feminist tendency in his newsroom that both syllables of his name were a patriarchal, gender-based affront to women. His name was Chapman but to this day he is known as Person-Person.

LUCY Brown, a London-based clothes designer, had an uninspiring date through an online dating agency. She decided to let the man down gently with a text explaining she was not interested in a second meeting. She was astonished when the "normal and sweet" man replied saying he was devastated and asking for "a contribution for the drinks I spent on you." She sent him £42.50 and made an equal donation to a donkey sanctuary. And they say romance is dead.

IN a column for the Daily Telegraph, Philip Johnson despairs of a BBC producer who tries to draw some comparisons between post-Brexit UK and Britain in 1940 if a German invasion had succeeded, as portrayed in the new drama series SS-GB. "People who they thought they could trust have affiliations elsewhere," says the Beeb spokesman, as though being denounced by your neighbour and executed by a firing squad is a bit like discovering your uncle voted to leave the EU. I recall meeting a lecturer who toured secondary schools to teach children about the Holocaust. He was profoundly shocked to find teenagers who simply could not comprehend the industrialised slaughter of European Jews. One pupil asked who looked after the family pets when the Jews were deported. Another, in all seriousness, asked whether the Jews were offered counselling. When people chuck around insults such as "fascist" or "Nazi" in today's politics, they diminish the unique evil that stalked our world from 1933-45. They spit on the memory of those who died, and engage in a form of Holocaust denial. Freedom of speech is fine but it is always improved by a sense of proportion.

TOLD you so. Last week I reported a suspiciously generous offer for my aged diesel car from one of the buy-your-car websites. This week there's talk in Whitehall of a scrappage scheme to get diesels off the road that will pay up to £3,500 for our old bangers. Kerching!

A WOMAN in China known as the Pangolin Princess has been arrested for eating several protected species of mammals and reptiles, and posting images of her meals online. I am reminded of the court case involving a man accused of killing and eating a golden eagle. He got off after persuading the magistrate he had accidentally killed the eagle in a shooting mishap, and ate it rather than waste it. As he left the court the JP asked him: "As a matter of interest, what does golden eagle taste like?" "Actually," said the accused, "it's a bit like swan."