Mark Andrews: Sydney Sweeney, Ed Sheeran, and ending class war over asylum seekers

Turning first to Sydney Sweeney’s risque advert for the US betting company Novig, a series of female athletes have piled in to deride the actress for parading about in the buff which just a few bits of sports equipment to preserve her modesty.

Gymnast Gracie Kramer posted a montage of herself performing with the caption ‘This is what a woman in sport looks like’, while the retired swimmer Ariarne Titmuss was somewhat more sanctimonious: “Not only is it a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, but every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is.”

Please ladies, get over yourselves. You’re not lifesavers or brain surgeons, your job is to cavort about on a mat or in a pool for the entertainment of the crowds - just like Sydney Sweeney.

And having watched Sydney Sweeney’s video, quite a few times now, actually, I can confirm it is far more enjoyable than Gracie Kramer’s.

Then we come to the terminally dreary Ed Sheeran being ‘cancelled’ by people even more woke than himself for dropping a ‘rapper’ called Macklemore who had been boring the pants off the crowds on his tour by rambling on about global politics, and specifically, of course, Palestine.

Now Ed’s tour is in jeopardy because all the other support acts, including his backing band, have threatened to pull out.

I’m almost tempted to side with Sheeran, despite his own crimes against humanity. Why do people think that because they can sing or act, they have some kind of responsibility to force their views on the rest of us? And it’s always the joyless Z-listers who do this kind of thing. You never got Dolly Parton - or Noddy Holder, or Brotherhood of Man, or Abba - banging on about global affairs. They knew what they were there to do, and they stuck to the brief.

The weakness with that chain of thought is that Macklemore doesn’t actually pretend that he can sing or act. He’s a ‘rapper’, which means his sole talent is standing around mumbling incoherent nonsense. And that is exactly what he did.

I suspect most people thought it was part of the act.

The village of Piddington has voted to leave the UK over plans to increase its population five-fold by creating a giant migrant camp. It’s not hard to sympathise with their predicament, even if voting to leave the UK sounds a rather unpatriotic way to go about it.

Andy Burnham has said that ‘middle-class areas’ have got to take their share of migrants as well as the inner cities, but then again there seem to be few issues which our TikTok-obsessed Prime Minister does not think are about class.

I would suggest that he forgets about class for just one minute, and perhaps considers a fairer way to distribute asylum seekers: put them in the locations that actually want them.

For example, why not put a few thousand in Brighton, where council leader and former asylum campaigner Bella Sankey wishes to see a ‘holistic and humane’ approach to asylum policy. Or how about Stroud, where council leader Chloe Turner declared: "Refugees, asylum seekers are not the problem. Refugees didn't cause the cost of living crisis.”

That’s devolution for you, Andy.