Peter Rhodes: Toe-sucking in Truro

AM I alone in finding the vicar sucking a prostitute's toes in Poldark (BBC1) just a tad inappropriate for peak-time Sunday night viewing?

HOW do you explain to the kids, for example, why the toe-sucking cleric (soles before souls?) keeps talking about getting Morwenna's hand in marriage when he's clearly more interested in her feet?

IT'S all about the L-word, isn't it, Tone? Blair is ageing. He knows his best years are behind him. He is thinking of his legacy. He may be enormously wealthy but he has no desire to go down in history as the Warmonger of Iraq. He thinks that if only he can tip Britain away from leaving the European Union, the Brits will come to their senses and support him as they did in the 1990s. Too late, chum.

FOR if there is one thing we remember from the Blair years – apart, of course, from invading Iraq - it is Blair's casual aside that “we have no population policy.” His open-door approach to migration triggered the biggest population movement of modern times. Why did he do it? If we believe his former speech writer Andrew Neather, the aim was to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” In other words, Blair set out to change the cultural and political mix of the UK for his own benefit. And now he comes hot-foot from Brussels telling us that European leaders are prepared to “compromise” on the free movement of people in order to keep Britain in the EU. So what are you telling us, Tone? That the free movement of people you massively encouraged a few years ago is now a bad thing, to be turned off like a tap, once again for political motives? The hypocrisy is beyond breathtaking.

“FREE movement” has a wonderfully liberating ring. But if you allow people into a country without inquiring where they will live, you sentence them to life in squats, garden sheds, hostels and clapped-out old tower blocks which should have been demolished years ago. Free movement gives us a housing system so chaotic that no-one knows who has a right to be here or who is living where. And when a catastrophic fire breaks out, the local council hasn't a clue whether the block contains 400, 600 or 350 people. When the long list of the guilty is finally compiled, free movement must take its share of the blame for Grenfell Tower.

AS the first contracts are announced, here's an intriguing question. Why did we never have a referendum on HS2? Simple. Because the powers-that-be knew 90 per cent of the British public would vote against it. We love our countryside. We see no reason to arrive in Birmingham 20 minutes earlier that at present. We don't see the point of a railway with hardly any stations. HS2 is a triumph of big money over democracy and our grandchildren will think we were mad. Not mad, kids. Just disenfranchised.

FINALLY, a tip for the newly-wed Morwenna in Poldark. Before retiring with your revolting foot-fetish husband, dangle your toes in the smelly, slime-filled toad pond at your family mansion. He'll get the message.