Peter Rhodes: A leadership crisis and careless pedestrians
ONE of the scariest aspects of the Las Vegas massacre was that Stephen Paddock was allowed to take 10 suitcases containing guns through the hotel and up to his room without being challenged. A reader asks: "It couldn't happen in London, could it?" Now, there's a cheerful thought to start the week.
A SIGHT to turn your bowels to water. At a crossroads in a small town a few days ago I saw a woman walking with her child aged about three. As they reached the junction the lights changed and the child skipped to the kerb. At this moment, any good parent takes the child by the hand. Instead, the kid walked into the road while the mother, at least 20 feet behind, was head-down and fully immersed in her smartphone. Thankfully, the pedestrian-crossing lights were in their favour and no harm was done. But if the smartphone epidemic has reached the stage where parents no longer look out for their toddlers, the law has got to be changed. Pedestrians are road users like anybody else and must accept the responsibilities that go with it. If it takes a new offence of walking without due care and attention, so be it.
YES, she was unlucky. In her unforgettable performance at Manchester, Theresa May had a perfect storm of a crippling cough, a prankster and a dodgy slogan board. May is a great back-room staffer, a stickler for accuracy and hard work but she comes across as humourless and awkward both physically and socially. She never struck me as a natural leader. And now it seems she is unlucky, too. There is an old belief in my trade that good journalists make their own good luck. The same applies to politicians.
THIS item may be overtaken by events but there is talk of the Tories ditching May as leader before Christmas. And replacing her with whom, exactly? Jacob Rees Mogg is too weird, Amber Rudd is too inexperienced and Boris ("clear the dead bodies away") Johnson is a raging liability. Ruth Davidson is a stunning performer but is not a Westminster MP. Theresa May may be the least worst choice. As the great poet and writer Hilaire Belloc put it all those years ago: "And always keep a-hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse."
A READER asks why hasn't the European Union stood up for plucky little Catalonia in its struggle for freedom against the Robocop thugs of the Spanish police? Possibly because the EU is not a very pleasant organisation.
DELIGHTED to hear from a couple of readers who, like me, lost their taste for red wine after their blood-pressure prescription was changed. One is a convert to single-malt whisky while the other, again like me, has transferred his affections to cider. This is clearly an area of science that demands more research. For the greater good of humanity, I am prepared to sink a few.
AND thanks for your emails on turning from middle-aged to elderly and forgetting things. The worrying part is that I find some of your curiously convoluted epistles make perfect sense.
