Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on Trump’s challenge, taxing sweetness and futile gestures in Whitehall

Goodbye Devon, hello home.

Published
Resigned - Phillip Lee

FAREWELL, Devon. We are back home in familiar surroundings. Ah, the bliss of knowing where everything is and that everything works, including your old toaster (if you just give it a good shake and wiggle the plug a bit).

IT is a fact that, no matter how pretty your rented holiday cottage may be, no matter how beautifully thatched and exquisitely furnished, you will never be truly happy unless you take your own mug, kettle and frying pan.

AND don’t get me started on the DAB radio. Does anyone know how to make these damn things work? The one in our holiday house produced nothing apart from the unblinking digital litany: “Connecting. No connection. Awaiting connection...“ And then nothing. Over and over again. Thank heavens for the old FM radio upstairs.

AS this Brexit debate reaches its climax, watch out for more ritual falling-on-swords, as performed by the Tory justice minister Phillip Lee, followed by half-a-dozen of Corbyn’s finest front-benchers. They get their moment of high principle but, because no-one outside Westminster has ever heard of them, it hardly shakes the nation. I was reminded of that wicked old Beyond the Fringe sketch when Peter Cook as a senior RAF officer orders a pilot (Jonathan Miller) on a doomed mission with the words: “We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.”

DRIVERS in Scotland will soon be banned from parking on pavements. Some campaigners want a similar ban in England. It’s a bit like passing a law banning penny-farthings from towing chariots; you can’t argue with the logic but it’s just a tad outdated. Many pavements have been unusable by pedestrians for years. They are, in effect, car parks and if anyone tries turfing motorists off these hard-won scrap of muddy verge, there will be blood on the streets.

WHEN President Trump refers to the ruinous cost of staging “provocative”war games in South Korea, we should be reminded of President Eisenhower’s chilling end-of-office address in 1961 when he warned Americans of the growing might and influence of what he called “the military-industrial complex.” There are US politicians, industries and entire cities that depend for their survival on the creed, cultivated in Congress for the past 60 years, that America is under permanent threat and must spend billions of dollars developing and maintaining the greatest arsenal the world has ever seen. Fear breeds huge profits.

BY reducing the fear and publicly warning about the cost of US defence, Trump is daring to question the military-industrial complex. And he will surely be aware of the conspiracy theory - unproved, of course - that, for doing the same, President John F Kennedy was assassinated.

THERE is talk of extending the sugar tax on drinks to cover sweets and chocolate. Good luck with that. I found a cake shop in Devon offering a chocolate-chip cookie sandwiched between two slices of chocolate doughnut. Diabetes in a bag, and selling like hot cakes.