Jimmy Kimmel and the threat to free speech

Villain
The recently elected mayor of Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, for attending a formal ceremony for Royal Marines, army and air force cadets wearing a floral shirt, shorts and trainers with no socks. Councillor Tom Buckley, an IT consultant, refused to apologise for the casual look, saying he would “not allow the role to shape me”.

Hero
Restaurant critic Tom Parker Bowles, the Queen’s son, who tells The Independent that after decades of lunchtime drinking he can now do a “proper Friday lunch” only about “once or twice a month”. In other words, every other week. Which isn’t bad going.

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The government, after announcing that the “See it. Say it. Sorted” slogan at train stations will “torture us for another decade”, says Carol Midgley in The Times. No doubt the authorities will also continue their “tautologous torments”, such as “this will be our last and final stop” and “take your personal belongings with you”. Not to mention all that guff telling us to “hold on tight” to handrails. What are we, six years old?

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A consultant anaesthetist in Manchester who left a patient midway through an operation to have sex with a nurse. Married father-of-three Suhail Anjum asked a colleague to keep an eye on things while he went to the loo, only to be discovered in a “compromising position” in another operating theatre. The 44-year-old, who was sacked by Tameside Hospital but has avoided being struck off, said: “I only have myself to blame.”

“Eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”

Around the turn of the millennium, says Rowan Pelling in UnHerd, I asked readers of Erotic Review to vote on the “most erotic people” of the past 1,000 years. In first place was Marilyn Monroe. In fourth? Margaret Thatcher. At the time, I attributed the Iron Lady’s high ranking to “the British man’s nanny obsession”, and I still think there’s something in that vision of a “nursery dominatrix thrashing grown-up little boys who confuse punishment with love”. But with hindsight, it’s obvious: a “powerful, intelligent woman who knows her mind and is unafraid to use her sexuality as part of her arsenal” is catnip to certain men.

A new, “pleasingly unconventional” biography of Mrs Thatcher is not so much concerned with her political legacy as her “erotic capital”, exploring how the “Finchley coquette” used sex appeal to propel her to the top job. Laurence Olivier taught her to “seduce and flirt”. It worked. She and Ronald Reagan shared a powerful mutual attraction, and a 1989 profile in Vanity Fair quotes French president François Mitterrand saying she had “eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. The profile adds that Thatcher had “the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime”, manipulating her “court of bedazzled male advisers” – who, as Neil Kinnock noted, all “looked as though they’d walked out of a 1950s B-movie” – with “the skill of Elizabeth I”. Interviewers, not all of them admirers, tended to weaken (as many media men and politicos today battle “inconvenient attraction” to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni). One former BBC chief political correspondent recalled the “devastating” way she put her hand on his arm. “I would tend to weaken, I must admit.”

❤️‍🔥 “I was in love with her, yes,” confessed Tory grandee Woodrow Wyatt, “but I suppose in the best platonic manner because – well, she was a marvellous girl… her skin was glowing and she had very fine legs”. You can’t help suspecting that for all her achievements, that “gushing appreciation of her sexual charisma” might be her preferred epitaph.

Here’s what makes Britain great

For this month’s British GQ, says Sathnam Sanghera in The Times, the magazine asked 14 celebrities: What makes Britain great? It’s a question I’ve considered repeatedly in my life, developing over time “a long and detailed list of things I adore”. There are the obvious ones: Queen, Elton John, the Beatles. Writers like Hilary Mantel and Salman Rushdie, and brilliant TV from Only Fools and Horses to Succession. I love a walk across St James’s Park on a winter’s day, a martini at Duke’s hotel, a balti pie at the football. Then of course there’s tea, “a medium through which to celebrate, work, live and grieve”.

But it’s our anthropology that makes us. Whenever I’ve spent time abroad, it’s always the classic British rituals I miss the most. After a six-month stint in America, I found myself “weeping tears of gratitude” watching someone doing the “half-run” across a zebra crossing, waving and nodding as they went. I had missed our queue culture “almost as much as I missed my mother”. The instinctive ability to form an orderly line is “steeped in dignity and mutual consideration” and “even thinking about it now makes me emotional”. We Brits have a joyous desire not to draw attention to ourselves – we’d rather endure a bad meal, a bad haircut, a bad taxi ride than complain about it – and we’ll “apologise to people who have stood on our feet”. When my home town of Wolverhampton was listed as one of the worst cities in the world in 2009, “I don’t think we were ever so proud”. Sure, Britain has its challenges. But, truly, “I can’t think of a better country to be”.