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Yes: whatever happened to the NHS dental service? Another project for Michael Howard.
Everyone is liberal on some issues and conservative on others. I am a liberal on migration. People should be able to live where they please. And if so-called asylum seekers in Britain were permitted to work, we would have much better domestic services from keen young immigrants who seek to better themselves. What’s wrong with that? It is always a good sign when migrants want to get into your country. I think it is excellent that more than 10 per cent of the population of Ireland — 400,000 people — are now immigrants. There are said to be 50,000 Chinese people in Dublin alone, although no one knows the exact number. But each time I go to Dublin — which is about twice a month — the Chinese population has apparently doubled. These young Chinese people are hard-working and very polite, and they frequently offer me their seats on the crowded Dublin buses. Many small shops in central Dublin are now run by the Chinese. It is an extraordinary social revolution which will bring great benefits to Ireland in the coming times.
In my biography of Lord Haw-Haw, Germany Calling, I tried to explain, for younger readers, just how famous a media celebrity William Joyce was in his day. ‘It was as if,’ I wrote, ‘Anne Robinson were facing a capital charge in our time.’ The thought set off a brief fantasy — if only! Only kidding, Annie. Kind of. The story of William Joyce, the last man to be hanged for high treason by the Crown, is now attracting several TV documentaries and movie offers — one Irish-British production is well in progress. A full-length movie feature is also being outlined. My son Patrick has wittily suggested that Mel Gibson might play the lead role — with the Nazis speaking in British accents, naturally.
I intensely dislike the current fashion for referring to individuals by their surnames only. An otherwise well-written recent profile of Hillary Clinton in the New Yorker referred to her throughout as ‘Clinton’. Maddening. The practice offends against the first law of communication — clarity. Many people, especially married couples, or those related by kin, have the same surname. Moreover, many people have surnames that are also given names, or Christian names: Ian Jack, Clive James, Theresa May, Michael Howard, Howard Patrick, Mary Hope, Hope Christian, Elizabeth John, Dylan Thomas, Jamie Oliver, Oliver James, Sid James, William Sydney, Trevor Eve, William Trevor, James Joyce, Augusta Gregory, Mary Gordon and Walter Terry, as do I. ‘Kenny’ is a man’s first name, often an Australian and sometimes a footballer, and the horrible diktat about last-name nomenclature has more than once conflated me with such as Mr Kenny Dalglish. This practice was first introduced by women academics seeking to advance feminism. But what, precisely, is feminist about addressing a woman by her patronymic? A surname is your father’s name, than which there is no more patriarchal construct. We are always told we have ‘choice’ in everything. But we don’t. Certain practices are simply decided upon by the masters and mistresses of our culture, and there is virtually no redress.
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