Another week, another whitewash. The latest chunk of culture to be painted out of existence is ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, Queen’s 1978 hit. Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve never liked the song. I think it’s crude, patronising and misogynistic. It was pretty dated even on the day Queen recorded it. But that’s my problem. Millions loved it. That’s why it was track four on the band’s 1981 Greatest Hits album. But as Universal Records re-release Queen’s classic collection, FBG is track nothing. Track gone. Track ghosted. We’ve got to stop doing this neopuritanical cultural censorship, whether it be with songs, books (Enid Blyton’s PC-filtered Famous Five or P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves), fairy stories (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), or films (Gone with the Wind). These icons from the past are rather like maps, guiding us to our shared history. They tell us where we are today; how far we’ve come – or maybe how far we’ve slipped. The present can have no meaning if we keep erasing the past. Queen sang about fat-bottomed girls. Maybe they shouldn’t have – but they did. Pretending they didn’t is even more stupid than those crap lyrics.
Seven-thirty on Tuesday morning and – for me at least – at last a clear explanation for Lucy Letby and what she did. Evil personified? No, at least not in the metaphysical sense. A monster created by nurture? Again, no. Criminal psychologist Dr David Holmes, speaking to me on Good Morning Britain, dealt directly with the two fundamental questions the rest of us have been wrestling with for days. Why did she…? How could she…? In one of the most grimly fascinating interviews I’ve ever done, Holmes, an expert on psychopaths, made it clear he personally has zero doubts about what drove Letby to become a serial killer. He said she’s been on a pre-ordained path from the day she was born: ‘She’s clearly very high on the scale and it’s a trait she was born with. She’ll have a permanent brain configuration meaning total lack of empathy for others, but a hunger for control over them.’ So, Letby is a natural-born psychopath. And she’ll die one.
Holmes explained that as Letby grew up she would have realised she was profoundly different from everyone around her, that she was genuinely puzzled by what gave others pleasure because it left her cold. But like most psychopaths, she learned to shroud her inner self, constructing a sophisticated veneer of normality. Everyone was fooled. Indeed, so convincing was the performance that Letby’s parents and some of her former schoolfriends still refuse to believe ‘our lovely Lucy’ is guilty. But what about those scrawled Post-it notes found in Letby’s bedroom, I asked. ‘I killed them on purpose… I am evil… I did this.’ A momentary flash of insight, sanity, even remorse? ‘No,’ said Holmes. ‘Just doodles to herself. Nothing more, nothing less. Certainly not remorse, and definitely not some kind of weird confession. No, just doodles, I’m afraid.’ Holmes is relieved Letby is incarcerated for life: ‘She’s not safe to release. She’s a persistent and permanent danger to others.’ They say that to understand all is to forgive all. Hmm. Forgive me – but I think I’ll pass on Lucy Letby.
I dread Nigel Havers getting one of his regular bursts of publicity (which he’s currently enjoying, starring in the West End revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives). Not because I bear a scintilla of ill will towards the man; it’s just that people reckon we look identical. This week London cabbies (yes, despite Uber they still exist) have been yelling: ‘Oi, Nige! Shouldn’t you be on stage?’ I wonder if it’s the same for him? ‘Oi, Rich! Shouldn’t you be in bed? Up early in the morning, mate!’ I must ask him.
If you’re about to snatch a late summer holiday, here’s a book to shove in your bag – Essex Dogs, by Dan Jones. It’s about the Hundred Years’ War, set in 1346 with an amazingly contemporary feel. He makes the longbowmen – the English archers – sound like a blend of modern-day machine-gunners and snipers. Except Jones says that while anyone can squeeze a trigger, shooting a longbow required phenomenal skill and strength. (In Essex Dogs, some likely lads try to have a go on one and can’t even pull the string back.) Longbows were deadly at astonishing ranges – more than 300 yards – and at close quarters an arrow could pass through two men and eviscerate both on the spot. But the book’s funny, too – the Essex Dogs of the title are a company of freelance adventurers and Jones says he based their often-drunken marauding through France on how boozy English football hooligans would behave 600 years later. A cracking read.
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