There’s no statute of limitations on reporting a government minister’s embarrassing oops-a-daisy. It’s no good them doing a duck-dive, hoping that by the time they resurface everyone will have forgotten all about it. I remember after the Salisbury poisonings in 2018, Gavin Williamson, who was defence secretary at the time, appeared genuinely thrown when I brought up his Vicky Pollard-like comments about the Kremlin (‘Go away and shut up!’) in a live TV interview a few weeks later. I think it’s fair to say the exchange that followed wasn’t his finest hour. So it was when Rachel Reeves appeared on Good Morning Britain last week. It was the Chancellor’s first appearance since the toe-curling ‘Rachel from accounts’ story broke in November (when the Telegraph accused Reeves of exaggerating on her CV). By last week she probably thought her first Budget and Wednesday’s big speech on growth had eclipsed the issue. So her eyes widened when I said: ‘This is your first interview on GMB since allegations about you enhancing your CV. We don’t mean to embarrass you, but we’d just quickly like to go through it…’ You can see her stuttering reply on YouTube, TikTok, etc. I felt a bit sorry for her, to be honest. Lots of people tell little porkies to boost their career backstory. Frankly, there are worse offences. But if you move into 11 Downing Street, you can expect to be called out on any embellishments which emerge. Time may be a great healer, but only after you’ve got up on your hind legs and explained yourself. Reeves should have done that in November.
Of course, the wreckage of some car-crash misjudgments is impossible to escape. Reeves will walk away from her little CV tangle, but Prince Andrew is firmly entrapped in the twisted metal of his Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Now it transpires that, as the late Alan Clark might have said, the Duke was ‘economical with the actualité’ during his catastrophic interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019. He swore he hadn’t been in touch with the paedophile after cutting ties with him in December 2010; now an email has emerged from the following year in which Andrew tells Epstein: ‘Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!’ I doubt he was referring to chess or table tennis. But I doubt even more that Andy will be appearing on GMB or anywhere else to explain precisely what he did mean. Debate over the return of the rope shows no sign of diminishing in the wake of the Southport murder trial. A fascinating poll shows that 58 per cent of millennials and 45 per cent of Zoomers want capital punishment to be restored in Britain. I’ve always been firmly against state execution on principle. But now, my certainty has stumbled. Why? Because of Holocaust Memorial Day last week. It reminded me that the fiends who orchestrated the genocide of six million Jews were, when captured after the war, mostly convicted and sentenced to death – swine such as Rudolf Höss, commandant at Auschwitz. Höss lived with his family in a pleasant house with pool and garden, just behind a high wall screening them from the slaughter taking place on the other side. (The grotesque juxtaposition was chillingly portrayed in the recent film The Zone of Interest.) Höss came to a sticky end. A Polish court convicted him of mass murder. He was strung up from a short-drop gallows (the kind where the condemned man chokes to death rather than having his neck broken) on the site of Auschwitz’s Gestapo headquarters. Here’s the dilemma. I’m against the death penalty. Yet I truly believe men like Höss deserved to swing for what they’d done. Perhaps you’re the same. How do we square that circle? I’m still working on it.
OK, I surrender. Giles Coren has just announced he has prostate cancer at the age of 55. I’m 68 and I’m going for a prostate cancer check. I’m not messing about with the unreliable PSA blood test (you get too many false negatives); I’ve raided the piggy bank and I’m having an MRI scan. But we need a national screening programme, like the one for breast cancer. It’s only because men are so bone-headed about health checks (‘Nothing wrong with me, I’m fine’) that we don’t have one already. Wish me luck.
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