Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

There are lies, damned lies — and statistics about the housing queue

Rod Liddle says that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been well led by Trevor Phillips — all the more reason to play straight with figures about the treatment of immigrant applicants for housing

Rod Liddle says that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been well led by Trevor Phillips — all the more reason to play straight with figures about the treatment of immigrant applicants for housing

There was a report out recently which said that men who marry much younger women tend to live rather longer than men who don’t. This cheered me up no end. I’ve always had the vague suspicion that I might be immortal, beyond the reach of the Reaper’s scythe, and I regularly scour the newspapers for scientific evidence that this suspicion of mine is indeed well founded. And there it was. I married a woman who was much younger than me, you see, so, as they say — get in there, back of the net. Looks like I’ll be around until I’m 150 and then I can marry another much younger woman and add another 30 or 40 years on to the total, keep on doing it over and over again and end up a Time Lord.

The only worry was that the science in this scientific survey might be a bit flawed. After all, what is the process by which marrying a younger woman adds years to your life? Is there a sort of implied vampirism at work? Most people, asked this question, would probably hazard at maybe a reinvigorating aspect — that was certainly the approach taken by every single newspaper: Cor! Phew! She’ll keep you fit and no mistake, guv! This was implied by the people who did the survey too, although the science of ‘keeping you fit’ was never really spelled out.

It was then I realised that, once again, we’d all been had: there had been no weighting of the sample in the survey for personal wealth.

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