Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on fake news headlines and Cold War memories

A READER asks, in this age of fake news, how can we tell which reports are genuine? Simple. Just use your common sense. For example, only one of these three recent headlines is true: Honey Monster Gets Diabetes. Man in New Relationship Fakes Joy at Autumn Colours. Over 40s Top of Sex-Appeal Table. Okay, maybe it’s not that simple.

Published
Lord Adonis – missing the elephant?

LORD ADONIS, head of the National Infrastructure Commission, reports that Britain faces a ‘tainted’ future with gridlock on the roads, railways and in the skies, with useless broadband coverage and polluted air. He blames it largely on under-funding. Full marks for ignoring the elephant in the room, your Lordship. Does it not occur to anyone in Whitehall that if you allow a country to grow from 50 million to 70 million in a single lifetime, things are going to get sticky? Among all the new policies being suggested, how about a UK population policy?

I WONDERED a few days ago what the squaddies of the South Korean Army called their General In-Bum Chun. A number of you have supplied the obvious answer: Sir.

WHICH leads seamlesly on to an anniversary. God knows where the decades have gone but 40 years ago today in the depths of the Cold War, I was at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, for my TA commissioning course. There are some moments you never forget, and wrestling with a sand-blocked machine gun during an attack by invisible, and very scary, Paras at 3am is one of them. Frantically working the mechanism, I found myself haunted by the line from Henry Newbolt’s poem, Vitai Lampada: “The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead / And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.” Later, they told us we had won the mock battle but I never believed it. In the years that followed we rehearsed for the war against the Soviet Union that never came. We won the Cold War but nobody got any medals.

THANKS for your views on the scruffiness of some TV reporters. It irritates me because I belong to a generation of hacks which was taught to dress smartly out of respect for the people we interviewed. If you are calling at the house of a family whose son was killed the night before in a road accident, is a collar and tie too much to ask?

I WONDER how many of today’s journalists keep a black tie in their office drawer. “You never know,” my first editor told me in awesome tones, “you might have to attend a Rotarian funeral one day.” That was in the days when Rotary was a power in the community and heaven help the hack who referred to Rotarian Jones as plain Mr Jones.

LEAMINGTON SPA has been voted Britain’s happiest place to live in a Rightmove survey. One newspaper headlined the story strangely as ‘Happiness is living in the West Midlands’. In truth, part of the pride of living in chic old Leamington is that it’s not in the West Midlands. As every Leamingtonian knows, it is ‘leafy Leamington in woody Warwickshire’.