Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on Fleabag, the rise of the Right and that impossible Irish problem that suddenly became possible

I SUGGESTED some time ago - and I'm hardly alone - that the HS2 railway, with carriages running on steel tracks, is a Victorian solution to a 21st century problem. Now Lord Macpherson, the former Treasury boss who signed off the original HS2 project warns not only that the sums no longer add up but that the technology will be obsolete by the time it is operational. Britain built the world's first railway. Do we really want to go down in history as the nation that built the last one - and never knew quite what it was for?

Published
Phoebe Waller-Bridge is Fleabag

AFTER the episode in which Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and a priest snogged passionately in a confessional, the Daily Telegraph asked of the BBC series: "Is Fleabag good for Catholicism?" Well, of course it is, in much the way that Father Ted, Dave Allen, paedo priests and the Reformation were good for Catholicism. How much more of this benevolence can the Vatican stand?

HERE'S a strange thing. The EU announces that it has done all its planning for a no-deal exit by the UK. If these plans came into effect, the Irish border issue would be settled by customs checks on vehicles, but these would be carried out far away from the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, thus preserving a check-free open border. Or as one EU official puts it: "We try and perform the controls away from the border." Hang on. Isn't that the plan put forward by the British Government months ago - and rejected outright by the EU as impossible? Some of us have been deeply suspicious all along that the Irish border and backstop issue is not a big problem but a little one that has been weaponised to frustrate the whole Brexit process.

"GOODBYE to the Left. Now Europe is going to change." With those chilling words a hardline Italian politician, Matteo Salvini promises "a new European spring" with right-wingers like him taking more power across the EU. One of the enduring mysteries of the Brexit campaign in Britain has been the enthusiasm of liberal left-wingers to remain part of an increasingly illiberal right-wing club.

WHAT'S that, my Remainer friends? You think you can reform the EU from within? And when did that ever work?

THIS week's health tip comes with the inevitable snappy slogan: "Sitting is the new smoking." If you believe the statisticians, Britain's couch-potato lifestyle is responsible for 70,000 deaths a year and costs the NHS £700 million a year. This, incidentally, is on top of the £9,000 million we blew on staging the 2012 London Olympics which, as you may recall, were intended to turn us into a nation of lean, fit athletes.

THE sorry truth, seven years on, is that the Olympics merely continued the television-age process of turning us into sofa-spectators, not participants. It's the men's 100 metres. Put on the burgers and pass us another beer.