Quotes

Speculation builds about how well Olivia Colman will succeed Claire Foy as the Queen in the coming third series of The Crown (2016). Ms Colman herself has expressed anxiety on this score. There is no doubt that she is one of the best actresses of the age, but I have a doubt, too. She has a distinctly leftwing face.

On climate change, I resist what I see as a political viewpoint masquerading as "the science". The aim of the large numbers of alarmists is unprecedented government control and the relative impoverishment of western societies. Cheap energy is one of the greatest emancipations produced by our civilisation.

[2014, on the BBC] It's a great abortionist of creativity. There's a lot of sort of unborn babies because of the BBC. For effectively always, certainly for a long time, I've been against the licence fee... I wouldn't mind if they completely abolished it.

[on licence fees for over-75-year-olds] Old people are the biggest consumers of terrestrial television, so if we preserve the iniquitous system of the compulsory licence, they should pay it.

How different is Pete Seeger from Leni Riefenstahl, really?

Looking forward, as one always must, I wonder if the law will eventually be changed to allow one to marry one's dog. Until now, this would have been considered disgusting, since marriage has been a law revolving around sexual behaviour, and sexual acts with animals are still, I believe, illegal. But, as this column has pointed out, the unintended consequence of the same-sex marriage legislation has been to take sex out of marriage law. Civil servants, unable to define same-sex consummation, omitted it. So marriage, from now on, can mean no more than the legally registered decision of two people to live together while not being married to anyone else. The justification for this is 'equality', buttressed by the idea that love must carry all before it. People often love their dogs very much and want to spend their life with them. So why should they not, chastely, marry them?

Shortly after reading Matt Hancock's article about combatting obesity in yesterday's paper, I emerged from a café to find my way virtually blocked by an enormously wide, youngish woman in a nurse's uniform. It was a vivid reminder of a general fact about the National Health Service: many of its staff are fat. If the public are being urged to lose weight, they will not take the message seriously if they notice that a substantial proportion of those caring for them are not doing so. Sightings of fat NHS doctors are definitely unusual these days. Nurses and ancillary staff, on the other hand, are often disproportionately tubby.

[on David Attenborough] The exotic creatures he presents to us have all become unpaid, co-opted actors in his unending propaganda melodrama against the growth of the human race.