Peter Rhodes on the must-see tendency, a Scottish delusion and the biggest Brexit whopper of them all

HE was shifty, hesitant, defensive and refused to make eye contact. If you needed to produce a training video showing a classic case of a fantasist spinning a web of lies, the police footage of Carl Beech describing a non-existent paedophile ring at the heart of the Establishment would be perfect. It didn’t fool most TV viewers for a second. So why did highly-trained cops swallow it hook, line and sinker?

THAT, incidentally, is a hypothetical question. I don’t expect we will ever get an answer. Move along, folks.

THE biggest lie about Brexit is not the one about spending extra millions on the NHS. It is the one that goes: “We are determined to stop a no-deal Brexit,” as spouted by politicians who are hell-bent on stopping any sort of Brexit. They pretend that all they want is an orderly, organised departure, yet fight tooth-and-nail to keep us in. Expect to hear it endlessly in the next few weeks.

THE most brazen of all are the Scottish Nationalist MPs who thunder piously about “us” and “we” as if they had some great affection for the United Kingdom, when their sole aim is to tear it asunder. Theresa May was always far too polite to mention this hypocrisy. Let us hope the Boris regime takes a sterner line with the blue-faced brigade.

I REFERRED yesterday to tourism destroying everything it touches. Even so-called “eco-tourism” fouls the air and pollutes the sea. It is underpinned by the curious human mind-set that says until we have actually witnessed something, walked the ground and taken the selfie, it doesn’t really exist. Every mountain must be climbed, every glacier trampled, every whale watched. The inconvenient truth is that the only clean, green way to witness threatened places is for David Attenborough to make the movie and for the rest of us to watch it on telly.

IF you believe everything you read, the late Chinese leader Li Peng was known as “the Butcher of Beijing”. Really? And who exactly used that term? I’m guessing that in a rigidly controlled state like China, no-one would use it to his face, or even in private. History is full of nicknames that nobody, apart from headline writers, ever spoke. Do you seriously think anybody ever saw Edward I and remarked: “Look, here comes The Hammer of the Scots” or greeted Charles II with “Morning, Merry Monarch”? Nobody ever really called the Mosquito fighter-bomber the Wooden Wonder and, despite what every medical book tells you, doctors do not refer to high blood pressure as the Silent Killer. They call it high blood pressure. The campaign against nonsensical nicknames starts here.

INCIDENTALLY the Silent Killer is a nickname which is used to describe all sorts of nasties from hypertension to radioactivity, smog, diabetes, poison gas, venomous snakes and nuclear submarines. Or rather, not used.