Mark Andrews: Vertical drinking, Walter Mitty dupes academia, and The Price is Right for PM

It has been suggested this week that the Prime Minster bears a passing resemblance to the late comedian-turned-quizmaster Leslie Crowther.

Can’t see it myself. One belongs to another era, and is known for his suspiciously jet-black quiff, outsize spectacles, and for giving away low-value prizes that didn’t quite live up to the accompanying razzamatazz. And the other presented the Price is Right.

I’m here all week.

It seems Cambridge University’s ‘poster-boy for diversity’ Prof Jason Arday turned out to be more Walter Mitty than John Sumpter.

Probably his weirdest claim was to have appeared on the 1964 television series Seven Up!, despite having been born in 1985 - and insisting he was mute until the age of 11, which surely must have made his interviews a bit tricky. How did he ever think he would get away with that one? Aside from the fact that show is periodically repeated on TV, did none of the, I dunno, distinguished maths professors at Cambridge notice that the sums didn’t really add up?

Maybe they thought, as a professor of sociology, that spouting nonsense was just part of the job.

The reality is that his back story was so compelling that the great and the good desperately wanted to believe it, and anybody who questioned it was immediately castigated as a baddie. Which is what happens when people place themselves in silos of like-minded types, where it is a crime to question the received wisdom.

The other problem is that, in this case, the received wisdom is that diversity is the antonym for discrimination. Discrimination is bad, so diversity must be good. But this is balderdash.

Discrimination is indeed a bad thing, and should not be tolerated, but it doesn’t follow that diversity for its own sake is a good thing.

Diversity is neither a strength nor a weakness. It is a red herring, and one we would do well to hear a lot less about.

As if the licensed trade does not have enough to contend with at the moment, it seems the great minds of Westminster Council have now declared war on people standing up in pubs, discouraging ‘open bar space that caters for high-volume vertical drinking’.

From my experience, it is not the ‘vertical drinking’ that is the problem. It is the ‘horizontal, flat out on the floor’ variety they should be worrying about.

Farewell to my favourite columnist Rod Liddle, whose genius for ironic understatement was my reason for buying The Times and The Sun. A great columnist is one you enjoy reading however much you disagree with their worldview, and it is sad that none of us will be able to enjoy his pearls of wisdom in future.

How sad, then, that the gut reaction of the Bluesky #BeKind brigade was to post some very unkind remarks about his passing. Their minds must be as dull as they are narrow.

I only wish I had half the talent Rod Liddle had. Probably the one thing that a lot of you will agree with me on.