Peter Rhodes on blaming the French, fighting Covid and what really happened at the Oscars?

Nigel Farage is a seasoned French-blamer. Yet even he, in his nightly slot on GB News, points out that the rise of people-smuggling is entirely Britain’s fault.

We have created the benefits, the legal system, the human-rights protections and the “modern slavery” rules that make it either impossible to deter the boat people from coming or to send them back to France once they have arrived. This is entirely a home-grown problem and nobody, not even Farage, has a home-grown solution.

I once knew a drama critic whose reviews were so controversial that he amassed a pile of angry readers’ letters containing the words: “I cannot believe I was at the same venue.” When he retired colleagues bought him an A-Z Atlas, just to make sure he was in the right place in the future.

I thought of him a few days ago when the world’s media queued up to tell us that, at the 1973 Oscars, Sacheen Littlefeather was “booed offstage” when, on behalf of Marlon Brando, she refused to accept his Oscar in protest at the film industry’s long-standing negative portrayal of Native Americans.

But you only have to watch the video of the event, which is freely available online, to see what happened. While there was some booing, Littlefeather got a respectful hearing for her short speech and left the stage to loud applause.

In the years after her appearance, she suffered abuse and was shunned by the industry, for which the Academy belatedly apologised last week. So why has the “booed offstage” version taken root? Maybe because the notion of privileged white actors abusing an ethnic-minority woman speaks to today’s woke agenda of villains and victims. Or maybe they were all at a different venue.

My Covid experience ended when, ten days after catching it, my test results suddenly changed and Mrs Rhodes and I had a conversation which must have been repeated millions of times: “I’m negative.” “Really? Are you positive?”