Back in 1985 I was an inpatient at a drug rehab in the West Country and had genital warts that required regular and painful treatments.

Each week I went to the STD clinic at the nearby hospital, where a middle-aged consultant applied an acidic preparation to the glans of my penis. One day, while he was actually holding the afflicted portion, he remarked — quite casually — that the best way to rid the country of HIV/Aids would be to “castrate all you junkies — and the queers, too”.

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This week, Will writes about how he overcame his motoring addiction

29.04.08

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Read Will’s Evening Standard column of 18.03.08 here

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The Prime Minister has uttered two cheers for 24-hour drinking. Yes, there will be a crackdown on premises flogging booze to underage drinkers, and yes, there will be a campaign to persuade us not to damage our health and looks, but overall the Government feels the more liberal drinking regime is by no means a disaster.

Not so, claims the Local Government Association. Its head, Sir Simon Milton of Westminster Council, believes the liberalisation has been a disaster, with town centres becoming no-go areas, full of berserker teens, their chests daubed with lager: violent crime has increased by 25 per cent between 3am and 6am in the morning. The statistic the Government prefers is that there has been a three per cent reduction in crime since the citizenry were able to spread out their imbibing.

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I’m delighted to be able to sign up to this newspaper’s campaign to make London restaurants offer their clientele tap water as a matter of course. It’s long been difficult for the cynics among us not to imagine that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the establishment, there isn’t a bus boy resolutely refilling fancy bottles from a rusty faucet, especially if those bottles have reusable lids and are blazoned with the restaurant’s own logo.

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John Williams, the then press secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote the “first draft” of the so-called “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, after concerted campaigning, the Government has finally released this “first draft” only for David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to say that it’s nothing of the sort.

Williams’s draft doesn’t have the key stuff about Saddam Hussein being able to target Britain in 45 minutes, or the long-since discredited cobblers about uranium being sourced from West Africa, but it does paint up a picture of an aggressive state with a capability for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Is Miliband’s bizarre statement that this was not the basis for the later dossier meant to suggest that more information will somehow come to light showing there was sound intelligence for these claims? It hardly seems likely.

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Boris Johnson is the latest visionary to wade into the soggy morass of the Thames estuary and propose that an airport be sited there. The Tory mayoral candidate describes Heathrow as a “planning error” and proposes that it be shut down and a new London airport built to the east of the city.

I well remember my late father, Professor Peter Self, sitting on the Roskill Commission in the 1960s, although mostly because of his vivid description of going on an amphibious vehicle out to visit Foulness Island. The Commission was considering sites for a third London airport, and the Thames Estuary was on their list - only to be abandoned for Stansted because of cost considerations.

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Read Will’s piece about the smoking ban from the Evening Standard
04.02.08

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Read Will’s latest Evening Standard column about McDonald’s latest attempt to ‘crawl back to respectability’ and why he won’t take his children there.

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To Video City in Notting Hill Gate, a fine emporium for the rental and purchase of videocassettes and DVDs. During my brief incumbency as this newspaper’s film critic I often called on them to obtain some obscure early Kurosawa. The same staff are behind the counter as when I joined 20 years ago and they offer the same olde worlde service: on this occasion heading into their musty vaults to disinter an ancient Tom Sawyer for my young shavers.

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