I tried living without public services for an hour and I was fine. By a Daily Telegraph columnist

14th July 2023

By Charlotte Phelps

I SEE public sector workers are getting huge pay rises again, but do we really need these skiving Bolsheviks in our lives? I didn’t use their services for a full hour today, and I’m just fine.

Doctors would have you believe they’re running themselves ragged treating sick people every day. But while I’ve been sitting here typing I haven’t felt ill once. Not a twinge. So what are we paying them for – other than grafting penises onto confused teenage girls because they saw it on TikTok and think it’s ‘cool’?

Socialist spendthrifts will no doubt say: ‘But what if you were in a car accident, Charlotte?’ Well I wasn’t. And why on earth would I be driving a car in my home office? So that demolishes that argument.

Even worse than doctors are teachers, crybaby failures in life who can’t relate to other adults and expect a medal for being able to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But in this last hour I’ve been a perfectly productive member of society without needing another O-level.

What can these Marxist oddballs offer me when I’ve got a third in Classics from Oxford? I’m hardly going to go back and study copper sulphate solution. My children don’t need their services either because they’re at fee-paying schools. I’ll admit Orlando and Persephone aren’t the brains of Britain, but the £30,000 a year is worth it because the smart uniforms with little hats are adorable.

Naturally the police don’t want to miss out on the taxpayers’ money bonanza. Did a gang of heavily-armed murderers and rapists break in while I was warming up a croissant? No. And if they had the local rozzers would have been too busy investigating personal pronouns.

I could weep for what this country has become, happy to be blackmailed by fat nurses and Beardo the Weirdo teachers who’d rather teach Stalin than Shakespeare. Come on Rishi, tell these freeloaders to sling their hook. Offer them £5,000 a year and not a penny more.

If they don’t like it we should do two things: send in the army, and all go private. If, heaven forfend, I do ever suffer a serious injury I won’t be stupid enough to wait hours for the leftie NHS, I’ll just call a Bupa ambulance.

Six 90s rumours you were a moron to believe

13th July 2023

THE 1990s were rife with dumb rumours and myths, often promulgated by the new-fangled Worldwide Web. Here are some you’re not proud to admit you did sort-of believe.

The kid who got hit by a javelin at school and died

Every school had an apocryphal tale of a kid – always from a year group that left before you started, curiously – who got hit by a stray javelin during sports day and died. Versions varied from county to county, like Native American folk tales. In some it was a mere stab in the heart, in others he’d somehow been near-decapitated. RIP, javelin kid who strangely was never on the news.

Saying ‘Candyman’ into a mirror five times got you murdered

Obviously the Bloody Mary myth reworked in Candyman. Just one problem – Candyman was definitely fictional. The 1992 film unambiguously has writing credits for director Bernard Rose and Candyman himself is played by the fairly famous actor Tony Todd, who was in Platoon and Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s basically the same as worrying John Wick will mistakenly come after you.

Drinking too much Sunny Delight turned you orange

Launched in the 90s, Sunny Delight was a phenomenon. It tasted f**king disgusting but kids loved it because it was mostly sugar and only five per cent juice. Then it got banned. But that’s not the real story, it’s the ‘turning orange’ one. It can’t have been true, or British primary schools in 1998 would have had whole classes that appeared to be as addicted to fake tan as the Oompa Loompas on TOWIE.

Richard Gere and the gerbil

Richard Gere, star of Pretty Woman and American Gigolo, definitely put gerbils in his rectum to stimulate his prostate. With hindsight it’s obviously spite directed at a particularly good-looking male actor, if only because it’s a huge faff and Gere could have had all the bum fun he wanted with attractive women and skipped having to remove a dead rodent from his arse. A true cultural phenomenon, though, and even today you can’t look at your kids’ gerbil Mr Nibbles without idly wondering if he’d ‘fit’.

Prince had ribs removed to you-know-what

Another rumour that defies logic is that Prince had ribs removed so he could give himself blowjobs. Something about this doesn’t really stack up. Why would a man with a cavalcade of Kim Basinger-level conquests need to gobble his own knob? And does being minus a rib give you that much more reach? This rumour reignited in the 00s when Marilyn Manson was claimed to have done the same. But they also said he was in The Wonder Years, so we can now chalk up all three of these as patent bollocks.

The Millennium Bug

According to Michael Buerk planes would fall from the sky and the world would be destroyed when the nukes spontaneously set themselves off. In reality, IT blokes fixed it because banks didn’t want to risk losing money. So the actual story was more like ‘Man successfully avoids mid-morning hunger with large breakfast’. How silly to think mass deaths and martial law clampdowns were just around the corner – you’d have to wait for Covid for that, and it was a lot more hassle than resetting the clock on your VCR.