
- Quote:
-
[...]
Sir Gerald Howarth MP, who once worried that the same sex marriage bill would be seen by “the aggressive homosexual community… as but a stepping stone to something even further”, analysed Corbyn’s Remembrance service bow
Sir Gerald, who was dismayed when the ban on military homosexuals was lifted because many “ordinary soldiers in Her Majesty’s forces joined the services precisely because they wished to turn their backs on some of the values of modern society”, explained how Corbyn’s “slight tip forward” toward the Cenotaph “should have gone down to around 45 degrees from the waist” proving that he was “not cut from the cloth of a statesman”.
Perhaps, mindful of Sir Gerald’s anxieties, Corbyn had refrained from bending too far forward in order to avoid encouraging any members of the aggressive homosexual community present at the ceremony to see his action as a stepping stone to something even further.
[...]
Oddly, I have previous experience of a protractor being used to calculate offence. Twenty-one years ago I appeared in a TV sketch show, and in an item written by the comedian Richard Herring, Tom Binns featured naked as a showering footballer. When the rushes arrived, there were legal anxieties that Binns’s penis appeared to be erect, and that the footage could not be broadcast.
A BBC ombudsman analysed Binns’s penis with a protractor, using the Mull of Kintyre test, and found that Binns’s penis, while buoyant, was angled downwards at less than the 45 degree mark that would have made it unfit for transmission. Turning from the Telegraph to the Sun, this knowledge was to come back to haunt me.
The Sun’s front page, Leveson a mere memory, maintained Corbyn had not bowed at all, downgrading his movements to a futile nod, and ran a photo of the nodding “pacifist” next to a picture of an apparently topless woman standing heroically in some snow in just tiny pants and ski-boots. Her back was towards the camera, but the subconscious 3D modelling in my mind kicked in involuntarily, and I was very slightly excited, surely the paper’s intention in displaying the image.
Later that day, as I walked home past a decorated war memorial, the stirring began again, and I realised to my horror that accidentally viewing the image of the semi-naked woman on the Sun cover alongside their story on Corbyn and the Cenotaph had caused me to associate subconsciously Remembrance Day with mild sexual arousal.
Appalled at what had happened to me, through no fault of my own I might add, and terrified of incurring the wrath of Sir Gerald for my inappropriate response to the sacred symbols around me, I grabbed my protractor from my satchel and rushed into a toilet cubicle to calibrate the extent of my unintentional disrespect.
Luckily, I realised that, as usual, my penis fell below the required standard to constitute legal tumescence, and quickly mailed off mathematically annotated photographic evidence of this to Sir Gerald, for fear of becoming the subject of a Daily Telegraph exposé myself, while praying that he himself would not interpret this desperate gesture as an invitation to a stepping stone to something even further.
Yes awful, just awful. If he was a communist he'd be banished to siberia.
Islington seems worse to me.
|