My licence to kill off ‘Bond girls’ label, by 007 author
WHILE travelling the world with a licence to kill, James Bond often finds himself in the arms of beautiful women.
But we should no longer call them ‘Bond girls’ as people now find the term offensive, according to author Anthony Horowitz, who has written two novels featuring the superspy.
He said the phrase ‘offends modern sensibilities’, adding: ‘I’m still struggling to find another word for “Bond girls”, I think you can’t use it in the 21st century. Those two words are somehow offensive in a strange way..
‘One of the hardest things to get right in a Bond novel is the love interest – the lady. Because, of course, you have to swerve a circle between 1950s attitudes and the “Me Too” generation, where we are now. I don’t want to put people’s backs up.’ However, Horowitz, 63, warned against changing the spy’s character to suit modern times, saying the novels were rooted in the 1950s when author Ian Fleming created James Bond.
Speaking at Cheltenham Literature Festival yesterday, he added: ‘I’m not going to give Fleming’s character Silk Cut or whatever it is, low-tar cigarettes, or vaping. Can you imagine Bond vaping?’
Horowitz also insisted that Bond is not a chauvinist, saying: ‘He is very highly sexually-driven but I don’t see him as a rampant chauvinist. He is kind towards women.’
At the inquest into the Westminster terrorist attack, a letter from PC Keith Palmer’s widow, Michelle, was read out.
‘the hardest thing was having to tell Amy that her daddy was gone. they were the best of friends and he was her world. there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about and miss him with all my heart.’
PC Palmer was the final victim of jihadi maniac Khalid Masood who was hellbent on killing a cop.
During the inquest we heard claims that the Metropolitan Police ‘closed ranks’ over shortcomings in procedures that left an unarmed officer alone at the entrance to the Palace of Westminster.
Not until the coroner’s verdict — that PC Palmer’s death might have been prevented had armed officers on the other side of the palace been closer — did the Met finally drop its claim that their fellow officer’s life could not have been saved.
Forget the fancy parlance of an inquest. Mrs Palmer put it succinctly: ‘how could Keith have been left alone, unarmed, guarding one of the most iconic buildings in the world?
‘I truly believe that if they [firearms officers] had been there, he would still be alive today and Amy would not have lost her daddy.’
Perhaps even more shocking than the attempt by the Met to cover their own backs was the revelation that an internal security review two years before the attack concluded the gate was ‘ vulnerable’ because it was manned by unarmed officers. Incredibly, the review wasn’t passed on to the police. But that is no excuse — only a dimwit would have failed to realise after previous attacks that Parliament was the terrorists’ most precious prize.
And why was the former Met chief, now Lord hogan-howe, not called to give evidence at the inquest into his force’s shortcomings?
he retired only a month before the Westminster attack — it was his procedures that were in place when his successor Cressida Dick took over, and she had to take the flak for his mistakes.
I’ve lost count of the number of times our virtue- signalling politicians have stood up just yards from where PC Palmer was stabbed to death and praised our fine police force and the brave and selfless role they play in protecting us.
Yet as the inquest shamefully revealed, when it came down to it, they and the Met were not there for their own hero, PC Palmer.
As Michelle said: ‘they let Keith down by failing to protect him and let us down by failing to investigate his death properly.’ Adding with heartbreaking poignancy that she and little Amy now ‘have to live with the consequences of their failure’.