Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
PM rules out sugar tax to boost health
House where Bond had a licence to chill
BORIS Johnson will not be introducing sugar taxes in a bid to beat obesity post-coronavirus.
The PM, who battled Covid-19 in April, admitted that he’d had a change of heart when it came to using so-called “sin taxes” to improve public health.
But he is now believed to favour changing diets via ongoing campaigns.
Mr Johnson is expected to crack down on unhealthy food promotions, such as “buy one, get one free” offers.
The PM, who is a keen jogger, also plans to promote exercise as a good way to lose weight.
A Whitehall insider said: “I wouldn’t expect tax measures on obesity. It’s just not where the PM is.”
JAMES Bond’s London home has been identified nearly 70 years after Ian Fleming wrote the books which earned 007 worldwide fame.
The spy’s luxury bolthole was pinpointed by writer William Boyd, 68, who painstakingly researched the novels.
Having pieced together clues from books including Moonraker, From Russia with Love and Thunderball, he believes Bond lived at 25 Wellington Square in Chelsea, West London.
The address is a stone’s throw from 9 Bywater Street where John le Carre placed George Smiley – Britain’s other great spy character of the 20th Century.
In the forthcoming edition of the
Times Literary Supplement, Mr Boyd – who wrote the sequel novel Solo – claims Fleming refers to Bond’s home as a “comfortable flat in a Plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road”.
He writes that there are several similar squares in the area but “Fleming lets slip a crucial co-ordinate” when in 1961 novel Thunderball he describes the secret agent swerving out of the square, into King’s Road, and then “fast up Sloane Street and into the Park”.
Using this description, Boyd was able to eliminate every location except Wellington Square – where the average house price is £4.5million.
No25 once belonged to Desmond Maccarthy, who would have been the chief book reviewer at The Sunday Times when Fleming was its foreign manager. Maccarthy and his wife hosted many parties at the five-bedroom property which, it is believed, Fleming would have attended.
Two other clues were found in From Russia, with Love, which was published in 1957. Bond’s home is described as having a “long, big-windowed sitting room” and is also said to “booklined”.
The Wellington Square house remained in the Maccarthy family until last May when it was sold to Frank Cordes, MD of the Boston Consulting Group. After the discovery, Mr Cordes said: “I am a huge James Bond fan.”