Vegans are NOT better lovers, Pamela – but I’ll happily test your theory

SUNDAY, JANUARY 17

The art of letter-writing is going out of fashion as fast as paying for stuff with cash, which, as someone who once won his prep school handwriting cup, I find very sad. Emails, texts, tweets and WhatsApp messages are all fine, but they can never rival the personal impact of a hand-written note.

As the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: ‘Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.’

I’ve been reminded of their value by three beautifully written letters that I recently received.

The first was from Sarah, Duchess of York and contained a review of my book that offered a fascinating perspective on cancel culture, given how often she has been through the media and public opprobrium mincer: ‘Wake Up is entertaining and engaging,’ she wrote, ‘for all the faults of inflammatory tabloid style of journalism, you certainly know how to entertain. You make strong arguments, as a liberal, that simply demanding people be fired and cancelled from public life for their views is not the way to go about changing attitudes. Changing hearts and minds is more effective than cancelling opposition. However, you hit the nail on the head… our eyes have been opened and we must NEVER close them again. Love: “The biggest threat to our freedom in the 21st Century isn’t so much coronavirus but hysterically woke liberals trying to kill democracy by suppressing free speech.” The world has gone nuts, yes!’

Fergie, who has just announced her own racy romantic novel, Her Heart For A Compass, concluded: ‘Hate the trolling and bullying on social media. Common sense ignored, weakness and victim behaviour celebrated, and strength denigrated. Accountability abandoned, replaced by a blame culture. Dissenting views crushed by self-righteousness.’

The second letter was from another Royal, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, who’s launched a new book club on Instagram called the Reading Room, and who has also survived many an attempt to ‘cancel’ her from public life.

She had requested a copy of my book and wrote to thank me for sending it, saying: ‘I shall look forward to reading it in this lockdown world we all find ourselves living in.’

I’ve since been informed that Her Royal Highness is finding it ‘very funny’.

Funny enough to make her Reading Room selection?

Camilla interviews her chosen authors… so that could be most amusing!

But it was the third note, from a Good Morning Britain viewer, that had the most profound effect on me.

‘Dear Piers,’ it began, ‘I am writing to a TV programme for the first time in my life and I am 75. My husband died in December 2019, after 57 years together, and I was left devastated and alone. I can truthfully say that watching you three mornings a week on GMB has given me a reason to get out of bed. I love your hard-hitting interviews, and you have managed to make me smile now and again. This has been the worst year of my life and you have been shining a light into my darkness. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Linda.’

There was no surname or address, so I don’t know who Linda is or where she lives.

But her letter brought a tear to my eye and served as a reminder not just of the power of written words, but also of the power and responsibility that rests on the shoulders of all TV presenters when we beam into millions of homes.

You never know who’s watching, what’s going on in their lives, or how valuable – and, conversely, potentially damaging – that little screen can be to their mental health.

MONDAY, JANUARY 18

Vegans are ramping up their unproven claim to have superior sex lives to us carnivores. Pamela Anderson (above), an evangelistic plant-muncher for 30 years, insisted on GMB today: ‘Vegans make better lovers. The cholesterol in meat, eggs and dairy causes hardening of the arteries but not much else. It slows blood flow to all the body’s organs.’

When I pressed her as to whether her sex life has genuinely improved since she renounced meat, she insisted: ‘YES!’

Then she paused, smirked, and added: ‘Actually, I’ve always had a lot of fun in that department.’

Exactly.

Ms Anderson’s boudoir pleasure has got nothing to do with any adherence to kale smoothies or only bedding fellow avocadochompers. And yes, purely in the interests of science, I’m prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to test that theory.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 21

Government Ministers continue to compete with each other on GMB for the title of Most Incompetent Media Performer of the Pandemic. On Tuesday, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis made Matt ‘je ne regrette rien’ Hancock look brutally honest by refusing to provide a single reason why the UK currently has the worst coronavirus death rate in the world, preposterously insisting the Government doesn’t like giving international comparisons, even though that’s exactly what they do all day every day about our comparatively impressive vaccine rollout.

On Wednesday, Home Secretary Priti Patel made Lewis seem a master of transparency when I grilled her about the growing scandal of what’s happened to 400,000 crime records ‘accidentally deleted’ from the Police National Computer due to a ‘coding error’.

In a farcical exchange, she insisted the crime records still exist somewhere, but she just doesn’t know where, and in fact isn’t entirely sure they ARE somewhere else – but she hopes they might be.

But today, they were all eclipsed by Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, who showed why 92 per cent of teachers want him gone by abjectly failing to answer any of the questions we threw at him.

He concluded a truly diabolical interview by saying he’d come on the programme to talk about ‘skills for jobs’ – but then declined my request to say what skills he thinks he has for his own job.

Question Time legend David Dimbleby recently said this Government was the worst he’d seen in his 82-year lifetime.

I think he was being generous.