When you need a little space...
ONCE UPON a time a rich man’s midlife crisis consisted of buying a flash car and having an affair. Now it seems the extremely rich man’s later-life crisis consists of competing with your billionaire buddies to be the first to build a rocket and go to space.
Step forward, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Sir Richard “Rocketman” Branson, known for his hot air balloon capers, seems to have won the race – so at least we can celebrate one English triumph this week! And he did it despite his wife warning: “If you’re foolish enough to do these wonderful things, you can do it, but I won’t be going to your funeral.”
Thankfully, there is no funeral to go to and she and Sir Richard can celebrate his 71st birthday in a few days’ time.
So why the mad rush to space? Will it make even more billions for these billionaires? Do we really want a holiday on Mars? Is space travel the future? And if it is, will it be on the amber or red list? And will we all need to be doublejabbed to get there?
I think I will leave it to the billionaires – although a week in Egypt seems more unlikely than a space landing at the moment!
WHEN TIM Davie became director general and Richard Sharp became chairman of the BBC, I actually thought we had two people who understood why Auntie had lost touch with huge swathes of the country due to its Left-wing, Remain obsessed, metropolitan culture groupthink.
It seems I was wrong. Unbelievably they are reported to be recruiting the Left-wing, Remain obsessed, metropolitan Jess Brammar from the Huffington Post as their news editor.
Can they really not find anyone at all to recruit who might have a different perspective and can relate to the majority opinion across the country?
My only encounter with Brammar was when the Huffington Post wrote a fake news story about me fairly recently and her cavalier attitude to that when I raised it with her certainly doesn’t bode well for the BBC.
As someone who worked for the BBC when I had a career in the media, it breaks my heart to see them once again pressing the selfdestruct button.