So who’ll duck out on Donald?
QUESTION The election of Trump has led to the customary threats by celebs to quit the country. Has anyone actually done so? The threat of a celebrity exodus is nothing new. During the 2000 election campaign, several celebrities threatened to leave if George W. Bush won.
eddie Vedder (lead singer with rock band Pearl Jam) said: ‘I’m moving to a different country if little Damien II gets elected.’
And actress Kim Basinger told Focus magazine that her then husband Alec Baldwin ‘might leave the country if Bush is elected president . . . and then I’d probably have to go, too’.
Barbra Streisand said: ‘I don’t think you’ll see me around here for at least four years.’ Director Robert Altman said: ‘If George Bush is elected president, I’m leaving for France.’
In fact, none of them left when Bush won, though Altman claimed he meant Paris, Texas. The exception was Pierre Salinger.
A well-known figure in the U.S., Salinger had served as White house press secretary to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. he was a Democrat senator in 1964 and campaign manager for the 1968 Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign.
he later became known for his work as an ABC News correspondent and, in particular, his coverage of the American hostage crisis in Iran and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
he wrote in The Georgetowner newspaper: ‘I don’t want any more Bush presidents. If Bush wins, I’m going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France.’
So when Bush won, the 75-year-old and his wife did just that, and moved to near Avignon in Provence. he died in 2004.
It’s often claimed singer Phil Collins moved to Switzerland in protest at Labour’s 1997 General election victory, but this isn’t true.
A day before the 1992 election, Piers Morgan, then Bizarre columnist at The Sun newspaper, quoted Collins as saying: ‘If they put up taxes, I’d consider going abroad.’
This quote mutated into a cast-iron vow to emigrate if Labour won.
In fact, Collins claims he left Britain for Switzerland in 1994 because he had started a relationship with a woman who lived there.
Unfortunately for Collins, many took Morgan’s quote at face value. In 2005, Labour supporter Noel Gallagher said: ‘Vote Labour. If you don’t and the Tories get in, Phil Collins is threatening to come back and live here. And none of us want that.’
Since Donald Trump’s recent victory, various U.S. stars, including Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston, comediennes Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, singer Miley Cyrus and actress Neve Campbell have threatened to leave the country.
Streisand is a serial offender; she told an Australian journalist: ‘[Trump] has no facts . . . I’m either coming to your country, if you’ll let me in, or Canada.’
Time will tell if they stick to their threats to leave.
Mike Killick, Bangor, Caernarfonshire. QUESTION What’s the closest the world has come to ending? PeRhAPS the closest we’ve been to nuclear Armageddon was on September 26, 1983.
Three weeks after the Soviets had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, Soviet Lt Colonel Stanislav Petrov was in command at Serpukhov-15, monitoring satellite- based detection systems. Shortly after midnight an alarm sounded, signalling that the U.S. had fired five intercontinental ballistic missiles toward Russia.
It was a false alarm — one of the satellites had misinterpreted the glint of sunlight off clouds near Montana as a missile launch — but for a while, it was believed the U.S. had started a nuclear war.
Protocol demanded Serpukhov-15 report any signs of a missile launch to the Soviet high command, but Petrov chose to ignore the blaring warning alarms and reported the launch as a false alarm. he might well have averted a nuclear holocaust.
he later indicated that his decision was based on previously being told a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay. The incident remained classified until after the Cold War ended. Petrov has said that he was neither rewarded nor punished for his actions.
Rachel Riley, Birmingham. TheRe can be little doubt that the closest our planet has ever come to utter destruction was 4·45 billion years ago, when it obtained a moon.
The planet was still very hot when a planetoid the size of Mars, that had probably been dislodged due to the erratic movements of Saturn and Jupiter, crashed into the earth, spewing vast masses of material into near space.
Much of this material coalesced to become the Moon, It was attracted by earth’s gravity and became associated with earth’s own rotation.
The earth was enlarged and the collision had after- effects, the most significant being that it was knocked 23 degrees from its vertical axis, giving the planet seasons and speedier cooling from the poles.
The gravity of the Moon helped to smooth out the wobble that the collision had caused in our planet, and as it slowly moves away from us at about the rate that finger nails grow each year, we are able to make observations of the atmosphere of the Sun. That will be denied us in the future when the Moon appears smaller and does not block out the star at the centre of our solar system.
As the Moon passed overhead, the land would rise by 200 ft by the gravitational attraction, and the oceans of water sloshed around in a similar fashion, just waiting for life to begin, ultimately to replace the toxic atmosphere with some oxygen, and ozone to hold back the Sun’s aggressive ultra-violet radiation.
Gerald R. Kimber, Lymington, Hants. QUESTION When his house was destroyed by a Nazi bomb, Graham Greene is alleged to have said: ‘That’s the end of both my marriage and my mortgage.’ What did happen to one’s mortgage payments when your house was totally destroyed? FURTheR to the earlier answer, my wife’s parents owned a bungalow in Collier Row, Romford, essex, which was damaged when a bomb fell nearby, taking out their bay windows.
When my wife and her sister were clearing out the bungalow after her father’s death in 1997, at 96, they found letters from the War Damage Commissioners approving payment of the cost of repairs, dated 1956, 11 years after the war ended.
It would seem that with so many properties to repair, especially in and around the London area, people had a long wait to get the repairs done and payment approved.
Chris snow, Chelmsford, Essex.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT. You can also fax them to 01952 780111 or you can email them to charles. legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.