Tyson Fury, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail, is about as far removed as one can imagine "from the PR-obsessed, homogenised, ineffably bland world of your standard modern-day sports star". After winning the world heavyweight boxing championship in Dusseldorf (plus £4m in prize money), he decided against flying home by private jet and returned instead by driving to Rotterdam and taking the ferry to Hull.
Just before winning his title, he also rashly gave an interview to The Mail on Sunday without having any PR men present. During the interview he was startlingly candid about his religious beliefs. "There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the Devil comes home. One of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion andthe other is paedophilia This is a free world we live in and an evil world.
People can say, oh you're against abortions and you're against paedophilia, you're against homosexuality but my faith and my culture is based on the Bible. If I follow that and that tells me it's wrong, then it's wrong for me."
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As a result of this, a petition has been launched to remove Tyson Fury's name from the shortlist for BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Fury's "apparently drawing moral equivalence between adult same-sex relationships and sex with children" is "deeply offensive", says Lawson. He is not, however, condoning violence against gay people, or demanding politicians take action. He comes from what is known as the "Irish traveller community" and is merely repeating the fundamentalist views he picked up as a child. In line with this, his courtship with his wife was very chaste: "We didn't sleep together until after we got married. That is the travellers' way."
At his worst, he can be unattractively crude he has said that woman's "best place is to be in the kitchen or on her back". But does this mean he should be kicked off the BBC's list? The trouble is, as Lawson suggests, the very idea of a Sports Personality is almost a contradiction in terms: most sports stars are as bland as can be: Nigel Mansell, Nick Faldo and Lewis Hamilton have never said anything remotely memorable. Fury, at least, is a genuine personality: the BBC should stick with him and let viewers vote him down if they want to. Otherwise they might go for Lewis Hamilton again, says Lawson. "Wake me up when that's over."
Blanche Girouard, a religious studies teacher at St Paul's Girls' School, has said that older women who only did needlework and domestic science were often more contented with their livesthan many of the young bluestockingsof today. "Happiness and success don't turn on A*s and a place at Oxford," she said. Feminists were up in arms, butThe Mail on Sunday's Rachel Johnson sent Blanche a reassuring email. Although Johnson's only daughter went to St Paul's and Oxford, "my own mother (73) has always maintained it's a great mistake' to educate girls at all", she wrote.
Tabloid money: Cadbury, the 'unacceptable face of capitalism'
They complained, and the Rugby Football Union, "led bythat blithering idiot from the tennis world Ian Ritchie, held aninvestigation and dumped him". What hypocrites if their shareshad gone up, the hapless kit man "would have been a hero" andprobably been "hired by The Wall Street Journal".
"Foreign-owned" Cadbury has "paid not a penny in tax on itsnear £150m profits in Britain", rages Peter Hill in the Daily Express.Sadly, this is "typical" of these "stateless conglomerates".
They "behave like pirates: responsible to no one, ruthless andarrogant". They "think nothing of making thousands redundantwhen it suits them" and, while "ordinary people pay moretax every year", multinationals "get away with murder".It's "no wonder extreme left-wingers like Jeremy Corbyn have afollowing". This is "the unacceptable face of capitalism".
The latest ruling from the Court of Protection is "terrifying",says Louise Mensch in The Sun. It ruled that a 50-year-oldsocialite had the right to refuse life-saving treatment, eventhough "her crazy reasons related to looks, cash and champers".
Worse still, a judge "with no medical expertise" was able tooverrule the opinion of her doctors that the patient wasn'tmentally stable enough to make her own decisions. The patientclaimed she wanted to die because she'd "lost her sparkle", didn'twant "to end up in a council flat" and that medicine "madeher feel fat". This "sounds like insanity to me and a case ofnarcissism that medicine could cure". If the patient "couldn't seethe blessings of life" then she "needed therapy, love and care"not "an easy route to the grave".
