Peter Rhodes on ever-growing London, the mucky Thames and a timely warning from Boris

The Guardian reports, rather kindly I thought, that “the Conservative party will lose almost 1,000 years of Commons experience just from MPs who have already announced they are standing down.” Somehow the report avoided the terms “rats” and “sinking ship.”

In a thought-provoking article, Boris Johnson considers how skiing helmets, once a fad for the few, have virtually replaced traditional woolly hats thanks to “conformism,” a process he calls a “movement from optional to semi-compulsory.” He senses the same movement in the debate on assisted dying where something once considered plain wrong gradually becomes the normal, socially responsible thing to do, piling pressure on sick and suffering people to seek euthanasia. Johnson is not infallible but I think he's right on this and I suspect assisted suicide will be with us before we know it.