Has Boris Johnson really ‘trashed’ parliament’s reputation?

‘When they posted the closing-night notice for his first Broadway play, Comes a Day, he went into a drunken rage, threw his fist through a glass window and played the last act bleeding into a rubber glove before being forced into a hospital where he required 22 stitches.’ So said the New York Times in a profile of George C. Scott in 1970, 12 years after the event. Scott’s infatuation with alcohol saw him through five marriages. My husband admires his screen performances, naturally.

In another profile of the actor, in 1971, the Times in London said of the incident: ‘Backstage at Comes a Day he got drunk and trashed his dressing room.’ It was among the first times that trash had been used like that in England. In this sense it was from the first an Americanism. Once, though (in the 18th century), to trash had meant to ‘rid of trash’, something done to sugar cane.