Spectator competition winners: ‘a tomato is nothing more than a bordello of suggestibility’

The inspiration for the latest challenge, to submit a newspaper leading article exposing the corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item, was the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’. In a smallish field with a narrow focus, you divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery. As usual with this type of challenge, the entries that stood out were those that retained a crumb, however small, of plausibility. Nicholas Stone was good but his piece was written as a news report rather than a leading article and so I reluctantly disqualified it. Bill Greenwell takes the bonus fiver. His fellow winners earn £30 each.

Bill Greenwell It cannot even be decided in polite society what species it belongs to.