Peter Mullen

We live in an era of illusion – and delusion

From our UK edition

Matt Hancock, a government minister, has felt obliged to declare formally, 'Objective reality exists.' To his credit, he confessed to a certain shamefacedness about this but he added that he believes he had a duty to reassure us. I find it hard to understand what Mr Hancock’s statement means. By 'objective reality' does he mean truth? If so, then the proposition 'There is such a thing as truth' is self-evident – a necessary proposition – because if someone attempts to refute it and says, 'There is no such thing as truth,' then either that proposition is true or the one who states it is wrong. In either case, there is something that is true.

The BBC has become obsessed with sex

From our UK edition

So Pope John Paul II had a mistress. That’s not quite what the BBC’s Panorama asserted, but they chucked around enough hint, innuendo and nudge, nudge to make us believe he had. And there was similar suggestiveness in a Today programme interview on Monday morning between John Humphrys and the liberal Catholic journalist Edward Stourton. Humphrys delighted in the whiff of salaciousness and wondered aloud whether Stourton’s discovery of hundreds of letters between the former Pope and the Polish-American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka indicated that the pair were lovers. After much whetting of our licentious appetites, the BBC concluded that they were 'More than friends but not quite lovers.