Tom Utley

Every Friday, veteran Mail columnist Tom Utley entertains readers with his perceptive and sometimes hilariously grumpy takes on the issues of the day, often seen through the lens of his own life.

November 2023 found him explaining how, shortly after the Brexit referendum of 2016, his enjoyment of a pint at his favourite pub was interrupted by a young woman shrieking: ‘I’ve been literally raped by 17 million old people.’

Utley wrote: ‘I toyed for a moment or two with challenging her use of the word “literally” but I judged that she wasn't in the mood for lectures from an ageing pedant on the meaning of common English words.’

From this typically amusing opening, Utley segued to the point of his story: a new study claiming that Brexiteers are dimmer than Remainers. ‘What did the researchers hope to achieve?’ he wondered. ‘Unless it was simply to lend a scientific veneer to the familiar insult: “We Remainers are clever, and the rest of you are stupid. So yah boo sucks.”’

As he pointed out, ‘Remainers still blame Brexit for practically all our woes - including those that manifestly have nothing to do with it.’

Yet ’as for those catastrophic consequences of withdrawal, so confidently predicted by David Cameron, George Osborne and all those highly qualified people at the Treasury, whatever happened to them? Mass unemployment, widespread civil unrest, an instant double-dip recession - none of this has come to pass.’

In December, a trip to see the singalong version of The Muppet Christmas Carol with his two eldest grandchildren saw Utley admitting that this was the first time he’d seen the film ‘and I pray to the Almighty that when I'm laid to my final rest, it will also turn out to have been the last. ‘Still, I had reason to be grateful to the Muppets and their dire production. This was because our trip to the cinema gave me the chance, despite the cacophonous din, to get a few minutes' much needed shut-eye in the stalls, as a brief respite from the duty of entertaining the little brats while they stay with us in the run-up to the Big Day.’

After a series of heartfelt anecdotes about his experiences of standing on Lego bricks and finding felt-tip on the new tablecloth, he wishes readers a joyful Christmas — ‘and, please God, a little peace when it's over.’

That cheer had somewhat diminished by June when, after getting a speeding ticket for travelling at 26mph, he told the story of a friend’s daughter who, the very day after she passed her test ‘was tootling along obediently at 20mph, in one of these wretched zones, when she was pulled over by the police — for driving too slowly! ‘After 53 accident-free years of experience behind the wheel, driving almost every day of my life, I will take some convincing that 20mph zones, policed by cameras, are anything other than a scheme to screw yet more money out of motorists.’