Affecting that familiar air of above-it-all, actorly bewilderment, Jeremy Irons wondered last week what sort of society we’ve become. After all, he complained, a chap can’t even pat a woman on the backside without it being misinterpreted.
“The assumption must be that all men are evil, and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits, whenever they have free scope,” he complained. Oops, no, that was Niccolò Machiavelli, explaining the subtleties of statecraft in 15th-century Italy. What Jeremy actually said, in the course of plugging his lavish new TV series, The Borgias, was that political correctness, and the various prohibitions it imposes, are largely a result of there being “too many people in power with too little to do”.
Click here to read this article from the Daily Telegraph