Forty Days of Temptation

As is traditional, some good Christian folks appear to have taken the deprivations of the Lenten period as a licence to wallow in the vice of self-righteousness. Having temporarily renounced their tiddlywinks, corporal punishment and other unholy pleasures, a noisy gang calling themselves 40 Days for Life are filling the moral void by staging protests outside abortion clinics. Rather than doing anything so dull as meditate on their own sins, they hammer at the mote in their neighbour's eye with threats of breast cancer and psychological trauma comparable to rape, and in some cases by brandishing cameras. A couple of local authorities have voted to introduce buffer zones to prevent harassment in the immediate vicinity of the clinics, but last autumn the compliant Sajid Javid ruled out making this a general provision. It remains as yet unclear whether his main objection was the risk of offending pious colleagues in the Democratic Unionist Party or a plucky, fair-minded British hope that the cameras might snap him some immigrants.