I see that a more-than-usually clownish member of the daft and dangerous UK Independence Party has speculated that the recent damp weather in parts of England is down to proposals to legislate for gay marriage.

The suggestion isn’t new. In 2005, presidential candidate John McCain’s main man in Louisiana, John Hagee, pointed out that Hurricane Katrina, which deluged New Orleans, had been sent by the Almighty as punishment for that year’s particularly flamboyant Gay Pride parade.

In 2011, Pastor John Prangle warned New Yorkers that Hurricane Irene was about to devastate the city in revenge for Mayor Bloomberg supporting moves towards gay marriage. Pastor Prangle saw no reason to withdraw his prophecy when Irene swerved around and avoided the city: he reckoned his personal prayers had done the trick.

In 2012, the Rev. John McTernan drew attention to Hurricane Sandy heading up the east coast, driven by gay marriage and the fact that there was a pro-gay militant Muslim in the White House.

The persistence of these mad pronouncements – and there’s a bunch of other bubble-brains babbling the same balderdash every time there’s a strong breeze – can mean only one thing: none of them reads Hot Press. Had they had the foresight to take out a subscription, they would have learnt from this very column that the incidence of hurricanes in the US doesn’t conform to but, in fact, is in inverse proportion to the gayness of States.

My methodology consisted of noting the pattern of hurricanes annually recorded by the US meteorological service and plotting this, State by State, against the incident of gay activity as established by the number of gay events, gay bookshops, gay saunas and the like.

The figures did not yield any significant correlation at first. But when another adjustable variable was factored in, something dramatic emerged. Taking the number of specifically lesbian bookshops, lesbian college groups, lesbian knitting circles and so on as a reasonable indication, it became clear that the more lesbians a State could boast, the lower the chances of a hurricane hurling your house into the heavens. The rule of thumb seemed to be that a thousand lesbians (approx.) could repel one hurricane a year. Thus the best method of preventing hurricanes was to import as many lesbians as could be persuaded to move to your State. (It has occurred to me since that relocation grants, tax breaks and subsidised housing for lesbians would make a lot of sense.)

That’s if my figures aren’t entirely coincidental and hurricanes are actually intense low pressure areas into which evaporating moisture releases heat energy to warm the surrounding air and fuel immensely powerful swirling winds.

It’s either that or God loves lesbians – which would be much the more pleasing explanation except that God doesn’t exist.

Does the Iona Institute have a view on this matter? I think we should be told.

I was surprised that none of the obituaries of Shirley Temple mentioned Graham Greene. The curly cherub who charmed the world through the dread years of Depression was indirectly responsible for one of the Catholicguilt- ridden novelist’s best-known if least well-written works.

In the 1930s, Greene was film critic and joint editor of a small London magazine, Night And Day. In 1937, he published a review of Wee Willie Winkie – directed by John Ford and co-starring Victor McLaglen and Cesar Romero, arguably Ms. Temple’s finest moment in movies. In a passage which would read somewhat differently today, Greene declared: “Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece... In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep... Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire...”
She was nine.

Sued by the studio and Temple, Greene fled to Mexico – the trip that was to inspire The Power And The Glory. He wrote to a friend, “I found a cable waiting for me in Mexico City asking me to agree to apologise to that little bitch Shirley Temple.”

He refused to cough up, the case went to court, where the judge described the piece as “one of the most horrible libels that one could imagine” and ordered payment of £3,500. Greene chipped in £500, Night And Day went under.

Greene’s defenders today insist that the passage had a satiric purpose. If so, he was a bad judge of the way words fall on the ears of an audience. Which he wasn’t.

The fact that hardly anybody brought the incident up in coverage of Ms. Temple’s death suggests that, even now, in the world of literature, as opposed to celebrity, there’s no stomach for looking this sort of thing in the eye.