Crime

Most Britons assume at the outset that any misfortune involving a cyclist is the cyclist’s fault. After all, many a two-wheeled hellion has earned contempt. But put aside the understandable cynicism. This is not one of those stories. A week ago, I was cycling around Buckingham Palace while some low-key royal whatnot was pending but not under way. The vicinity was closed to traffic but not to bikes. As usual, I was heading for Hyde Park Corner via Constitution Hill, because the bike path on the right-hand side in Green Park is insensibly ‘shared use’ — meaning, teeming with pedestrians, and I see no point in our inconveniencing one another. As I passed, an officer shouted ‘Cyclist!’ and then barked something I couldn’t make out.

James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon dog of American letters’ has no hesitation in affirming it when he arrives in The Spectator’s London offices to record a podcast. ‘Oh yes, I think that’s been proven,’ he says matter-of-factly. Has he always thought that? ‘When I finished the LA Quartet. I knew there was nobody like me and there wasn’t.’ Ellroy’s new book, This Storm, is the second novel in a projected set of prequels to his LA Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz) set between LA and the Baja peninsula in Mexico in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.

The Guardian ran a story on its website today headlined: ‘Hate crimes doubled in England and Wales in five years.’ Alarming if true, but is it? The story is based on some data released by the Home Office today which, on the face of it, does appear to show the number of hate crimes increasing. The number of hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2018-19 was 103,397, up from 94,121 in 2017-18, a rise of ten per cent. But drill down into the report, and the picture becomes more hazy. The word doing most of the work here is ‘recorded’. Yes, the number of recorded hate crimes has increased year-on-year, but how do we know that isn’t due to the police being more likely to record hate crimes?

On Monday, a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Munster Square in Camden. A Witness reported seeing three men 'screaming and laughing' as they chased him with a machete. The poor kid apparently sought refuge in a house, banging on the door and pleading for help, but his pursuers were close behind him. A couple of days before, across town in Leyton, a police officer had been attacked with a machete after trying to stop a van. PC Stuart Outten was slashed across his head and hand but courageously resisted the attack and survived. In Tottenham, a week before, an 89-year-old woman was reportedly raped and murdered in her home. Of course, unless you live in a small community you will always hear about evil and nauseating crimes.

Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn. In fact they now look bigger than their mothers. The easiest way of differentiating the ewes from the lambs is that the latter still have their fleeces while the former are shorn and look thoroughly careworn and knackered from having to feed their demanding and needy adolescents long after it’s strictly necessary. What’s rather spoiling my nature notes at the moment, though, is the nagging fear that next time I venture out into the fields on my morning walk with the dog, our pastoral idyll will have been reduced to a bloody shambles of discarded entrails and severed heads.