Crime

Sir Cliff Richard will not be charged with historic sex offences, say the police and Crown Prosecution Service. There is ‘insufficient evidence’. You, reader — yes, you: I cannot reveal your name because I’m making this up, but let’s call you Alan, and let’s suppose my reader-ship know very well who you are… you, Alan, respectable, hitherto-well-regarded Alan, are not going to be charged with smuggling into Britain a stash of sadomasochistic scatological pornography as a young man in 1983 because there is ‘insufficient evidence’. How do you feel about that announcement, Alan?

Much fuss is made about financial inequality, but what about inequality of crime? It’s a question that has never been properly answered. Last year, The Spectator put out an appeal for help with social questions that weren't being addressed by politicians or academia. One was whether the much-lauded fall in crime has been concentrated in richer neighbourhoods. Strangely, the Home Office seems never to have looked into it. It's an area I know something about, having previously worked on profiling areas across the country based on their inhabitants’ wealth, health, and various other factors for a number of demographic studies. So The Spectator commissioned me to carry out the study. The crime rate in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level since the 1980s.

Any parents considering Dollar Academy are invited to take their car along its long driveway and park outside what looks like a palace. When I first did so with my parents, I told them that it all looked ridiculously posh. My mum flew into a rage. ‘Posh’ was a word of bigotry, she said, and one I’d best not use if I was going to survive a day in boarding school. My dad left school aged 15 and eventually joined the RAF, which was kindly paying for me to board while he was posted to Cyprus. He’d have loved such an opportunity, and wanted me to see it for what it was — and to forget any class-war language that I might have picked up in my old comprehensive in the Highlands. I needn’t have worried.

Pity the poor crime writers. Our earnings, like those of all authors, are diminishing for reasons far beyond our control. Our fictional criminals and detectives are being outsmarted by genetic fingerprinting, omnipresent security cameras and telltale mobile phones. Who needs Sherlock Holmes to solve a tricky crime when you have computers, with their unsporting ability to transmit and analyse enormous quantities of data and identify culprits? But the bigger problem for us novelists (if not for everyone else) is that murder itself is dying. The official homicide rate peaked in 2002, thanks to Dr Harold Shipman, and has since fallen by half — from 944 then to 517 last year.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsangryamerica/media.mp3" title="Emily Rhodes talks to Isabel Hardman about book thieves" startat=1139] Listen [/audioplayer] Notoriously, during the riots in London five years ago, Waterstones was the only high-street shop that wasn’t looted. But that depressing lack of book-pinching belied a thriving -tendency. Think of a bookshop and you think of a musty, hushed spot where people browse and whisper. In fact, it is thick with thieves. As a bookseller, I’ve encountered many a thief over the years. Most dramatic was the Mr Men thief, who used to steal a whole shelf of these tiny children’s books every couple of months. One afternoon I emerged from the stockroom to find the shelf newly emptied.

I’ve pointed out before that to be a woman who sucks up to Islamic extremists is to be a somewhat upmarket but equally self-deluded political equivalent of those strange women who write love-letters to incarcerated rapists and serial killers of women. I’ve recently spotted another septic sister-under-the-skin, though I imagine this one will be better-dressed and better-read. She is the consumer of the recent glut of ‘Death of a Woman as Hipster Diversion’ programmes: Serial, Undisclosed, Making A Murderer, The Jinx. This is true crime for those who know how to pronounce quinoa, but it is no less nasty a habit. Those who indulge in this particular 'guilty pleasure' should, indeed, feel guilty about it.

The Today programme often has one choking on one's porridge, but this morning's edition had an item even more infuriating than usual. A barrister who had represented one of the men accused in last April's Hatton Garden raid -­ in this case acquitted -­ was invited onto the show to speak of his 'grudging admiration' for the men who have just been convicted. 'They were clever, they were brave, they were elderly,' he began, suggesting that the raid had 'captured the imagination' of all of us. He was then followed by a crime writer who likened the gang's takings to a 'lottery win', and suggesting that it had cheered us all up at a time when many are struggling with their own finances.

It was watching the latest film on the Krays (ludicrously called Legend) that brought it all back. I remembered not so much the deliberate and casual violence which underlay the swinging Sixties in Britain but something more personal. A recurrent question I have asked since those days is whether I personally could have prevented one of the Kray murders. Let me go back to 1966. I was a journalist on the Times commissioned to write two articles on British prisons. The Prison Department had directed me to the new secure prison of Albany on the Isle of Wight and to the psychiatric work being done at Grendon Underwood. But I wanted to contrast this with prison life in an older and more typical prison. What better place to go than Dartmoor?