Police

‘Yes, you can report it, but it’s going to take ten minutes to go through the process,’ said the oppressively cheerful bureaucrat at Surrey Police when I rang to tell them about my stolen saddle. After the first 30 seconds I could see why. She kept asking me to verify that I was all right — still coping, still breathing, still pumping blood around my body — after every sentence. For example: ‘I just need to take your name and address. Is that all right? I need to open a file and log your personal details. Is that OK?’ ‘Yes, fine,’ I said, before telling her my name and address, which prompted a lot of tapping. ‘If I go silent… then it’s just because… I’m typing. Is that all right?

There was a grim inevitability that the name Edward Heath would one day be trawled up in connection with allegations of sexual abuse of children. As one of our few unmarried prime ministers, Heath always attracted speculation about his sexuality. The public image of a private man wedded to his career, content to spend his spare time playing music and sailing, has long given way to a presumption that he must have been a repressed homosexual. Because of our national obsession with paedophilia, this in turn has all too easily morphed into the suspicion that he had a sexual interest in underage boys. Anyone who tells the police that they were sexually assaulted as a child should be taken seriously, whatever the social and professional status of the alleged abuser.

Another stabbing in my new neighbourhood, not with an axe or with a samurai sword this time, but a machete. The samurai sword incident was back in the spring. The magnolia was in bloom and the citizens of London N1 were about their innocent business, reading for book club and baking (wheat-free). At 3 p.m., a terrible screaming was heard coming from Englefield Road and when police arrived they found a teenage boy lying bleeding, sword on one side, meat cleaver on the other. The machete killing which followed was worse. Daylight, but this time the crime scene was a playground. Children were goofing about after school, including the soon-to-be victim’s sister. Witnesses said two teenagers appeared on a scooter.

Each year Anjem Choudary earns more in benefits than a soldier does starting off in our armed forces. This is a fact I never tire of pointing out – especially to Anjem’s face whenever we have the misfortune to meet. The follow-on point, which I think also worth continuing to make, is that there is something suicidal about a society that rewards its enemies better than it does its defenders. Choudary and his family rake in around £25,000 each year  and - as you can see from this newly-released video above  – we taxpayers now get even more for our money than we had previously thought.

Aren’t the police getting younger nowadays — and ruder, and scruffier and more intolerant of middle-class women? In other words, why am I always getting pulled over for no apparent reason? If I were a member of any other minority group I would be complaining to my community leaders of terrible bias and of hideously unfair ‘stop and search’ policies. As it is, whatever minority I do belong to in my Volvo with a Countryside Alliance sticker on the back window and my gundog in a travel cage in the boot, it has absolutely no recourse to complain to anyone. So they help themselves. The other day, I was driving past Wandsworth Common on my way to Surrey to see the horses when I was pulled over by police manning a huge road block.

'Hidden menace of the drivers high on drugs,' says the headline in today's Daily Mail, revealing that – according to police – six out of 10 motorists are failing a new roadside test that can detect use of cannabis or cocaine. If so, that's worrying. But not as worrying as actually being driven by someone who's stoned. Trust me on this. Several times I've found myself in California bowling along the freeway at night, trying not to think about the spliff the driver smoked before turning the ignition key. A single puff induces terror in passengers, since all dope seems to be skunk these days and the Californian strain is wickedly strong. (Again, trust me on this.) It makes the journey 'more fun', it was explained to me.

This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking north on a silent Park Avenue hoping to get into trouble. Fourteen thousand yellow taxis have turned Manhattan into a Bengali hellhole, blasting their horns non-stop, picking up or disgorging passengers in the middle of traffic-clogged streets, speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians as Big Bagel law requires. But on the Upper East Side, on a balmy evening, the yellow devils are causing havoc downtown, so I almost find myself singing in the rain as I head north far from the madding crowd.(Puns unintended.) Nicola’s is an Italian restaurant that used to be very much in fashion back in the Seventies and Eighties.

Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains were open, lights on. Music must have been playing, though I couldn’t hear it through the glass, because she was singing as she danced the dog about, leaning back to balance his considerable weight. Her arms made a seat for him, as you might carry a child, his paws on her shoulders. The woman gazed down lovingly at the dog, who looked embarrassed but patient, as if this wasn’t his first dance and wouldn’t be his last. I watched them for a while, standing unseen in the street, half-wondering whether to take a photo — not for fun or for Facebook, but to show to all the crosspatch busybodies who support the ban on ‘devil dogs’.

Like you, I suspect, I have been terribly worried these last few weeks over the plight of 15-year-old Amira Abase. Amira fled the country on 17 February in order to take up an exciting and challenging position as an in-house whore for the vibrant and decapitating warriors of the Islamic State somewhere in Syria, probably Raqqa. She travelled with two like-minded school friends from the local caliphate of Bethnal Green and not much has been heard of her since. We wring our hands in anguish at the fate which might have befallen this girl. It is of course commendable that she, along with so many other fervent young British Muslim women, should wish to become a jihadi bride. What kind of life would she be forced to endure in the Islamophobic hell of the United Kingdom?

Imagine you lived in a country which last year had 3,000 allegations of police corruption. Worse, imagine that of these 3,000 allegations only half of them were properly investigated — because for police officers in this country, corruption was becoming routine. Imagine that the police increasingly used their powers to crack down not on criminals but on anyone who dared speak out against them. What sort of a country is this? Well, it’s Britain I’m afraid — where what was once the finest, most honest service in the world is in danger of becoming rotten. Some of this was revealed in a little-noticed report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, which went on to deliver some even more shocking news.