Police

I was listening to the radio the other morning to hear people complaining about the huge cuts in the number of traffic police patrolling English roads. This meant that drivers would disobey motoring laws with impunity, they said. They would babble away on their mobile phones, unfasten their seat belts, and generally break the rules of the road in the knowledge that they were most unlikely to get caught. The only things left for them to fear would be speed cameras. As a result, road deaths, of which there were already more than 1,700 in Britain last year, would go shooting up. A grim outlook indeed. But wait, there is hope on the horizon. This is the exciting prospect of the driverless car.

There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that. It’s true that I would never shop a friend for drink-driving — but frankly I doubt I’d shop a friend for murder. This column isn’t about what we should do if we know a friend drink-drives — responses will be various and variously arguable — but about shock at my own serious misreading of my countrymen. I was tooling along in our Mini on the first Saturday of the year, with BBC Radio 2 playing. It was Graham Norton’s fizzy and engaging morning show, where a regular feature is his ‘Grill Graham’ slot in which listeners contact him with personal, social or moral dilemmas.

I had thought that the saying ‘Accidents will happen in the best regulated families’ was a vulgar reference to children born unexpectedly. The Oxford English Dictionary records accident being used in just that way in the middle of the 19th century. On its own, ‘accidents will happen’ dates from at least as far back as 1705, and the Lady’s Magazine for 1791 gave this humorous version: ‘Mistakes will happen in the best regulated families; I have taken my opera fan to church.’ Ever since, it has been in common use, with Mr Micawber (1850) taking it up as ‘Accidents will occur in the best regulated families.’ You’d think it might have originated in a play or poem, but no such origin has been traced.

Spectator Money is out, with ideas on how to make it, spend it and even how to be seen spending it. Freddy Gray looks at the 'social economy' - think tax loopholes for financiers of politically favoured endeavours; while Camilla Swift peruses credit cards such as Kanye West's 'African American Express' and the Dubai First Royale, 'studded with diamonds. Bring it on, Sheikh Sugardaddy.' Spare a thought, though, for the inconspicuous consumers - or at least, the wannabes.

Settling down to watch 24 Hours in Police Custody, the new Channel 4 programme brought to us by the team behind the excellent 24 Hours in A&E, I was expecting some proper gripping telly. What I did not envisage was to be further educated about the level of plonkery that some men are capable of. And I don’t just mean the criminals. The custody sergeant this week was checking in a 60-year old man who was under arrest for an alleged assault and kidnap. The case was called ‘honour-based violence’, which usually refer to crimes against women and girls perpetrated by religious maniacs.

The release of Harry Roberts, the man responsible for shooting dead three policemen in 1966, has sparked a vigorous debate about whether he should have stayed in prison until he died. The idea that ‘life should mean life’ for anyone who kills a policeman is a police-pleasing policy that the Home Secretary promised she would implement in a speech to the Police Federation last year. But a more interesting aspect  of the Roberts story is what it shows about the changing nature of Britain’s career criminals, and the values — if that is the right word for them — that they share. Until quite recently, criminals in this country did not routinely carry guns. The relative rarity with which criminals went armed made it possible to have an unarmed police force.

Sometimes I read things that really get on my wick, and last week was one of those times. A new, 'definitive' 20-year study has 'demolished the argument that the drug [cannabis] is safe', according to the Daily Mail. Has it, though? There are various things wrong with that claim. One, no study is 'definitive'; two, the research was not a '20-year study', but a review of other studies carried out over the last 20 years. There are lots other things wrong with the coverage, too, including the startlingly ridiculous claim that cannabis is 'as addictive as heroin'. Even according to the research itself, less than one-tenth of people who try cannabis become addicted to it, compared to nearly a quarter for heroin.

At its peak, the Stasi employed one agent for every 165 East Germans. Spying was a labour-intensive business then — you needed to monitor telephone calls, steam open mail, plant a bug, follow suspects on shopping trips and then write reports for the KGB. The advantage was that, human nature being what it is, the Stasi would probably succeed in gathering dirt on all but the most saintly. The drawback: trying to gather files on so many millions could almost bankrupt a government. How much easier it is nowadays. By interrogating someone’s mobile phone, the police can gather more information than the Stasi could dream of compiling. The modern smartphone contains all the secrets of a life: bank balances, emails to lawyers, texts to lovers.

At least every other time a ticket inspector boards a train or bus I'm on, I pretend I can’t find my ticket or Oyster card. I then miraculously find it at the very last second before my stop. Why? Pure revenge. I hate this nasty group of sadistic jobsworths and, having been stung by them myself, take great pleasure in distracting them for long enough to allow those who are fare dodging to get away without being spotted. The smugness of ticket inspectors becomes unbearable in the face of the chronically bad service on London transport. My blood boils when I spot a bank of uniformed inspectors, flanked by police officers, when disembarking a train so overcrowded that your kidneys have been pushed up to your throat and your DNA merged with at least half the carriage.

Day two of the Rotherham scandal—or rather the fallout from the latest report on it—and there’s a marked, obvious change in the coverage of it from the last time the subject surfaced. It may be the sheer scale of the thing —1,400 girls, and counting—and the horror of the cruelties perpetrated on the victims, but I don’t think that anyone is now trying to evade the reality of the thing: that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani Muslim background and the victims white.

Imagine you bought a ticket for the opera and then a copper told you how you may travel to the opera house. You absolutely may not drive there, he says, nor take public transport, nor walk. You must go on a licensed coach, crammed in with all the other opera-lovers, under the watchful eye of the boys in blue. Yes, that’s right, the police will escort you to the opera, monitor you through the performance, and then escort you home. You got a problem with that? I imagine you would. You might feel that your right to get from A to B however you please had been curtailed. Now you know how football fans feel.

Perhaps you’re aware that it’s Ramadan right now, the month in which all good Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex during daylight. What you might not know is that Ramadan also marks the start of an annual turf war in London; a battle between the tribal Sloanes and the young Gulf Arabs to dominate Chelsea. The skirmish actually begins before Ramadan. The Gulf States heat up to an intolerable degree and their oil-rich young migrate over here in droves to escape both religious censure and the sun. They descend first of all on the department stores in what’s become known as the Harrods Hajj, to flash their cash around. One friend of mine working in Selfridges was asked by a young Saudi what she would like as a present.