Andrew Gilligan

No place for him in Scotland’s new McCop megaforce Here is an intro to get all Scottish Nationalists fuming about London media bias: Alex Salmond is abolishing John Rebus. Well, all right — this recalcitrant Scots detective never actually existed in the first place. And even in fiction, he’s been drawing his generous public-sector pension for some time now. But if Scotland’s First Minister reads crime novels, he will know that many of the successful ones depend as much on place as on character and plot — Conan ­Doyle’s clattering Victorian London, Morse’s Oxford, and a Rebus Edinburgh that keeps tourist board officials awake at night. In Mr Salmond’s new model Scotland, Rebus would never have been born.

Tripoli Coming pretty much straight from the London riots to the Libyan revolution has made me more contemptuous than ever of Britain’s self-pitying, self-indulgent, social-security-claiming insurrectionaries. For all the fear and death, Tripoli’s uprising has been far more disciplined. Cool young rebels, in their bandanas and Free Libya T-shirts, guard the streets. Barely a shop has been looted, and trainers are still changing hands in the normal way. Only one group of people, in fact, is brazenly disregarding private property and disrespecting the law: western journalists.

The Olympics are a gigantic folly – and you still have time to be part of it Would you like to compete for Britain at the 2012 Olympics? No, seriously, compete in the real Olympics, march in the athletes’ parade, wear our national colours? Vacancies are still available. Complete beginners most welcome — no experience necessary. You don’t even have to be, well, British. I promise I am not making this up. Among the many inventive ways which London 2012 has devised to waste public money, Team GB Handball is my personal favourite. Three million pounds is being spent to create, from scratch, a British Olympic squad in a sport which virtually nobody in Britain has ever played.

Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Expecting the usual concerned talk of deprivation, poor parenting, and high-rise flats, the interviewer was disconcerted to find both his guests averring that the only answer to youth criminals was to ‘cut off their goolies’. (It was perhaps funnier at the time — Britain then knew nothing of talk radio, or David Blunkett.

MoD documents leaked to Andrew Gilligan show that the ‘special relationship’ in Iraq was more like a bad marriage: riven with misunderstanding, irritation and hurt feelings It may have made it into such pillars of the zeitgeist as The Simpsons, the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Geri Halliwell’s single ‘Bag It Up’. But it is still, perhaps, a little surprising that that seminal work of cod psychology, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, should have infiltrated a secret Ministry of Defence report into the war on Iraq. Let me tell you, the average MoD leaked document is hard going: thickets of bureaucratic bindweed wrapped tightly around the odd meaningful sentence. Not this time.

Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in? At the end of every government’s life there come events, big and small, which show quite clearly that what was once a convincing credo — convincing enough to win an election, anyway — has completely lost its bearings. George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism died in the floodwaters of New Orleans. For two vital elements of New Labour — fiscal extravagance and gesture politics — some of the last rites are being performed in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Green Park tube station.