Molly Guinness

A year into his sentence on 12 counts of indecent assault, it doesn’t look like Rolf Harris has developed much of a sense of remorse. After seeing Mr Harris’s latest foray into song writing, his victims’ lawyer has said he mustn’t be given parole, and she has a point. Theodore Dalrymple (also known as Anthony Daniels), then a prison doctor, described in 1994 the baffling ability of violent criminals to avoid that uncomfortable emotion. A murderer came back from court having been sentenced to life imprisonment. A period of depression is, of course, to be expected after such a sentence, but this man was angry, not depressed. He was red with rage. ‘That wasn't justice,’ he said. ‘It was a kangaroo court…They didn't listen to me.

It’s tough being a vigilante, as Michael Widen in St Mary Bourne village has discovered to his cost. Mr Widen has been monitoring drivers with his own speed camera, and then reporting them to police. People in the local pub have started calling him a speed Nazi and there are mutterings in the village that he should have taken up bridge like other pensioners, rather than become a grass roots traffic officer. The Spectator has quite often taken the side of people who take the law into their own hands, especially in the early ‘90s, when the police didn’t seem to be able to do much about crime. Paul Johnson argued in 1992 that the public had had enough.

It’s good to see that an actual anthropologist is studying the behaviour of some of America’s weirdest women. Wednesday Martin’s book The Primates of Park Avenue describes the exhausting lives of Manhattan’s most full-on wives: sci-fi beauty regimes, frenetic fund-raising, intensive mothering and military household management. In 1832 when a farmer in Lancaster offered up his young wife for sale, he advertised a similarly energetic range of skills.

The Conservatives always do a lot worse than Labour in polls that ask about how proud voters feel of their party. They’re hoping that ‘shy Tories’ might still win them the election, but it’s pretty pathetic that more than 20 years since the phenomenon was first identified, Conservatives still haven’t found a way to remove the stigma and convince the electorate that right-wing politics is about making people’s lives better. Social justice, compassion and coolness are now strictly the domain of the Left in the public consciousness, which makes it all the more baffling that the Tories decided to leave principle and passion out of this election campaign to fight on a dry message of past economic competence.

One of the trendy things to worry about these days is political disengagement among young people. A think tank called the Institute for Public Policy Research is so worried it’s suggested people be forced to vote in the first election after their 18th birthday. They say political apathy among the young is undermining democracy, but their solution is rather perverse. People who are so bored by thinking about the future of the country that they can’t be bothered to vote are the last people we should be consulting on the next government; frankly it’s a relief that so many of the least competent voters keep themselves away from the polling stations.

A lot of people seem to have confused the fact that Jeremy Clarkson is right wing and amusing (which they believe is at odds with the culture of the BBC) with the fact that he’s shown himself to be a brute (which is why he’s been sacked). The investigation into his attack on Oisin Tymon is pretty unequivocal. It was unprovoked and lasted more than 30 seconds until someone else intervened, and there was a lot of nasty verbal abuse thrown in for good measure. Tymon went to hospital afterwards to get his injuries checked out. Rather magnificently, he didn’t offer any resistance to Clarkson’s assault. The Duke of Cambridge in 1874 showed similar restraint when a disgruntled soldier attacked him in Pall Mall.

For Mothering Sunday, some advice to mothers from a 1912 edition of The Spectator. Be with him yourself as much as you can… I have no fear of your being a fussy mother, worrying him with continual attentions, but I have just the slightest fear lest you should entertain that silly idea that seeing much of a mother makes a boy unmanly. Kipling says that in nine out of ten cases a man calls on his mother's name at the hour of death. I cannot answer that this is so, but if it be it is of glorious significance for motherhood. After years and years of the world's buffeting it is the one who first knew him, who first clasped him in her arms, who counts.

The number of people sleeping on the streets has risen by 55 per cent in the last five years. New statistics show that London had 742 rough sleepers on the streets on an average night last autumn, which is about 200 more than the same period in 2013. Governments have tried various tactics to get people off the streets over the years, but the solutions often sound as bad as the problem. An 1893 article attempted to classify the tramps as a first step to getting rid of aggressive beggars, ‘sodden scoundrels too cowardly to commit real crimes, but willing enough to frighten women into paying them blackmail.

Most people look back fondly at their sex education classes, remembering the stammering, red faced teachers, the very silly jokes and the endless, irrepressible giggles. The real tragedy about this week’s proposals to teach five-year-olds about sex is that children that small may not see the funny side of it. Generations of policy makers, teachers and journalists have spent years agonising over the question, while generations of schoolchildren have spent the happy hours of the PSHE classes passing notes, thinking up absurd innuendoes and flirting outrageously, eyes shining with laughter. But perhaps the privilege of having whole lessons given over to such cheerful pastimes was only ever to be a flash in the pan.

At a recent day’s hunting in Wiltshire, a man in a balaclava trying to pull a rider off his horse and said, 'Some of you will be going home in body bags today'. Later, after the huntsman had put his horse and hounds in the lorry, masked men armed with iron bars set upon him and knocked him out, kicking him repeatedly in the head as hard as they could even after he was unconscious. It’s 10 years since the hunting ban came into force but the sadistic sport of the hunt saboteurs is as popular, and as vicious, as ever.