As good as it gets.

IN CASE you haven't read the papers, the news can be summed up with the phrase: 'Handcart, meet hell.'

Government ministers have sent people to be tortured, pregnant women have been held hostage by machete-wielding burglars, Robert Mugabe is still not dead, a comedian's been pilloried for expressing an opinion about a football game, North Korea is going to set off a nuclear bomb and the BBC has spent £22million on a weekly advert for Universal music.

We're paying the Chinese to plant trees, hairdressers have been banned from knowing what time it is, the Sex Pistols won't be playing at the Olympics opening ceremony, a Tory tycoon thinks there's nothing wrong with making 300 phone calls telling his wife she's a "f***ing whore", someone's been set on fire and left in a wheelie bin and the terror of the Leveson inquiry means the only kiss-and-tell in the papers for months is a grubby yarn about an elderly bus driver and the prettiest passenger he could find on the no6 to Corby.

On top of that, we've all had to go back to work after four days off, the weather was crap, and we've got a hosepipe ban because the foreign firms who own our water won't let us use it on the roses because they're too busy wasting it themselves.

And let's not forget the writhing abortion of our legal system, an institution so corrupt and inept that people flock from all over the planet to use it.

And... oh, hang on. That's a good thing, isn't it? If we have divorce tourists, and libel tourists, and terror suspects using every last avenue of appeal to avoid being sent somewhere else, that presumably makes our form of justice the Seychelles of the legal world, a happy place where all can bask and frolic in the unending sunshine of freedom, doesn't it?

Well, yes and no. The doings of our courts and judges are far from perfect and having been at the mercy of our divorce laws myself I can tell you I'd rather poke my own eyes out with poisoned cocktail sticks than go through it again.

But compared to many other places in the world divorce is a lot fairer and nicer here. It's equal in terms of division of assets, in not apportioning blame (an oversight in some cases, particularly mine) and despite frequent custody and maintenance issues is a lot fairer to parents than you might get if you divorced in, say, Kazakhstan.

Then we have our terrorists. Today the man commonly known as Hate-Filled Hook-Handed Cleric Abu Hamza was among five such men who have lost an appeal against extradition to the US.

Hamza is a criminal, and a bad man to boot. He used to work as a bouncer at a peep show, his hook proves he's not great at dealing with explosives (never a good sign in a terrorist) and he took his son away from his mother for 12 years. Three of his sons have also been convicted of crimes involving stolen cars and another two for terror offences.

After 9/11 he started sounding off about jihad despite being a pretty bad example of a faithful Muslim, and formed a radical group campaigning for their idea of heaven on earth. We didn't arrest him, because as unpleasant as his words were he had a right to say them. Some people agreed with him, but many more thought he was an idiot, which is one of the principal blessings of free speech.

Seven years ago he was banged up because the Americans wanted him for encouraging one of their own terrorists, and an extradition process began. Unlike our cousins across the pond we don't like the death penalty, and our rules say we can't deport someone if they might get killed later. The Yanks had to agree whatever sentence he might get would not include death, but Hamza still didn't fancy leaving one of our high security prisons - with prisoner rights and flatscreen tellies and Coronation Street - for one of theirs, with orange jumpsuits and lots of angry men.

Unless he lodges a final appeal, Hamza will be on a plane within three months and no-one's going to miss him. It's very easy when considering a one-eyed, hook-handed hate merchant to just get rid, to let the Yanks do as they please, to feel the world would be a better place if some public-spirited prison officer would just garotte him one day or at the very least take the plug off his telly.

But what's easy isn't always what's best. A dead Hamza would simply spawn a million more medieval throwbacks for us to deal with. If you doubt me, just look at Afghanistan - a war which was welcomed as a liberation from an oppressive regime has since radicalised untold armies of people, promoted the opium trade and has long lost any international goodwill in the mire of a military disaster.

We spent £500million on bullets and drones and getting soldiers blown up, when we could have spent half that on schools and done a damn sight better job of keeping the Taliban out of power.

Al Qaeda is not a thing or a person. It's not an organisation or something with a list of names who you can track down to kill or deport. It's an idea, and if you want to beat it the only way is to have a better one.

Any student of history will tell you the only idea which has consistently won any arguments is the one with greater freedoms. The side which lets people do more of what they want, and less of what they don't, is the side which always wins in the end. It won in the civil wars in America and England, it won in the French and Russian revolutions, it won in World Wars I and II and it kicked butt in apartheid, the Reformation, the Suffragette movement and the Roman flipping Empire, too.

I think it's rather marvellous that Hamza has been able to delay the inevitable for seven years. If he'd won I wouldn't much mind either, because he'd end up in prison one way or the other. I'd rather pay for his XBox than I would a single minute of a pointless war, and it's far better that every British citizen - for he is one of us - has the same equal recourse to the courts. If we removed those rights for some people, then what is to stop someone removing them for you?

It's a hard and difficult thing to treat an awful person well, and to know it is much better than they would treat you. But it is the only way to show that you are nicer than they are, and definitely the only way to win.

Rules are a lot like brains, really - easy to bend, and bad to break. There are lots of imperfections in the world which give us journalists plenty to write about but as long as justice is at least theoretically available to everyone then the handcart is just circling hell in a holding pattern.

And you won't get better than that.

Just be glad he never caught the bus to Corby.

  

Hacked off.

WHEN a man in a car factory has a bad day at work, the car may get put together wrong and end up killing or injuring someone.

The same is true of doctors and nurses, engineers, architects and a host of other trades; those who are teachers and lawyers, shelf-stackers, till assistants, cleaners, carpet fitters and so on are less likely to maim with a mistake but still make them nevertheless, with unseen and sometimes serious consequences.

When a journalist has a bad day at work, there's usually a massive rollocking from The Editor, a series of difficult questions from The Lawyer and The Reader gets upset.

They are upset; it may be very, awfully, badly, terribly upset, but it is just upset. No-one's ever died or been injured from the occasional mistakes I've made in print. I had someone phone up threatening suicide once when I was on a local paper and aged only 18, which was pretty hairy at the time, but I got her friend and the police round to her house as quick as I could and it turned out she was distressed we hadn't reported her gripe against the local council's wobbly pavement. It wasn't that wobbly, you see.

Despite our low murder rate it seems journalists are considered a more destructive, unpleasant and socially detrimental force at the moment than any other profession. The Leveson inquiry - which I have forsworn to pass comment on until after it reaches its conclusions - is the first time I can recall that an inquiry into a public scandal has been held before the court case. It is yet to examine the other players in the phone-hacking debacle: the police and Prime Minister Dishface, to name but two.

Yesterday staff of a political lobbying firm run by a pal of Maggie Thatcher was exposed on camera saying pretty much anything to a prospective client in order to get their business, including promises of direct access to the PM, which has been met with a total lack of surprise among most of us because it's what most industries would do to gain a competitive advantage. Last year a similar sting was carried out on tabloid journalists, who in the same way agreed to meet someone who said they had a story, tried to persuade them not to take it elsewhere, said they'd talk to the boss and be in touch. The film-makers didn't wait to hear the answer, perhaps because had they done so the hacks would have either turned them over or told them the story was impossible to use for legal reasons. But the docu on the journos is the one being heard about by that inquiry today, without any of the hacks involved being invited to explain why it's only half the story.

Meanwhile the four swordsmen trying to bring about a newspocalypse - Zac Goldsmith, Steve Coogan, Max Mosley and Hugh Grant - have paraded their personal disdain for the trade that has repeatedly embarrassed them in front of a Parliamentary committee on privacy and injunctions.

What's under the table?

They have every right to an opinion and to be heard; but perhaps with a large dose of salt.

While I have immense sympathy for people thrown unwillingly onto the news agenda by life's misfortune or by being the recipient of any of these men's sexual attentions, I am not prepared to set my moral compass according to the whims of these boorish examples of humanity who have, variously: cheated on the mother of his three children with his sister-in-law while preparing to run for office, cheated on his wife with two lap-dancers while funding the international drugs trade and seeking tabloid publicity for his projects, engaged in appalling and violent rape scenarios far worse than 'ze spanking' we all joke about, and according to rumour indulged in behaviour which means that should we be introduced I will never, and I mean NEVER, shake his hand.

And no, I can't tell you. I don't know it's true, it's not in the public interest, and it would flout that man's right to a private life unless he or someone close to him decides to make it public.

And that's rather my point - there are lots of laws which say what I can and can't do, and I stick to them. Sometimes I screw up and when that happens I try to fix it as quickly as possible, and sometimes the toerags I annoy try to use those rules to score a point at my expense. There are rules for car mechanics too, for architects and policemen and nurses and carers. Sometimes bad people couldn't care less for the rules, and sometimes they have a bad day at the office. On the rare occasions members of a particular profession cause a public outrage - organ harvesting at hospitals, for example - we allow the legal system to run its course, hold an inquiry, punish those responsible and tighten the rules to make sure it can't happen again. But when have we ever decided to legislate a trade out of existence?

There are no judicial public inquiries investigating the Coalition's failure to fix the economy, while much of the rest of Europe is improving; why Milly Dowler's killer wasn't caught before he killed again; the ties between Government ministers and lobby firms; last summer's riots; the fact the trumpeted "lasting economic legacy" of next year's Olympics is going to be an even bigger debt than we already have; or the number of elderly and children struggling below the poverty line. And we still don't have a clue where Madeleine McCann is.

I am fine with the fact it's journalism's turn to be under scrutiny; I am fine with it being the fault of relatively few people, and that I've spent my entire career being treated as something less than human in return for seeing humanity at its best and worst. I am absolutely not fine with being likened to a guard at Auschwitz, which is what Zac Goldsmith said yesterday in a gross overegging of the pudding before he realised he was an idiot and backtracked.

But let's make one thing clear: a privacy law would not have saved Maddie's family from press attention, favourable or otherwise, especially when two police forces and their own spokesman were briefing newspapers. It would not have protected murdered Jo Yeates' landlord Chris Jefferies from police who arrested and held him for three days without good reason or journalists who temporarily forgot their law training, and nor would it have stopped Milly's voicemail being listened to by a private detective acting criminally while she was the missing subject of a nationwide search.

The rules as they stand protect everyone if obeyed and exercised correctly; a privacy law, were one introduced, would be used only by those with something to hide. This week I have already seen the Press Complaints Commission invoked to threaten one journalist over a perfectly anodyne story and another for proving a public servant wasn't doing their job properly. As a result I'm all for our rules being tightened, because if the idiots that abuse the system are stopped then the people with genuine complaints are going to get a fairer hearing.

No journalist worth the name wants to upset The Reader. But it is my job to upset everyone else and I am going to carry on doing that whether the likes of Hugh Grant approves of it or not.

Keep your hands where we can see them.