Double-oh George.

THERE are two ways of looking at the world - how you would like it to be, and how it really is.

As a hack I fall into the latter camp, but our beloved Chancellor of the Exchequer Gideon seems to veer to the fairytale side of things.

On the one hand there's his economic policies, which are all unicorns and dancing fairies and nice comfy toadstools for the pixies to sit on when they've finished their 36-hour shift solving all the problems of the Wicked Old Previous Administration.

And on the other there's his self-image.

Gideon is mean. Gideon is moody. Gideon, he probably tells himself in the mirror every morning, is good to go.

Gideon believes he is actually a secret agent using the alias George to fight the evil doings of SMERSH.

And after he defeats debt and unleashes a field of brightly-coloured ponies with names like Jobs, Growth and Small Business Loans he will go home to ravish his wife with a wink and a witty bon mot.

Which is a lovely fantasy for him to have, although it leaves me feeling a little unwell.

In reality his economics make him look like the fifth wheel in an international Monopoly game where he seriously believes that a dosshouse on the Old Kent Road is a worthwhile investment while he gets fiscally trounced by every other player, each of whom thinks he's an idiot.

In reality he is called Gideon, banks at Hoare & Co where you need £500,000 in readies and an invite to open a current account, is the future 18th baronet of Ballylemon and Ballintaylor, managed a 2:1 in modern history and has about as much idea of how to balance a budget as I do about tying a dickie bow.

Although he doesn't seem very good at that either.

Gideon thinks he's the man. But he doesn't realise the man in question is a puffed-up plump pillock just like Nicholas Soames, and should be banished to bark from the backbenches where he won't cause anyone much trouble and he can give us the occasional laugh, instead of being in charge from which position he's giving us bugger all to smile about.

Still, it's good to know that someone's making the most of the taxpayer-funded canapes.

 It'll shift a lot quicker if you run, mate.

How to raise a celebrity child.

CHILDREN cannot be protected from everything. They will eat dirt, experiment with electricity, learn to swear and smoke and have their hearts broken.

The best any sane parent can do is teach them not to do any of those things too often, and keep their fingers crossed. Some parents take the opposite view and try to keep their children from everything that might harm them, trying to kill each germ, prevent every fall. It's understandable but not very clever; it merely delays children learning how to deal with the problems life will always hurl their way.

So I can understand the reaction of Hugh Grant to protect his new baby daughter from the attentions which his fame and wealth were always going to bring. The child's mother Tinglan Hong - presumably with Grant's money and support - has sought and won an injunction banning photographers coming within 100 yards of her home.

It also bans snappers from taking pictures when mother and baby are in private, something they're already not allowed to do and which newspapers cannot print under the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct; and from taking pictures of her in the street, which is a little heavy-handed since the concept of public places is something many of our laws are based on.

Since it's been known Ms Hong had Grant's baby, the home he bought for her in Chelsea has been attended by different bits of the media most days and some nights. Some have been TV crews, in the early days, and newspaper photographers; as time has passed they have mainly given up and now it is the paparazzi agencies, who remain because a picture of Bamboo (as the baby is known) would earn big money as the public would buy more papers, or click onto more websites, to see it.

More than anything what they want is a picture of Grant with his daughter, which is tricky seeing as since she was born he has reportedly spent more time playing golf than bouncing her on his knee.

On one of his visits he beamed broadly for photographs then barked his reason for the trip was "to protect my baby" - presumably from the attentions of photographers, which is ironic considering it was his slapdash attitude towards protection in the first place which is at the root of the story, along with the public reputation as a womaniser in which he has at times gloried.

Tinglan and Bamboo are not famous in their own right, and if they do not want to be pictured publicly that's fair enough. The injunction however seems a little over-engineered, especially considering it grants these two people a right to privacy over and above that granted to anyone else in the country. There are many simpler, cheaper, friendlier ways to ensure your photograph is not taken when you do not want it to be, but those are ways this angry dad does not want to take.

That's because of Grant's long, bitter, unhappy relationship with the Press. The bits that like him, he likes; those that criticise, he does not. The parts which take his picture in public places he reserves a special loathing for and he seems to treat photographers as the earthly outriders of Satan himself, out to snatch a piece of his soul along with their shots. In general, snappers are a friendly bunch whose undying loyalty can be bought with a cup of hot tea on a cold day.

Grant has taken a very different stance to publicity around his daughter to virtually every other superfamous person. David and Victoria Beckham politely ask photographers not to picture their children on the way to school, yet expect it at a public event. They posted pictures of their new baby Harper Seven on Twitter, as Coleen and Wayne Rooney do frequently with their toddler Kai. Elton John and David Furnish, Tom and Katie Cruise, J-Lo - there is a long list of megastar parents who have a reasonably balanced view of what is public and what is private, what is good for their children or bad. Even Michael Jackson, who used to veil his children in public or dangle them from hotel balconies, seems to have raised three well-adjusted youngsters.

Perhaps it has the tang of a deal with the devil but it is far more pragmatic to accept there will be interest, and either release an official photograph in return for donation to charity, or allow the photographers to get their shot and go away. Either way the public appetite to see it is sated and those children who are the offspring of a very famous person learn, from an early age, how to negotiate one of the more difficult aspects of something they will almost certainly never escape.

To deny that shot only increases the hunger for it, in the Press as much as in the public mind. And it merely delays and makes more difficult the day that Bamboo finds out she's the child of someone very famous indeed, and possibly becomes as bitter and unbalanced about that fact as her father is.

It seems that Hugh Grant is trying to be a good dad by paying for lawyers to eradicate everything he sees as a threat; when those threats would cause far less trouble if they were handled reasonably in the first place.

But then reason is never going to be an easy concept for a man who hurls Chinese takeaways and tubs of baked beans at photographers while screaming "I hope your kids die of cancer!" and then kicks them up the bum.

"Watch Daddy as he kicks the man!"

Press on.

YESTERDAY I went to church.

(I am as shocked as you, but it's all right because afterwards we all went to the pub and got drunk).

I'm not religious and I don't believe in God, but there is one place of worship I will gladly enter and that is St Bride's off Fleet Street, the journalists' church. It is a beautiful building, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and its tiered spire is the inspiration for traditional wedding cakes.

Fleet Street is where the profession of journalism began 500-odd years ago, and from where it has spread around the world. It remains the spiritual home of every hack on the planet, and not just because of the pubs.

Last night there was a memorial service held to mark the sacrifice and remember the names of all those reporters and photographers who have died in the course of their duties in the past year.

The church was packed with journalists from tabloids, broadsheets, television and radio; foot soldiers, executives, foreign desks, and editors. Some had been wounded in the course of their work and others had lost comrades. The News International benches were a little empty, but then quite a lot of them have bail conditions to comply with.

The topic of journalists dying in harness does not always cause much concern, because as ITV news presenter Mark Austin told the church few people have sympathy for those of us who run towards the kind of things everyone else is busy running away from.

You might think we normally die in the crossfire; but as Mark also pointed out of those journalists killed in the past decade 70 per cent were murdered in cold blood. And of their killers, 80 per cent have not been brought to justice.

Being a journalist is a great privilege, and you get to do and see wonderful things. But you are also treated as less than human. If I am assaulted during the course of my job the police are unlikely to prosecute, and in many parts of the world if a reporter is shot by someone angered by what they have written it is regarded as their own silly fault. Each one, however, is still a crime.

Photographers in the Vietnam War showed the American public the truth of the conflict, and helped turn the tide of public opinion. Journalists embedded with the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have done the same, despite the constraints of their position. Hacks operating as best they can under oppressive regimes in order to spread the truth put their lives at risk every day, and they are rarely thanked.

Britain is 19th in the Press Freedom Index, below Estonia and Lithuania but thankfully above the likes of North Korea. Anti-terror legislation, stalker laws and the new Bribery Act make it much harder to do our jobs these days, especially as none of these statutes was designed with us in mind and can be used by the idiotic or the guilty to stop the unwanted attention of journalists. After the phone-hacking scandal the bar for prosecuting journalists - whether it's hacking, corruption or anything else - seems to have dropped even lower along with our reputation.

We are not all changing the world, and we do not fight the good fight as often as we struggle to come up with a funny picture caption. But we do bear witness to all the things you want us to and some of those you don't, and we bear the scars of that too.

Tomorrow everyone is going to stop and remember the sacrifice of service people in the name of freedom. Journalists don't get included in that, so please have a few seconds' silence and thought today for those in my trade all over the world who have given the same in the past 12 months.

Fleet Street has been spread far and wide, but we are still here. You can beat us, shoot us, pummel us, sue us, and you can legislate against us, but we will always be here.

Gelson Domingos da Silva, Bandeirantes TV

     November 6, 2011, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Wael Mikhael, Al-Tareeq

     October 9, 2011, in Cairo, Egypt

Faisal Qureshi, London Post

     October 7, 2011, in Lahore, Pakistan

Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, Freelance

     September 24, 2011, in an area near Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

Phamon Phonphanit, Sue Samut Atyakam

     September 24, 2011, in Yala, Thailand

Hassan al-Wadhaf, Arabic Media Agency

     September 24, 2011, in Sana'a, Yemen

Farhad Taqaddosi, Press TV

     September 20, 2011, in Kabul, Afghanistan

Javed Naseer Rind, Daily Tawar

     September, in Khuzdar, Pakistan

Hadi al-Mahdi, Radio Demozy

     September 8, 2011, in Baghdad, Iraq

Pedro Alfonso Flores Silva, Channel 6

     September 8, 2011, in Chimbote, Peru

Noramfaizul Mohd, Bernama TV

     September 2, 2011, in Mogadishu, Somalia

José Agustín Silvestre de los Santos, La Voz de la Verdad, Caña TV

     August 2, 2011, in La Romana, Dominican Republic

Ahmad Omaid Khpalwak, Pajhwok Afghan News, BBC

     July 28, 2011, in Tarin Kot, Afghanistan

Alwan al-Ghorabi, Afaq

     June 21, 2011, in Diwaniyya, Iraq

Shafiullah Khan, The News

     June 17, 2011, in Wah Cantonment, Pakistan

Edinaldo Filgueira, Jornal o Serrano

     June 15, 2011, in Serra do Mel, Brazil

Romeo Olea, DWEB

     June 13, 2011, in Iriga City, Philippines

Asfandyar Khan, Akhbar-e-Khyber

     June 11, 2011, in Peshawar, Pakistan

Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times Online

     May 29 or 30, 2011, in Mandi Bahauddin, Pakistan

Nasrullah Khan Afridi, Khyber News Agency, Pakistan Television, Mashreq

     May 10, 2011, in Peshawar, Pakistan

Chris Hondros, Getty Images

     April 20, 2011, in Misurata, Libya

Tim Hetherington, Freelance

     April 20, 2011, in Misurata, Libya

Karim Fakhrawi, Al-Wasat

     April 12, 2011, in Manama, Bahrain

Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Ashiri, Freelance

     April 9, 2011, in Al-Dair, Bahrain

Anton Hammerl, Freelance

     April 5, 2011, in an area near Brega, Libya

Sabah al-Bazi, Al-Arabiya

     March 29, 2011, in Tikrit, Iraq

Muammar Khadir Abdelwahad, Al-Ayn

     March 29, 2011, in Tikrit, Iraq

Luis Emanuel Ruiz Carrillo, La Prensa

     March 25, 2011, in Monterrey, Mexico

Mohammed al-Nabbous, Libya Al-Hurra TV

     March 19, 2011, in Benghazi, Libya

Jamal al-Sharaabi, Al-Masdar

     March 18, 2011, in Sana’a, Yemen

Ali Hassan al-Jaber, Al-Jazeera

     March 13, 2011, in an area near Benghazi, Libya

Noel López Olguín, Freelance

     March 2011, in Chinameca, Mexico

Mohamed al-Hamdani, Al-Itijah

     February 24, 2011, in Ramadi, Iraq

Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud, Al-Ta'awun

     February 4, 2011, in Cairo, Egypt

Le Hoang Hung, Nguoi Lao Dong

     January 30, 2011, in Tan An, Vietnam

Gerardo Ortega, DWAR

     January 24, 2011, in Puerto Princesa City, Philippines

Lucas Mebrouk Dolega, European Pressphoto Agency

     January 17, 2011, in Tunis, Tunisia

Wali Khan Babar, Geo TV

     January 13, 2011, in Karachi, Pakistan

Hacks will be hacks.

JOURNALISTS will ask you questions. We will take your picture, ring your office and your home, we will double-check what you say.

We will knock on your door, keep tabs on you, and stick our noses where they're not wanted.

Sometimes people take money in return for allowing my prying into their lives, and sometimes they don't. They almost always resent it however politely I go about it and regardless of whether answering my questions has helped to get them something they want, like cold hard cash, landing a role or being elected to public office.

Then there's the times I sit outside their house and trail them around. This is usually when someone comes up with a tip, and before we go crashing the front door in we try to find out if it's true. If person X is allegedly having an affair with person Y, you need to get a picture of them together either holding hands or kissing before you go banging on the door and upsetting their wife. If you do it properly they never know you're there, and if it's not true you melt away and they were never any the wiser.

It's called research, and without it newspapers both tabloid and broadsheet would be sued out of existence by guilty people who know you don't have the photographic proof to defend a story. It's not just affairs - corruption, politicians with 'friends' sitting in on private meetings, Royals hanging around with paedophiles and dodgy businessmen, have all been proven by journalists trailing around after people who'd rather they didn't.

And none of it is illegal. None of it is equivalent to deleting voicemails on the mobile phone of a missing schoolgirl. It is, in fact, doing a difficult job properly. Anyone reading this who's ever suspected someone of cheating will know how easy it is to believe the excuses and how difficult it is to be sure - imagine finding your way through that every day, and getting evidence which would stand up in court.

It's time-intensive though and in days of constant cutbacks some of this work gets farmed out to photographers working alone, or private investigators. Some PIs are a disgrace and others make us look bad, so determined are they to sit outside an empty house until the wee hours when a hack would bunk off for a kip or a pint. The fact that the News of the World employed one to tail celebrities is not illegal, not surprising, and not a problem - unless you're the PI in question, and angry you didn't get a big enough pay-off when the paper was closed.

Using him to tail lawyers who are suing the paper is a bit of an own goal, but seeing as the instruction to do so came from a lawyer working for the Queen's favourite firm Farrer & Co it wasn't a hack who had the last touch on that ball.

Newspapers don't use PIs that often - but lawyers use them all the time. Insurance companies, local authorities and many members of the public use PIs to prove their points, expose wrongdoing and frauds, and win court cases. The security services use these deniable private contractors too, Boris Johnson used them when he was on the Wellygraph years ago and more recently Justice Minister Jonathan Djanogly was employed them to investigate his own constituents after unfavourable stories about him were given to the Press.

Not always nice, not always justified, but not illegal either.

Of course that doesn't stop some of those people who have been followed around having a moan. Keith Vaz, who lost his job in government when his corruption was exposed by newspapers sticking their nose into his business affairs and private meetings; Chris Bryant, who was humiliated by publication of his Gaydar profile picture and being exposed for slipping his second home expenses repeatedly, are two prime examples of people attacking journalists for doing their job properly having been caught out not spending that much time on their own.

But the class-A holier-than-thou moaner has to be Zac Goldsmith, the Richmond MP who greeted the news that journalists research their stories before they publish with the same kind of bellowing belligerence as a 19th century country squire caught in the housemaid's skirts.

He said: "NOTW truly a rotten state within the state. Grotesque abuse of power. No org; media/bank/supermrket; shd ever be allowed to get too big."

This is the same Zac Goldsmith whose affair with his brother's sister-in-law was exposed by two newspapers who trailed him around for weeks; whose career is funded by inherited wealth from a man whose corporate raids damaged many companies, tried to bankrupt Private Eye and conducted vendettas against journalists who questioned him; who owes his position not to any discernible talent or craft but to his name.

So, Zac - an affair with an in-law is a rotten state within a state. Using your billions to bankrupt newspapers or run for Parliament is a grotesque abuse of power. And if the banks, supermarkets and newspapers aren't allowed to be too big for their boots then nor, I am afraid, should you.

I am sure your constituents would appreciate it if you stopped banging on about the stuff that bothers you and concentrated on what bothers them, which I will bet any money is not whether someone in your position is subject to entirely-justified scrutiny. No doubt you will carry on whining, but I am going to continue doing my job as well as I can whether you approve of it or not; in fact the less you approve the happier I shall be.

And if the Goldsmith clan hasn't employed a private detective at any point in the past ten years I'm a banana.

Now please stop bollocking on.

A bad machine blames the programmer.

WHEN men do bad things, they usually do it to other people.

Carlos the Jackal - once the world's most wanted terrorist, the Osama bin Laden of his day - thought nothing of tossing hand grenades into packed bars, or firing rockets at a nuclear power station. He thought he was right.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn thinks nothing of seducing or attacking women, and doesn't seem to see the difference between the two methods. He also thinks he is right.

Dishface and Gideon think they were born to run the country, and that if their policies have negative effects on its people then it is the people's fault. The single mum should have got married, the pensioner should work harder, the disabled should find a cheaper wheelchair. Dishface and Gideon not only think they're right, they have been told it since they were babies.

And of course, Simon Cowell inflicts the X Factor on much of the English-speaking world.

Women, on the other hand, generally do bad things to themselves. And they always think they are wrong.

So someone trying to win a singing contest will dress like a hooker in order to persuade people to listen to her voice. Someone whose career depends on her looks will abandon them as they mature and let her face and body be cut, scarred, peeled and injected to make others happy.

Dawn French spent years telling us and herself how great it was to be morbidly obese, and now says next-to-nothing about losing half her body weight because whatever she says she will seem to have been wrong at some point.

Cheryl Tweedy, meanwhile, hasn't eaten a proper meal in years - Nando's doesn't count, love - and now announces she is under doctor's orders to fatten up, while posing for photographs that are airbrushed to make her look thin because looking normal would be wrong.

The way men and women are presented to the world by television, advertising campaigns, newspapers and magazines does not lead people to think these celebrities should be pitied. Instead, men behave like oafs because oafs are what they see, and women blame and hurt themselves for not being someone else's idea of perfect.

It can lead, in extremis, to cases like that of Rebecca Jones and her daughter Maisy. Rebecca has anorexia, is 5ft 1in tall and weighs five stone. Her condition means she does not have enough trace elements in her diet, including potassium which is vital to make the heart beat, and could have a heart attack at any time.

She encourages Maisy to eat whatever she wants, as she knows her own attitude to food is unhealthy. Unfortunately Maisy, seven, is a stone and a half overweight for her age and wears clothes for children two years older. Neither of them is healthy, although Maisy could well grow out of it.

The fact that in general men do bad things to other people and women do bad things to themselves is not new, but perhaps things might improve if we treated them more alike - if men sometimes asked for help rather than punishment, and if women could stop punishing themselves.

Yes, I know, pigs might fly. But I have lost count of the famous people I could diagnose as victims of something, and the number of times I have explained to someone that truly emulating such people would make them miserable, angry and probably hungry.

We can but dream that one day we will rise above our wiring.

Humans seen from space, part deux.

"UGH, Mondays," said chief alien research scientist Grfelft as he leaned back in his chair and scratched at his nodule. "What's the point of Mondays?"

His junior colleague Bob did not look up from the viewing monitor that was trained on the blue and green planet thousands of miles below and said over his shoulder: "They're to make you appreciate Fridays more and not complain so much when you have to spend a weekend with your family."

"Huh," said Grfelft, who like Bob had a large family, as they and millions like them were born from eggs laid by the Big Wang in the methane pits of their home planet, many light years away. "My family all smell of farts, and so do yours."

Bob sighed and pushed the monitor away. "Are we in a grumpy mood, by any chance?"

Grfelft scowled. He was always in a bad mood - he had been running this human research project from a mechanically-unsound spacecraft for nearly five centuries, after all, and had witnessed the rise and fall of empires and the extinction of species, all of which had given him a healthy loathing for humans - but today he had something even more worrying on his mind.

Three of his tentacles stabbed at the keyboard in front of him and a small robot descended from the ceiling with a computer print-out in its metal claws, which it dropped into Bob's lap.

Bob picked it up and read it. His eye boggled, his eyebrow was raised, and then he put it down on the desk. "Ah," he said.

"Yes," said Grfelft. "The Big Wang has discovered Mondays."

Mondays on Earth are spent complaining, yawning, and looking at watches and clocks. It is a day of low productivity in almost every industry and nation, and is best explained by pointing out that for the staff of Earth's newspapers Mondays are spent rewriting what was in the papers the day before, because nothing else has happened since. Where in the winter humans suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder due to a lack of sunlight, there is a rarely-diagnosed Monday Affective Disorder due to a lack of anything interesting.

On Bob and Grfelft's home planet there are no Mondays, because it has three suns and each day lasts for six weeks. There is no S.A.D. because one of the suns is always shining, and there is no M.A.D. because there are no Mondays.

But the Big Wang took a close interest in the goings-on of Earth, even more than all the other planets in the universe he had sent his researchers too. There was something about humans that fascinated him, like a child with a particularly ugly scab.

The message which had so worried Grfelft and Bob read: "BIG WANG INSTITUTE 7-DAY WEEK TO PROMOTE INTERSPECIES UNDERSTANDING STOP ALL PLANET NOW WORK MONDAY TO FRIDAY AND TAKE TWO DAYS OFF TO GET DRUNK AND SEE FAMILY STOP ALL GREAT EXCEPT WHOLE PLANET NOW M.A.D. STOP FAMILIES ARGUING IN METHANE PITS STOP NO WORK BEING DONE TIL WEDNESDAY STOP EVERYONE SLACKING ON FRIDAY STOP BIG WANG ALWAYS RIGHT STOP BIG WANG NOT CHANGING SEVEN DAY WEEK STOP BIG WANG NEEDS CURE FOR M.A.D. IMMEDIATELY OR WILL SWITCH OFF YOUR LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS STOP PS HOW IS LIZ JONES STOP."

Bob and Grfelft looked at each other. "What the f*** are we going to do?" asked Grfelft, putting his head in his tentacles.

Bob cleared the desk and turned the viewing monitor back on. "Well, don't despair. There must be something we can tell him to cheer him up, that would fix the M.A.D. Right, America - oh, well turns out they likened Osama bin Laden to a Sesame Street character and lied about how and why he was killed. It wasn't a kill mission at all, so that's better, yes?"

He looked up hopefully. Grfelft shook his head.

Bob turned back to the monitor. "Something more positive, then. Um, well, the idiot running Greece has resigned and it means Europe might get to keep the Euro?"

Grfelft snorted. "How is that positive? Whole thing just leads to more Nick Clegg."

"Er, Berlusconi might resign?"

"They've been saying that for ages. Besides, he's crazy. Speaking of which, how is Liz Jones since you got her in for that rebuild?"

Bob shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Ah, yes. Well it seems she's been stealing sperm."

Grfelft shrugged. "So? She's only following orders."

Bob winced. "Yes, but she TOLD them she was doing it."

"WHAAAAAAAAAT? If she keeps malfunctioning like that they'll take a closer look and find her battery pack! Bloody hell, Bob, what did you do? Get her back up here, I'll fix her myself. Honestly."

Bob shamefacedly sent the Jonesdrone whistling from the aft tubes to collect the erratic remote device and after a few moments' silence cleared his throat. "If you want something cheery, we could always look at www.fleetstreetfox.com, she quite often does stuff on Mondays that..."

Grfelft rolled his eye. "Don't be ridiculous! The Big Wang wants a proper report! Give me the headlines, I'll pick something."

"Well, they've got to seven billion people, China's lecturing Europe on workers' rights, fireworks seem to have contributed to a massive motorway accident, war, famine, Kate and Wills are about to spend millions of other people's money on their house, Nancy's off Strictly, Downton's finished, X Factor's f***ed and I'm A Celebrity hasn't started yet," said Bob. "It's all looking a bit grim down there, if I'm honest."

"How about Gaga? She's normally good for a laugh."

"Oh, just another silly outfit. She's taking herself a bit seriously if you ask me."

Grfelft threw his pen down. "Look, this is just not good enough! Our home planet is in the grip of a dreadful human malaise and unless we can fix it the Big Wang will kill us! Actually kill us! I can't believe that on a planet of such infinite variety that doesn't have a single methane pit to deal with we can't find something to lighten the mood! Make it work or I'll tell the Big Wang Mondays are your fault!"

Bob yelped, and in desperation switched the viewing scope to the other hemisphere. "Oh, well, how about penguins in hand-knitted pullovers?"

"What?" Grfelft perked up.

"Yes, apparently there's been a massive oil spill in New Zealand and in order to save the afflicted penguins from being poisoned by cleaning their own feathers or dying from exposure people around the world are sending knitted penguin jumpers to help. They've sent so many they've run out of penguins to wear them."

"Are you shitting me?"

"No, look, there's pictures. There's even a knitting pattern."

"That's inspired. Send all that to the Big Wang, and chuck in the video of that latest David Attenborough documentary, that ought to sort everything out. Got to hand it to them, I hate humans - they're nasty, vicious, mean, cheating, lying killers - but they do the nicest things for animals. It's weird, when you think about it."

"But what about the dodos?" asked Bob.

"Whatever you do," said Grfelft. "Don't mention the dodos."

Poor foolish humans.

Things that have gone wrong with the world today:

1. Hugh Grant's idea of "supportive" fatherhood is a half-hour with the baby followed by a four-day golf tournament he wasn't even in after the first three rounds.

"Well, this is going to be a handicap."

2. Someone's decided to ask the Greeks if they feel like doing any work after lunch.

3. We have 72m mobile phone handsets in a nation of 60m people; if you knock out those who don't have one, like babies, the frail and the insane, around 22m of us are having affairs.

Still, on the other hand, this means:

1. Hugh Grant may launch the kind of shagging spree which will make the last days of Rome seem tame.

2. These drachma receipt books will come in handy again.

3. Two thirds of us are probably busy hacking the text messages, voicemail and emails of our other halves using the 'how to' explanations so kindly produced by snoresheet newspapers in the past year, and therefore two-thirds of juries in the upcoming phone-hacking trials will be guilty of the same offence they will be trying a handful of journalists for.

All of which makes great copy for tabloid hacks like me, and also goes to show that the only thing you can ever rely on humans for is to screw things up.

"Apparently Andy Coulson hacked my condoms, which is a bally outrage. My golf game's really suffered."

Jesus wept.

PROTEST can be a great thing. Suffragettes, Gandhi, Tahrir Square - without the right to protest our world would be a poorer, meaner and more unreasonable place.

But the #Occupy movement... well, they're doing it wrong. That bankers are motivated by money and need to be restrained from raping the planet in their quest for a buck is obvious, but I fail to see how sitting outside St Paul's cathedral until they make the Christians angry is going to achieve it. Maybe the bankers will be laughing so hard they'll be in a better mood on the trading floor?

The manifesto drawn up by the protesters living part-time outside the church in tents is so woolly and dim it makes a flock of sheep look like CERN physicists. It calls for the redistribution of global power, no less, an end to the Isle of Man, and 'total transparency' to everything everywhere in demands which themselves are about as clear as mud.

Moreover, in the past few weeks a lot of the people in those tents have been undercover journalists.

The reports - for papers of every political bent - are pretty much the same. Lots of students, a few poshos, couple of crusties and plenty of grass-roots-democratic-inclusive-LGBT-and-people-who-prefer-not-to-say holding meetings about whose turn it is to be Leader of the Revolution while ordering in Italian artisan baguettes and using the Starbucks khazi.

I'm not being cynical or making it up - I've been down there myself. I know hacks who got on the baguette rota and inclusion committee, who failed to get any sleep every night on cold concrete while watching dew form on the ends of their noses and who have arguably shown a lot more dedication to the cause than some of the campaigners. Half of them saw their copy spiked because one of their rivals published first, but if they were sent back there next week they'd do it all again.

I like a good protest; covering one with a purpose and even slight chance of success is an inspiring thing. I'm all for someone climbing Big Ben dressed as Batman, or a million people taking to the streets, or a man devoting himself for 10 years to shouting abuse at politicians about an illegal war. It's good copy and besides, we should hold tight to the idea that if enough of us show we are annoyed about something then someone might change it. I can't remember the last time that happened, but let's hold on to the belief all the same.

The one thing I don't like and which annoys me more than anything else on earth is faff. The doing of nothing in particular in a particularly laboured and annoying way for more time than it would take to do it properly is quite possibly the biggest waste of human potential it is possible to witness.

But protests often lead to faff. Stupidity leads to faff. Crime, wrongdoing, corruption, adultery, drugs, lying - it all leads to faffing about. If we outlawed faffing the whole planet would be a more efficient place with plenty of spare time for people to invent brilliant things, be nicer or at the very least just stop for a think.

If the clerics at St Paul's stopped faffing about whether to resign or evict protesters camped on their land, they might see that they could end the protest by using their influence to encourage the bankers who oversee their cathedral's charitable arm to donate their bonuses to the homeless for Christmas.

If the bankers who walk past St Paul's every day stopped faffing around with our bailout billions long enough to realise they could make even more bucks by being a bit nicer, they might open up the London Stock Exchange every night as a soup kitchen or at least sit down with the politicians in a spirit of true reform to fix the things they've all managed to break.

And if the #Occupy protesters stopped faffing about their inclusive baguettes and mission statements they might see that squatting outside almost the only organisation in The City of London to do anything for the poor is a total waste of time especially when GOLDMAN SACHS IS JUST DOWN THE ROAD.

As it is we're all going to witness a legal fight between one of the country's biggest landowners and a bunch of students who'll be claiming Legal Aid, each of them looking more unreasonable and unpleasant as the days pass and the story gets further removed from the bankers, who like the journalists go to work come rain or shine.

I don't know what Jesus would do, but I'll bet you any money his face has met his palm a few times.

Twats!

Hallowhogwash.

TODAY'S the day the world splits in two - the bit that likes Hallowe'en, and the bit that turns the lights out and shouts 'BUGROFF!' when the doorbell goes.

You could argue the split is between those with children and without, or the people that object to commercialisation of tradition and those that enjoy being bullied by little tykes expecting something for nothing. "How long til it's 'gissa flat-screen telly or we burn your house down?'," the cynical might ask.

Yet the rituals of All Hallow's Eve - even the ones that America has taken and made four times more expensive and less fun - still have their roots in good things. It's just we've forgotten what they are.

Pumpkins were originally turnips, carved to represent a soul suffering in Purgatory. They only became pumpkins when Celtic emigrants to America realised they were easier to deal with than turnips, and also nicer to eat. Anything is nicer than eating turnips; cardboard, cat poo, your own feet. The begging door-to-door comes from wassailing beggars, asking for soul cakes as the weather turned cold in return for saying prayers for the dead, which I suppose is more inventive than sitting outside KFC hoping for a discarded bit of factory-farmed almost-chicken.

It is the time of year when human beings gather around bonfires, store up food for the coming winter, and mark the changing of the seasons. When I was young we also used to deliver food parcels to the elderly, although that part of the harvest celebrations seems to have been lost amid fears of paedophiles, inadvertent poisonings and the health and safety police.

But the main purpose of the day, from pagans to Christians and everyone in between, was to mark the moment when life passes into death; when summer is over and the harvest is in, when you have long months of the cold and dark to wait for spring, and thoughts turn to people no longer with us. Hence the undead roam the streets, looking for a living soul to snatch, but settling in extremis for a Curly Wurly.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying Hallowe'en, yes, I get it, but most of it's hogwash and anybody who turns up on my doorstep expecting to get a bucketful of Jaffa cakes simply because they dressed up as the Cookie Monster is going to find that I have put a lot more thought into this than they have. So anyone who makes it through the enchanted forest to my gingerbread cottage is going to find one of the following:

1. I will open the door and read the above until they go away.
2. They will be given the contents of my recycling bin. Why should the Chinese get all the benefit?
3. Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries played very loud and me, silently staring.
4. A Ouija board and a tethered goat.
5. Hurled turnips.
6. Unholy fox noises.
7. A request to wash my car first.
8. Cigarettes, if they're that interested in being dead.
9. A lecture on tooth decay.
10. An adult in a fox costume who screams and swears from the moment the door is opened, hurls a single Curly Wurly at them and then slams the door.

But seeing as I did that last year, they might just leave me alone.

Either that or I shall egg them from my bedroom window.

What's the point?

SO Jeremy Clarkson has dropped the injunction he took out against his ex-wife's allegations they had an affair after he remarried, saying "it's pointless".

He means of course that the "anarchic" internet allows these secrets to sneak out and it's a waste of time and money trying to stop it, rather than the fact it is 360-degrees of wrong for anyone, much less a millionaire and someone who has been a journalist since he left school, to remove someone else's ability to express themselves.

Mr Clarkson has not been so bold as to accuse his ex-wife Alexandra Hall of lying, and nor has he explained that what he injuncted was a book she wrote about her own life, and which included a chapter or so on her first marriage and what she says happened after they divorced.

It's a subject close to my own heart but let's just state, for the record, no-one should ever have the right to injunct anyone from writing about themselves. If someone wants to stop publication of what they claim are lies, they have to take it to court and thrash it out in front of a judge. That's the way the free world works. Mr Clarkson decided he couldn't be bothered with that, and has locked himself inside a nuclear submarine while his wife and children put up with the headlines.

But while he has got us on the topic there are few other things which are pointless and we shouldn't bother with:

1. Cheryl Tweedy.
2. National debt. A debt of £500 should and could be repaid, but a debt of £500bn might as well be forgotten about because you've no chance. Let's reset all national debts to zero - the US, Zaire, Italy, Greece, everyone - because it's not like anyone was going to get paid anyway, and live within our means. Just a thought.
3. Stress. Whether it's work, love, or money, you've either got it or you haven't and you've not much control over how it comes and goes. We all end up dead; the trick is to enjoy yourself for as long as possible first.
4. Lettuce. See 3.
5. Actors offering commentary on anything except acting. I'm not interested in your views on politics, Africa or the travelling community and for goodness' sake stop making out your job is hard. Standing where you're told and reading aloud is hardly the same as being down the pit.
6. Family arguments. Unless your parents are Fred and Rose West you don't have much to be bothered about, so be nice.
7. Celebrity fitness videos. Used only by men wanting to exercise their right arm, and there are plenty of other ways to do that.
8. E4+1.
9. Media studies degrees.
10. Vegetarian bacon. If you like bacon, you are not a vegetarian.

But for starters, I'll be happy with a deep-sea accident which means Jeremy Clarkson and his vile brown teeth are locked inside a nuclear reactor for the rest of time.

Scuttle him!

Necessity is the mother of invention.

I AM always in two minds about Formula 1.

Firstly it's just cars going round in a circle, which however fast they do it is quite boring, and I'd be much more engaged if they either went cross-country, had someone riding shotgun or tried doing the M25 on a wet Wednesday evening.

Secondly the most interesting stuff about F1 always happens off the track. The drivers, the models, the technology. It's thanks to F1's innovations and perfection of existing tech that the rest of us have access to anti-lock braking systems in our own cars, carbon fibre-bodies, shock absorbers, improved suspension and tyres. F1 also gave us carbon-composite seats in military vehicles to protect soldiers from bullets and shockwaves, better wheelchairs, patient health sensors, pit-stop style intensive care procedures.

Do you remember the Beagle lander? The British-designed exploration vehicle we sent to Mars and promptly lost? Well, it was covered in a heat-resistant material originally designed to protect F1 car exhaust pipes. Wherever the Beagle lander is, it didn't burn up on the way there.

This year F1 cars will start using flywheels in their engines, which will capture energy created by braking so it can be used later for acceleration. They can trap enough power to get a normal road car from 0 to 46mph, and now commercial manufacturers are looking at ways to include it in new cars to conserve fuel for the rest of us.

Of course we'll be waiting a long time for F1 to come up with a decent windscreen wiper, which is why they're still made of rubber and squeak like they're on a Model T Ford.

But against all these gains is one dreadful cost. It's not the petrochemicals, it's not the carbon footprint, it's not even Jeremy Clarkson.

It's the double-headed hydra of Tamara and Petra Ecclestone, the two vacuous, rage-inducing spawn of F1 boss Bernie to whom we are subjected on what seems like an almost-daily basis. Today the elder of these gorgons of gluttony has posed in a magazine amid, at a conservative estimate, £200,000-worth of shoes, handbags and associated designer garishness, none of which is tasteful enough to be worn down Wigan High Street even if you had the cash.

Let's not mention the thoughtlessness which made this sound like a good idea when unemployment's spiralling, belts have been tightened beyond endurance and even the Business Secretary 'forgets' to pay his full tax bill.

Let's not even quibble the fact that the daughter of a billionaire who calls herself a TV presenter and seems intent on making a career out of having no need for one has a lot of shoes. I have a lot of shoes and if I had a billionaire for a dad I'm fairly sure I'd have even more of them, and a walk-in closet to put them in.

No, let's shake our heads and gnash our teeth and rend our clothing over the fact this prime candidate for the first human attempts to colonise another planet has FIFTEEN PAIRS OF UGG BOOTS.

I mean, once you've got the brown and the black and a pair customised with purple crystals spelling out your name WHAT THE HELL ELSE IS LEFT?

Tamara says: "People think I'm a spoilt rich girl, but I want to demonstrate that I am more than just the daughter of someone famous."

I wish you the best of luck with that one, love.

As for me, I'm building you a rocket.

Things you'll never know.

TODAY I heard someone complain "the news tells us too many things".

Let's leave aside what that statement tells us about the average adult concentration span in 21st century Britain, and concentrate on the logic.

The news, as far as most people are aware, is supposed to tell us lots of things. That's the point - that you can sit down with a paper, or in front of the telly or listen to the radio, and in 10 minutes or so get a little download of everything that's going on in the world. This enables freedom and democracy and choice and means we know what's going on in Syria where a British-educated ophthalmologist is shooting people who disagree with him.

(Thus finally explaining why I have always been terrified of having eye tests.)

Changes in society mean we are now seeing news we did not a few years ago. There are just as many paedophiles as there have always been in the population, but whereas those court cases weren't reported much because they were deemed too unpleasant they now appear quite regularly, giving the impression to any passing aliens that sexual abuse of children has massively increased in the past decade or so. It hasn't, it's just that we know about it now.

And because people are weird and put all kinds of stuff on the internet we're now used to seeing shaky mobile phone footage of home-made sex videos, tyrants being dragged through the streets, soldiers at battle and Japanese businessmen doing unspeakable things with laxatives. Political and sporting scandals have worn public morality away while we sit around at the weekends waiting for someone to have a nervous breakdown on the X Factor and secretly wishing for the innocent days of Blankety Blank.

Things do not shock us as much any more - and because shock gets readers and ratings, the hunt never ends for something new to make someone turn to their mate and say "F*** me, Doris! Have you seen this?"

But there are still many things you will never be told. A lot of my job is editing information I have gathered down to the paragraphs which will interest you while cutting out those that won't or will contravene someone's idea of decency; most stories you read in the newspapers are 70 per cent of the truth we know, but 100 per cent of all we can prove or print.

For example, here are some things you will never see reported and for very good reason:

* Keira Knightley in a short skirt (she has stumpy legs).

* An accurate description of the smell made by a decomposing body. It's sweet but disgusting. I'd say it was like drinking Jagermeister the morning after but it sounds too flippant - it's a million times worse.

* That almost every case of child abuse involves a family member. Reporting this fact would mean that, to preserve the anonymity of the victim, the abuser would also have to be anonymous. Most papers quite rightly choose to name and shame the culprit for abusing 'a child' while not reporting it was their own. A surprising number are mums, and most of them are too thick to tie a shoelace.

* The agreements between PRs and journalists to publish information which is perfectly accurate but will be utterly denied by their showbiz client once the story breaks. Sometimes even after they've received money to do an interview in the first place, the hypocritical little toads.

* A gun is surprisingly quiet when fired directly into a head.

* That pretty much every politician, thanks to a diet of coffee and meetings and subsidised booze, has bad breath. Eric Pickles smells like an open-air morgue in the tropics.

* Most famous people aren't cash-rich - once you have management, staff, houses, a couple of addictions and some crime family is into you for £100k you'll find your money disappears from your accounts just as quickly as it does for a mum-of-two in Margate. A lot of celebs rely on freebies. Some subsist on a diet of canapes and champagne just like showbiz reporters do, and are far more grasping when it comes to the goodie bags.

* The 99 per cent of court cases which don't make the news because it's the same troubling people doing the same thing they were caught for last week and no-one has the faintest idea how to stop it.

* 'Community campaigners' normally have stinky houses.

* The names of the impoverished Russian women whose hair decorates the head of Cheryl Tweedy and the rest of her pretty-but-pointless ilk.

* Lizzie Jagger doesn't believe in deodorant.

And now that you do know those things, are you any the better for it? Probably not. Which is why, generally, we don't tell you.

But perhaps we ought to say more often that being rich and famous and thin doesn't make everyone happy.

No body's perfect.

Half-time score: 2-1 to the savages.

IT'S been a bad week for civilisation, what with an inhumane tyrant being abused and executed, thousands hunting down the footage on YouTube, and the unpleasant death played out again and again on TV and in newspapers.

There is even one shaky mobile phone video which appears to show Colonel Gaddafi being physically violated by his captors in the 15 minutes or so of chaos which surrounded his seizure and execution; yet barely a single politician has raised their voice to decry the fact he will never be put on trial for his crimes or to point out that treating a barbaric man with barbarism does not exactly win anyone the moral high ground.

But then, so many have said, it's Libya, it's Africa, it's the right of an oppressed people to be angry.

Then I woke up this morning to the news a gay man had been beaten, tied to a lamppost and burned alive and presumed it must have happened somewhere else.

Uganda, perhaps, or Saudi Arabia where homosexuality is against the law and can even lead to the death penalty; maybe Zimbabwe or Turkmenistan where it's illegal for men but perfectly okay for women; Antigua where it carries a 15-year prison sentence, or perhaps somewhere closer to home like Ireland where loving someone of the same sex has been legal only since 1993.

I was surprised such a crime in a different country had made headlines here, but then reasoned it was so horrific that perhaps it had forced its way to the top of the news agenda.

But it happened in my own country, in a market town of 13,000 people who say please and thank you, who watch the same TV programmes and read the same newspapers as I do, have access to the internet and a properly made cup of tea and all the other things which most of us presume makes us 'civilised'.

Whether he was killed because he was gay or not we do not know, but regardless of motive the method is horrendous in the extreme. Whoever did it must score fairly high on the psychopath scale for their inhumanity alone, much less the possibility that it was provoked by a dislike of how an inoffensive man liked to spend his leisure time.

All we know for now is that Stuart Walker, 28, had been at a party and was last seen alive at 2.30am. His burned body was found at 5am on an industrial estate not far away. What happened in the meantime is the subject of a murder inquiry, and deep heartbreak for his family and friends. But if footage of his last moments were put online, how many of us would click the link, just for kicks? There are already people saying the same treatment should be meted out to his killers, if they are found.

Because obviously that would help.

It's enough to make you loathe the whole human race and scowl at every person you see. Humans, on days like today, seem like a nasty cancer the whole world would be better off without.

But then today is also the anniversary of the death of Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old lady who once sat on a bus, got arrested for her trouble, and changed the world as a result. Rosa was active in the civil rights movement but quiet, serene, well-behaved and generally followed the rules which segregated her from white people in her home town of Montgomery, Alabama.

One of those rules was that the first 10 seats of a bus were for whites, and if an 11th got on board the black passengers had to move, stand or leave the bus. It was just a petty rule compared to those segregating education or marriage but it produced everyday minor humiliation for Rosa and when she was asked to give up her seat for a white passenger one day in 1955 she decided she'd had enough.

Rosa said: "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Rosa got arrested, fingerprinted and charged with violating a city law. It wasn't the first time such a thing had happened, and there had been many worse abuses of the black population, but for some reason this one lit a spark. The black community of Montgomery staged a year-long bus boycott, crippling the transport companies and forcing a change to the law. During those protests a charismatic young reverend electrified everyone with his speeches, and Dr Martin Luther King emerged to lead the civil rights movement to victory.

They were angry but it was the grace and humanity of people like him and Rosa that won their battles, the quiet insistence that however badly someone else may act they would not allow it to taint their own civil behaviour.

Rosa died six years ago today, at the age of 92, in a country which still has plenty of problems but at least a black lady can sit wherever the hell she likes on the bus.

Perhaps we haven't come very far since 1955 if people can still treat one another with the utter inhumanity we've seen this past week; we are still barbarians under the skin. But Rosa at least shows that it doesn't have to be that way, and us cavemen can be angels if we try.

1913 - 2005

* Anyone with information about Stuart Walker's death can contact Crimestoppers Scotland on 0800 555 111 or fill in an anonymous online form here.

Humanity (n.): the quality or condition of being humane.

THERE are lots of different ways to be poor.

It can be that you find it hard to maintain the life you're used to - that you lose your job, but are reluctant to take one that is poorer paid, because it won't pay for the mortgage, the car, the internet, the central heating.

Or it can be that you live somewhere that has no door, where the head of the household has to choose which child to feed today, where school costs a month's salary and growing crops doesn't get you as much money as growing opium.

There are places where the poverty of expression is just as crippling - where people can eat but not speak, like Libya for the past 41 years, or China, where there has been a famine of food and thought for 62 years. These days many Chinese have fridge freezers, but there are too many who have never learned to see beyond themselves to help two-year-old Yue Yue when she was run over in the road.

When I was growing up there was food, and warmth, and clean water and free schools. We never wanted for a fridge freezer, in fact we had two, and a couple of tellies although one was black and white. I felt poor when the other girls had horse-riding lessons and the new Barbie and permed hair, while I had Girl's Worlds from a jumble sale and last year's Barbie and my mum cutting my fringe, and used to complain to my parents how it wasn't fair.

When I said that they would tell me about their childhoods, about rationing after the war, about paraffin heaters and linoleum instead of carpet, wages running out on Wednesday and bread dipped in dripping for your tea on Thursday before dad got paid on Friday and they could afford fish, about choosing between having free eggs and wringing a chicken's neck for the meat. They told me about their parents being raised in far worse circumstances, about families of 10 and gin and getting on a ship to a strange country and suicide and unhappiness I would never know. They would explain that dad wasn't working at that place any more, but he'd found somewhere else. They said the interest rate on their mortgage was 15 per cent, and I didn't know what they meant.

When my grandparents would visit, I was told to be grateful for any gift they gave me because they didn't have much. They would fish fifty pence out of their purses, and press it into my hand and give me a strange grandparents' kiss and a hug when they left, and mum told me to say thank you because that was a lot to them. My gran bought Christmas presents in the January sale and kept them for a year, so the year she died we all got gifts from her a month after she'd passed away.

We forget that because we have sewers and out-of-town shopping centres and what-not that there are people here whose lives would be easily recognisable to someone in a Victorian slum. I've been in places a stone's throw from central London where cockroaches run free, where the methods of disposing of human waste are a cholera epidemic waiting to happen, where tuberculosis still kills and children have rickets. These are the breeding grounds for crime and terror, and no-one in authority dares go there.

This winter, at a conservative estimate, at least 3,000 people in the UK are going to die because they're not warm enough. They all have homes, and blankets, and access to the NHS, and they're going to die anyway because they have to choose between eating a tin of beans or turning on the heat. That's more than are killed in road accidents every year.

And in response our government insists on green taxes for the energy companies, which pass them on to the consumer, and pushes the cost of that heat even higher in a practice which impacts on the poorest households far harder than it does the wealthy ones where our politicians all live on £65,738 a year and second-home expenses. It criticises the elderly for 'bedroom blocking' by staying in their homes rather than selling up to a younger family and going into residential care. Meanwhile we spend our time worrying about the ways in which we might get cancer, an illegal travellers' site in Essex which is hardly Zimbabwe however hard we look at it, and a Defence Secretary with the judgement of an eight-year-old child.

I'm not saying those things aren't poor. I'm not saying that someone struggling in the Yemen has it better or worse than someone struggling in Milton Keynes. The real problem in all of the above is a poverty of humanity - the people who didn't help Yue Yue when she was run over, the people who grow opium because it's easier, the ones who fight the police at Dale Farm just because they want a fight or hate the travellers just because they want to hate, those who let Gadaffi engage in 41 years of death and misery and cheer his death rather than regret his escape from his crimes, the politicians who want to hit a target before they bother to stop people dying, the people who don't look in on their neighbours or talk to their relatives. It's the lack of those well-intentioned philanthropists who transformed this country a century or two ago, and on whose good works we still rely because there's no-one else making the effort.

True poverty is not about what you have, but what you don't. People who've lost their humanity are the poorest of all.

It always meant a lot to me.

Russia's greatest love machine.

SAY what you like about the Russians, they have a hell of a work ethic.

Alleged spy Katia Zatuliveter endured an affair for four long years with Liberal Democrat backbencher and Portsmouth MP Mike Hancock, a man renowned for neither his charm or his good looks.

He is in fact notorious for being a sex-pig, for a string of affairs that have been exposed in the Press which have embarrassed his long-suffering wife Jacqueline and their two children, and most recently for allegations of making sexual advances towards a vulnerable woman who was mentally ill.

His nickname in Westminster is 'Handycock', but I imagine anyone unlucky enough to be presented with it thinks it is anything but handy.

According to Katia's evidence at a deportation appeal on the night they met Handycock's moves involved going to her room "with a CD and some money". I shudder to think what his soundtrack of love would have been - Back in the USSR perhaps, or Ra-Ra-Rasputin.

She has now been accused of being a spy, not least because her involvement with Handycock saw a spurt of him asking new questions in Parliament about our missile systems and where we kept them.

Never mind that he's a less important part of the political machine than whoever empties the bins, and whatever information she gleaned could have been found quite easily with Google.

If she's not a spy she simply needs sitting down with a cup of hot, sweet tea and a friendly talk about how to choose better boyfriends.

And if she is a spy, then could someone please sit the current version of the KGB down with a cup of hot, sweet tea and give them a friendly talk about how it's much easier to infiltrate the Ministry of Defence just by being chums with whichever numpty has been put in charge of it.

Or by going through the bins once Oliver Letwin's had his morning constitutional.

It's hardly Spooks, is it?

Doctoring the truth.

WHEN someone gets caught out, they wriggle and writhe and say it's not true.

When it's proven to be true they backflip and bluster and say it was all a mistake.

And even when it's quite clear to the rest of the world they plotted and planned a course of immoral behaviour all along, it's all someone else's fault. Usually Walter Mitty's, the poor misunderstood man.

I've seen it in magistrates' courts, coroner's inquests, on doorsteps and street corners and drug dens, and the worst people in the world for refusing to face up to their own failures are the most intelligent and fortunate ones. The ones whose lives have conditioned them to believe they are always right.

Doctors, for example, are very clever people and they know it; seven years of being told they know best will rub off on anyone. Good doctors are wonderful but bad doctors are the worst at developing a god-complex. Some I've met are only an inch away from turning into Harold Shipman, given the right circumstances and a really bad day.

So it is not surprising that when questions were first raised about former GP Liam Fox's best pal Adam Werritty he threatened to sue, rather than quietly say 'whoops!' and sort the problem out. When the newspapers began asking questions there were carefully-worded responses which avoided telling the whole truth. When it was proved the Defence Secretary had acted in a way which would have most employees sacked in seconds it was his mate's fault. And now an inquiry by his chums has concluded he did something wrong but not that wrong and, oh, here's a £17,000 severance payment from the nation's empty coffers to say sorry.

The fact remains, however, that Dr Fox is the man who employed his best pal on the public payroll, on and off and in different ways and without qualification or a Parliamentary pass, for several years. The good doctor gave him use of a taxpayer-funded office to run a charity that wasn't charitable, and let him stay rent-free in a London flat which we were paying the rent on, even though the doctor was a quite-wealthy company director at the time and could easily afford to cough up himself. He had warnings about his pal and ignored them.

When Fox decorated the flat we paid for that too, only he bent the rules to claim it by way of his mortgage rather than the decorator's bills, and ended up having to repay £22,476.30 once he got found out. And of course, once he was, he had an excuse about how actually it was cheaper to borrow the money from a bank over 30 years rather than pay it up front. Never mind that it was wrong; Dr Fox knows best.

I suppose that's why we're paying him £17,000 as twisted compensation for finding out he's a lying, cheating, manipulative, stupid, arrogant little rat of a man.

Now a lot of MPs are lining up to bewail the loss of "a politician of his calibre", completely unaware that as far as the rest of the nation is concerned it's politicians of his calibre which are the problem.

If only there were a political equivalent of the General Medical Council, where he could be tried and questioned and if found guilty struck out of Government, struck out of Westminster, and struck out of public life for good.

"In three days I shall rise again! HA HA HA. Suckers."

Make it count.

HACKS have a different way of counting things to the rest of the world.

So one will report a million people on Bournemouth beach on a sizzling summer day, and another that it was a bit chilly and there were only 800,000. Today The Groaner claims there are 400 people camping out at the Occupy London protest, while the Daily Glimmer says it's 300 and the Daily Wail's hack on the spot can see only 250 and "a number" of tents.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but I'll bet you any money by the end of the week it won't be in three figures anymore, or at least not overnight. Gets chilly this time of year.

And while we're at it, in my lifetime there's not been a sit-in that counted at all. They were a useful tool for Gandhi and Martin Luther King back in the day when The Man cared about how he looked and could see the point of behaving better. But today? Well, Tiananmen Square was a sit-in and that didn't go too well. Greenham Common was occupied and we still have the threat of nuclear war, only these days it's Iran rather than Russia. Brian Haw sat in Parliament Square for 10 years and didn't stop any wars. The Occupy Wall Street protest has been going a month and Wall Street is still quite happily trading.

I don't want to appear cynical - all those protests showed public anger and disdain for very bad things, and everyone has the right to throw their two penn'orth in. But they didn't change anything, because The Man does not care and the people who organise such stuff aren't exactly rocket scientists.

Successful protests have to be held in warm weather, for a start. People are more inclined to take a week off work if they can sit in a deckchair drinking beer rather than stamping their feet trying to keep warm. They need to attract Joe Public too, rather than the usual suspects who flit between saving traveller sites, marching for the gender-confused and hanging banners off power stations. They may be very well-intentioned people, but a protest is never going to get public traction if the people on it all look like they don't wash very often.

And it needs a clear purpose. The democratic statement released by the London protesters called for world peace and the end of all general oppression, for goodness' sake. It doesn't have a single clear aim or intent beyond 'we don't like bad stuff'. Well, I don't like peas but I'm fairly sure I could get them all painted pink before this lot manage to achieve anything.

If you want to change the banking system, sitting outside St Paul's while the bankers walk past to get their Starbucks latte just isn't going to do it.

The only thing that would is if you cut off their life support - and take your money back.

No more hours spent talking to customer disservices. No more proving your identity 18 times a day. No more bankers' bonuses and tiny interest rates on your meagre savings.

'What a great idea!' I thought. So I rang my employers' finance department, and asked if they would pay me in cash. Er, no. They don't have any cash, the computer's not set up to do it, the PAYE coding would get all SNAFU'ed. Can't, won't, not gunna.

So I rang my bank, and asked what they would do if I took all my cash out every month, once I was paid. Nothing much, they replied, except I can't pay my mortgage in cash so that has to be paid through the bank, and I wouldn't get as favourable a deal if their computers didn't show my money flowing through their account all month, which would mean selling the house, and that involves paying the bank a few thousand, and then I still have to buy another house which, oh yes, involves paying the bank a few thousand. Hmmm.

Then there's the direct debits - electric, gas, telephone, council tax, TV licence. To pay my council tax by cash would involve a three hour wait with a numbered ticket down at the council offices, and the utility companies give you money off for paying through your bank. I'm not even going to start on the palaver of trying to get a new cheque book so I could do it by post.

So The Man has us by the short and curlies, and he knows it. That's why he doesn't give a damn about your tents and your protests and your bailouts, and is quite happily carrying on like Mr Potter in It's A Wonderful Life, screwing everyone just because he can.

But then it's not really The Man's fault - he is, after all, just something else that humans have made, along with guns and insurance firms and car accidents. But there is a choice other than beating him or joining him, and that's to go around him.

If you want to protest, put your money in the dwindling number of building societies, which do good things with it. Find a bank which doesn't invest your money in the arms trade, deforestation in Indonesia and rapacious mining in the Congo. Tell the Big Five of Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS and Santander to sod off and find an ethical bank that suits you better here.

You'll have to keep everything crossed they don't turn turtle like Northern Rock, but hey, life's a risk. You just have to decide whether you want to gamble with The Man or not play his game at all.

The only thing worth doing outside St Paul's with your two penn'orth is to use it to feed the birds, rather than hand it to a banker and hope he does it for you.

The only way to get The Man to do what you want is to deny him your tuppence.

Pot calls kettle a slag.

THE problem with women is that when something goes wrong they always blame themselves.

If it weren't for that pre-programmed insecurity we'd be running the universe, because there's nothing else to hold us back but the belief it's somehow always a woman's fault.

So we blame Maggie, and Hillary, and Diana, and Camilla, and not the idiots with testicles who cause a lot of the trouble in the first place.

That's why Stacey Giggs - whose husband Ryan cheated on her for EIGHT YEARS with the woman who went on to marry his brother, paid for her to abort their lovechild, had a fling with a celebrity bike called Imogen Thomas which led to an ill-advised superinjunction broken by the "anarchic" internet that was roundly criticised and led to weeks of front pages for the newspapers - blames the other woman rather than the dirty rat she married.

When she bumped into sister-in-law Natasha outside a restaurant Stacey screamed at her: "You're a f*cking slag!" Well yes, she is a slag, but it's her husband who betrayed her, not Natasha, who merely treated Stacey and her marriage in a way which unsisterly and stupid women have been doing since time immemorial. At least she managed to tell the truth in the end, as Ryan still writhed in his lies.

But then there's the "he's the father of her children" argument, and the "men can't help it" excuse, both of which are utter piffle and unfairly reduce men to the status of creatures with a mere physical function and ignore the fact they're also supposed to have morals, a brain and some bloody backbone.

Of course men do have a similar inbuilt flaw which stops them having too much power. It's called a penis and as soon as any chap thinks he is able to achieve a great feat - run the free world, for example, or convince his wife he's been working late - it flares up to defeat his ambitions just as effectively as women manage to screw each other over.

So I hope Stacey will not think me too unsisterly to point out that her husband is also a f*cking slag, and that seeing as she is prepared to put up with the crap dished out by a footballer who earns £80,000 a week and is worth a total of £34m then, I'm afraid, so is she.

Slag calls slag a slag for affair with slag. Well done humanity.

Take the rest of the day off.

Rule Britannia.

IF you move to Britain, you have to score 75 per cent on a citizenship test to pass, and dear old Dishface has just updated it to make it harder for the riff-raff to get in.

Well I've been here a little over 30 years and I got only 62 per cent. So that's me buying a cat.

Obviously my peasant forebears did not pay enough attention to the rules governing child labour and what dialect is spoken in Northern Ireland.

But then, that kind of thing is of most value if you're running a factory filled with children or trying to keep an uppity province under control, so it's not surprising Dishface's folks found it more useful than mine.

But should he get an attack of Commoners' Sense, here is a set of questions which I reckon will be a lot more pertinent when it comes to deciding whether to make people a citizen of these fair islands.

* Are you any good at rugby?
Yes/No
* How about cricket?
Yes/No
* Do you have a trade?
Yes/No
* Do you have the offer of a job?
Yes/No
* Can you speak enough English to buy a newspaper, watch the TV news, order a takeaway and insult someone in an amusing fashion?
Yes/No
* Do you know how to queue?
Yes/No
* Do you stand on the right on escalators and drive on the left on motorways?
Yes/No
* Will you send your children to school, teach them right from wrong, and keep your garden tidy?
Yes/No
* Can you make proper tea?
Yes/No
* Do you dislike the French, apart from the cheese and the wine?
Yes/No

You need seven positive replies to get your passport but as a supplemental question, in case someone's just below the pass rate and needs to bump their score up a bit:

* Is Dishface an idiot?
Yes/No

"Then you, my love, ARE IN! Where'd we be without rules, eh?"