The best of this week’s Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.

A READER suggests a writer-in-residence at a prison is mostly concerned with prose and cons.

AN INVESTIGATION reveals that tenants of 60,000 UK council houses, which have cost the state about £6,000 million, actually own another property. Just keep smiling and pay your taxes.

I HAVE campaigned quietly for several years against the lunacy of giving the winter fuel payments to everyone aged over 60, including some of the richest people in the UK.

Frankly, I never thought this campaign would take off. But it has. I may have written my way out of £200 next Xmas. Rats.

IN THIS mirthless age it comes as no surprise that  Conservative students at St Andrew’s University have been forced to apologise for burning an effigy of President Barack Obama.

Nor are we surprised to read that this deed has been denounced by assorted harrumphers  as “gravely offensive,” anti-American and even racist.

However, to put this in context, in recent years the same Tory students  have set fire  to effigies of Nelson Mandela, Gordon Brown,  Hazel Blears and a local councillor.

It’s a joke. Get over it.

SOME hoteliers claim they are  “blackmailed” by guests threatening to give them bad reviews on the TripAdvisor website.

If guests are demanding money  with the threat of an untrue review, it is probably a criminal offence.

But TripAdvisor  empowers those of us who have had a raw deal from a hotel and failed to get satisfaction. Some years ago I booked a few days at a hotel purely because it offered boat-launching facilities. I checked twice by email and phone and was assured the slipway was available.

When we arrived, the slipway access road had been blocked by a new decking area. The hotel directed me to the nearby sailing club which charged me £50 for the three days. It was a bit like a hotel advertising a swimming pool and then sending you to the municipal baths.

Despite a visit from Trading Standards, the hotel offered only £15 in compensation. I felt quite entitled to post on TripAdvisor that while the accommodation and food were okay, the hotel’s attitude towards a guest was deplorable.

That’s not blackmail. It’s fair comment.

DANIEL (Harry Potter) Radcliffe was walking in Oxford when he was approached by a stranger who  said he was a magazine journalist attending a conference on homophobia in Africa – and would Radcliffe care to comment on the issue?

The young actor sent him packing thus: “You shouldn’t care about my opinion. I am not informed. Just because I  am ‘somebody’ doesn’t mean I am qualified or even interesting.”

In a world obsessed with celebrities here’s a timely reminder that, contrary to what your agent and PR people may think, the fact that you can act, sing, dance or  tell jokes doesn’t necessarily mean you have anything relevant to say.

Ironically, in stressing how uninteresting he is,  Radcliffe says something  very interesting.

KATE and Gerry McCann were horribly abused by some sections of the Press and their testimony to the Leveson Inquiry was heartbreaking.  Back in 2007 I referred to the “wicked and deliberate lie” of the Daily Star headline: “Maddie Mum on Murder Rap” which was pure fiction.

But while the Press sank to new depths during the Maddy case, the really  vile, vicious, totally unsubstantiated stuff about the McCanns is not in print but on the internet.  Fleet Street has its share of rogues but some bloggers are evil beyond words.

AFTER the rubbish budgeting, rubbish logo and rubbish travel arrangements, the 2012 London Olympics unveils its purple polyester uniform for volunteers. It’s rubbish. You have to admire their consistency.