Best of Peter Rhodes - May 20

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

NOW that the Queen has walked the hallowed turf of Dublin's Croke Park, can we look forward to the President of Ireland visiting the scene of the Birmingham pub bombings?

THE Enfolding was a striking modern statue in Coventry. It has now been pushed from its pedestal and smashed. Police say CCTV footage appears to show three men damaging the statue and officers will be investigating. I thought the idea of CCTV was to get cops straight to the scene. Instead, it is routinely used to watch the ungodly doing their worst, in the hope of nicking them later. If that's a deterrent I'm the Angel of the North.

MIND you, if cops are going to rush to the scene, they have to be ready for trouble. The five officers caught on CCTV in Northampton as drunken Timothy Harris, 46, ran amok punching passers-by did not seem to get stuck in. In fact, the only blow which seemed to have any effect on this thug came from that deadliest of night creatures, the size-8 blonde with a strop on. Nice one, lady. See it here.

I LISTENED to the full recording of Ken Clarke's "controversial" Radio 5 discussion on rape and was still waiting for the controversial bit when it ended. Later on, even his critics couldn't quite agree which bit was controversial. But his chief offence seemed to be disagreeing with Victoria Derbyshire's shrill assertion that "rape is rape." As Clarke observed, it is not. Any journalist or lawyer knows that rape covers a huge range of incidents. That is why some rapists are jailed for five years and others for life. There are several good reasons for sacking Ken Clarke but talking common sense and challenging a radio presenter's silly slogan is not one of them.

THE disabled physicist Stephen Hawking declares: "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

I dare say Hawking is right. It has always struck me that an afterlife would need an awful lot of organising and an all-pervading sense of fairness. There seems very little organisation in this life and even less fairness. Why should things be any different when we pop our clogs?

BACK in 2006 an Italian politician, Tommaso Coletti used the phrase "Work makes you free" in a brochure to promote local job centres. He admitted he couldn't recall where he had seen the slogan but said: "It was one of those quotes that have an instant impact on you because they tell an immense truth." Coletti was horrified when it was pointed out that "Work makes you free" (Arbeit macht frei) was the sign over the gate in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Five years on, a dismayed reader hands me a new leaflet produced by the Shaw Trust, a charity which helps people find work. Over a silhouette of a man with outstretched arms it declares: "Feel the freedom a job can bring."

Oops.

HUGE response to yesterday's item on Pippa Middleton's derriere. And yet it is hardly surprising, given that Google now has more than eight million references to "Pippa Middleton's bottom." A world enthralled.

THE offending Pippa Middleton item? If you missed it, here it is: Pippa Middleton allegedly puts her neat derriere, one of the highlights of the Royal Wedding, down to Pilates. In truth it is more likely to be a matter of diet, exercise and, above all, genes. The best way to get a trim bottom is to have a mother who had one. And for anyone thinking how unfair this is, remember that genes cut both ways. We inherit all sorts of things from our parents: pert little bottoms, short-sightedness, baldness and heart attacks.

THE London 2012 chairman Lord Coe says: "The Olympic Flame will shine a light right across every nation and region of the UK." Curious. I always thought the United Kingdom was one nation.

LORD Hodgson, chairman of the Government's Big Society Red Tape Task Force (he must have enormous business cards), says many volunteers are put off by "a suffocating blanket of red tape and an insidious mythology about being sued." I believe that. Some years ago my sense of civic duty led me to become a school governor. At the first session we were warned darkly by an official that as we could be personally liable for any decisions we made, we might consider buying insurance against being sued. I got the impression they didn't really want us.

MORE mobile-phone texts for oldies:

* FWIW = Forgot where I was

* ROFLACGU = Rolling on floor laughing and can't get up.

OUR changing language. I was intrigued to read the report of a 100-year-old lady who, being a dab hand with a sewing machine, celebrated her birthday by "whizzing up a skirt."

A FINAL selection of useful expressions from The Only Way is Essex (ITV2)

* Webbats: querying the location of something or someone ("Webbats is me dole card, Trace?")

* Wonnid: Desired or needed. Sought by the police

* Furrok: Thurrock.

FROM an (alleged) list of holiday complaints to a major package company:

* "No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled."

* "There was no egg slicer in the apartment."

* "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."

IF Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been a British politician he would not have lasted long. His alleged grope of a young journalist some years ago would have been all over the Sunday tabloids and he would have spent the next day clearing his desk. Instead, protected by the French tradition of privacy, the man they call "le lapin chaud" (hot rabbit), and now in a New York jail accused of attempted rape, rose to lead the International Monetary Fund. All the while, his colleagues and their poodle press shrugged their Gallic shoulders and glanced the other way. You will not be surprised to hear that some British politicians look at France's privacy laws with seething envy.

A HUNT is under way in a garden in Johannesburg for the cherished pistol Nelson Mandela buried nearly 50 years ago. It is a reminder that for all the saint-like adoration he enjoys today, Nelson Mandela never claimed to be a pacifist.