Best of Peter Rhodes - Feb 8

Here's a selection of the best of the Peter Rhodes column taken from the Express & Star for the week ending February 8.

DUSTMEN in Birmingham have just negotiated new pay scales of up to £38,000. This explains why they no longer wear gorblimey trousers and live in a council flat.

IS THE real reason MPs are so outraged at the propsect of having their conversations bugged that someone might overhear them discussing mortgages?

THE NEW Housing Minister Caroline Flint seems to have a heart as tough as her surname. She is hell-bent on forcing jobless council tenants to find work or face eviction. It's the sort of policy that used to delight the hang 'em / flog 'em brigade in the heyday of Mrs Thatcher's Tory conferences. Flinty Flint also wants to create "strong, diverse estates with a mix of people." And a jolly fine idea it is, too. Now, which MP will volunteer to become the first to enrich the social mix in an inner-city sink estate. What, no takers?

A SCHOOL in eastern Germany has been renamed the Klaus Riedel School in honour of the man who helped develop the V2 rockets fired at London in 1944-45. To find the school, just follow the Hermann Goering autobahn, turn left into Eva Braun Road, right into Goebbels Avenue and you'll see it, opposite the Final Solution chemical works.

JANE Garvey, the new presenter of Women's Hour, says Radio 4 is "massively middle class." That's right. chuck. Radio 1 is massively moronic, Radio 2 is massively popular, Radio 3 is massively highbrow, the BBC Asian Network is massively Asian and BBC1Xtra is massively black. And your problem is what, exactly?

THE FERRY Riverdance, beached at Blackpool, is feared to be sitting on a main sewage outlet. If so, the entire resort may soon be floating on a vast lagoon of poo. No change there, then.

SOME people still don't get it, do they? So let us explain it, very carefully. Every time you send an e-mail or use a mobile phone, there are three people involved: you, the person you are talking to and Mr Plod. Mr Plod can retrieve anything you whisper or text and produce it in court. A married couple are facing a manslaughter charge in Nottingham. His text message promised to smash the victim's cars "until he dies." She texted back: "Okay, sweetie-pie." They might as well have written their messages 10 feet high and paid a pilot to tow them across the sky. Moral for the 21st century: Nothing is private.

NOTHING is safe, either. An estimated £700,000 worth of property was nicked from police headquarters last year, including three dogs. It sounds like one of those old lateral-thinking problems: What kind of theft cannot be solved by your sniffer dog?

NEW immigrants are being taught to follow "British social rules" by not spitting in the street, not playing music loudly and not dropping litter. Remove the word "not" and they'll fit in perfectly.

THE claim that the Scout promise "discriminates against atheists" will remind older Scouts of the yarn about a keen young recruit in the 1940s. After he proudly recited his Scout promise at home, his furious father buttonholed the troop leader.

"What's all this about my lad promising to do his duty to Gordon King?" he demanded.

"God and the King," explained the leader.

AMERICAN researchers claim that some people are born with a "Billy Bunter gene" that makes them fat. Curious. As I recall, Bunter's pals at Greyfriars put the girth of the "Fat Owl of the Remove" down to his regular deliveries of tuck hampers, which is hardly genetic. As that celebrated layabout Jim Royle would put it: Fat genes, my arse.

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