Best of Peter Rhodes - August 7

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

.EUTHANASIA is a hugely complex issue which must be handled with great tact. The Director of Public Prosecutions is soon to publish new guidelines to clarify the law in this most delicate and sensitive of areas. The document will be entitled: How To Bump Off Granny Without Getting Nicked.

I MADE up that last bit. But if you can read about the law on assisted suicide being "clarified" without feeling an awful chilling of the soul, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

Debbie Purdy who has multiple sclerosis, whooped for joy when the Law Lords ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions, to spell out how the authorities will treat people who help a loved one to commit suicide.

Miss Purdy says if her partner risks prosecution for taking her to a Swiss suicide clinic a few years from now, then she feels obliged to kill herself early to spare him.

There is an unwritten rule that we hacks do not refer to ladies in wheelchairs as silly old baggages. But Miss Purdy's meddling could have all sorts of unpleasant consequences far beyond her own circumstances. We are an ageing society. Old people cost the state, and their relations, a lot of money. If the law is changed to protect suicide-assisters from prosecution, what possible safeguards can there be to save little old ladies from being bullied into booking a one-way ticket to Zurich?

A SENIOR police officer in Cornwall sympathises with Newquay folk who are campaigning against drunkenness and rowdyism in the town. She declares: "The town's image has been tarnished and we need to work quickly to re-market it as a safe place to visit."

Re-market it? How about the cops going into Newquay mob-handed and locking up the drunks. Or am I missing something?

THE GOVERNMENT knew the summer was going to be a washout but ordered the Met Office to forecast a heatwave to keep people at home, boost the economy and contain swine flu within the UK. A conspiracy theory for our time.

A FRIEND says he was looking forward to a box of chocolate biscuits in the shape of marine creatures but had to return them to the shop because the seal was broken.

TESTS of a helmet-mounted camera by the Metropolitan Police have hit a snag. One officer's helmet caught fire because of faulty wiring in the recharger. Mind how you glow.

SWIFTS are superb flyers but useless if they are forced to the ground. A colleague found one grounded outside his back door, picked it up and called the RSPCA. The charity directed him to a vet, and paid the £60 bill. The vet referred him to a nearby bird sanctuary for release the next day. So within an hour of being found, this little bird had been examined by an expert and taken into care, with a charity footing the bill. As my colleague says: "Why don't we have a system like that for people? If it had been me with a broken leg, I'd still be waiting in A&E."

A READER describes a scam involving a pair of girls of Eastern European appearance. It begins with the two girls washing your car windscreen and getting soap suds all over their skimpy T-shirts. They refuse payment but ask for a lift to the nearest supermarket. On the way, one of the girls forces sexual services on the driver and the other steals his wallet. My reader says: "I had my wallet stolen this way on May 4, May 9 and May 10, twice on May 15, seven times in June, most days in July and, all being well, this coming weekend. You have been warned."

THE House of Commons officials who were supposed to scrutinise MPs' expenses have just been awarded pay rises of up to eight per cent. Well done, thou good and faithful servants.

INTRIGUING headline on a firearms case: Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant.

WE can't really be at war in Afghanistan because when you're at war, things happen. The faffing about over armour plating for six new Merlin helicopters would have had the aircraft fitters of the Second World War rolling in the aisles. What in God's name is the problem? They are helicopters. They need armour-plating. So what you do is get the armour plating and fit it to the helicopters. Job done. All being well, we are told, these Merlins will be deployed to Afghanistan at the end of this year - four months from now. Four months is longer than it took the entire Allied Army to get from the beaches of Normandy to the gates of Germany in 1944. These days it takes four months for the 100,000-plus civil servants at the Ministry of Defence to get half a dozen helicopters to Afghanistan. Snails go faster. It can't be war.

THE alleged Islamic terrorists arrested in Australia have been charged with something called "conspiring to plan a terrorist attack." So that's not actually carrying out an attack. It's not even planning an attack. It is something rather vaguer and it has the whiff of those alleged conspiracies which are so often "foiled" by British police - only to be chucked out by British juries. Maybe the Oz authorities have uncovered something more tangible but don't you long for the 1970s when the cops would nick an IRA member screwing a detonator into a big lump of gelignite while studying a map of central London? Now, that's what I call foiling.

HOW SAD that voters in Devon have chosen a local GP, Dr Sarah Wollaston, as the Conservative candidate for Totnes. GPs cost a fortune to train and are hugely veluable to society. MPs are so precious that we can manage perfectly well without them for 82 days each summer. Turning a GP into an MP seems a terrible waste.

FROM a reader who describes herself only as "83 and female" comes this shocker: "She was only the stableman's daughter but all the horsemen knew her." Shame on you, madam.