Best of Peter Rhodes - February 4

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

I FEEL a parable coming on. It has emerged that £1.85 million was taken from Britain's foreign-aid kitty to spend on the Pope's November visit to the UK. As it seems the chief purpose of the trip was for the Vatican to lure a few thousand CofE worshippers back to Rome, you'd think the whole bill would go to the Vatican's recruiting department. Instead, money which might have fed the world's hungry was lavished on pomp and incense. Never mind, you huddled masses. You will get your reward in heaven. And if you believe that . . .

OBITUARY for Lark Rise to Candleford (from the Daily Telegraph website): "Yes, it looked very nice, but after the BBC had spent £10 billion on bonnets, they only had £2.50 left for the script."

How true. Auntie has confirmed this is the last series. Watch out for Stephenson's Rocket crashing into the Pratt sisters' shop.

WE have pretty much exhausted the British Medical Association's response to the Government's health programme, save to add that:

* The radiologists saw right through it

* The podiatrists booted it out

* The gynaecologists think it's premature

* The nurses want to pan the whole thing

* The dentists are ready to pull out.

IT is all very well and terribly noble for Chancellor George Osborne to take more taxes from the middle class in order to reduce the taxes of the lower-paid. The only snag is the First Law of the Exchequer: The people you take money from never forgive you and the people you give money to never notice.

TEN families of the Bloody Sunday victims say they want the soldiers responsible to be prosecuted.

Hell, why not? We have bunged £200 million into the utterly pointless Bloody Sunday Inquiry which dragged on for 12 years, made a lot of lawyers very rich and changed not a single mind.

Why not spend a few more million and re-open more old wounds by dragging some ex-squaddies into the witness box to try to recall what they did on a panicky afternoon in Londonderry 40-odd years ago?

Well here's one good reason. The only thing which has brought peace to Ulster and enabled ex-IRA men to share power is the decision to forgive, forget , release the prisoners and move on. You cannot have justice on one side but prosecutions on the other.

But the best reason of all not to put the Bloody Sunday soldiers on trial is the unpredictability of the system.

What if half-a-dozen former members of the Parachute Regiment were charged with murder - and the jury acquitted the lot of them?

There are times when the authorities declare that a prosecution is "not in the public interest."

Do it now.

SIXTY tons of ore produces enough gold for one wedding ring, according to Birth of Britain (C4). Each year about 130,000 British marriages end in divorce. That's nearly eight million tons of rock dug up for nothing.

BOOTS is to sell a do-it-yourself DNA kit for establishing paternity. Bang goes the Jeremy Kyle Show.

SCIENTISTS at Birmingham University are working on an invisibility cloak which uses the light-bending properties of a crystal called calcite. Sadly, so far it works only on microscopic objects. The boffins' big project is to make a paperclip vanish. Interesting. I have suspected for some time that in the office environment, paperclips spontaneously vanish. Also pens, rubber bands, today's copy of the Telegraph and my teabags.

THERESA May is not only Home Secretary but also Minister for Women and Equalities. A reader emails: "Who is the Minister for Men and Equalities?"

Er . . .

AFTER spraying demonstrators with CS gas in London's Oxford Street, a police spokesman repeats the old mantra that the gas causes "no lasting damage." In army training, CS gas gave me a hernia. It was damage. It lasted.

HOSNI Mubarak, president of Egypt, is reckoned to have stashed away about £25,000 million. So what's new? Every dodgy dictator takes the precaution of stealing a few billion in case the tanks suddenly turn up on the presidential lawn. As you look at the unfolding nastiness in Cairo, think back one week to the international financial summit at Davos. How many of those smart-suited, utterly respectable chaps are taking good care of the ill-gotten gains of Mubarak and his bloody-handed kind?

IT was grand to see climber Adam Potter speaking so openly about his astonishing tale of survival but, alas, what is given away freely can never be sold later. If you ever fall 1,000 feet down a Scottish mountain and are still conscious, have the presence of mind to pick up your mobile and say those three magical little words:

"Max Clifford, please?"

SO Popeye was right all along. Researchers in Sweden say they have noted "profound and significant" effects on oxygen intake after volunteers ate spinach. Was that with or without the pipe?

SERIOUSLY, I thought we had finished with the medical profession's response to the latest Government NHS programme. But this morning I checked my emails to find your reports that:

* The catering staff thought it was pie in the sky

* The porters got carried away with it

* The hygienists washed their hands of it

Enough, already.