Best of Peter Rhodes - August 19

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

KENNETH Clarke, Justice Minister. Whatever happened to him?

A READER asks: "When a man wears a T-shirt with the logo 'Instant idiot - fill with beer,' is the beer really necessary?"

HANDS across the ocean. As David Cameron frets about broken Britain, a CNN viewer emails this encouraging little note: "Step aside, Brits. We'll show you some REAL moral collapse." God bless America for putting things in perspective.

ARTHUR Smith was in fine form in Raise Your Glasses (Radio 4), contemplating the best and worst of after-dinner speeches. I loved his address to a charity recycling group which featured a number of recycled jokes, including this whiskery old gem about a chap who goes to his GP:

Doctor: "What's the problem?"

Patient: "I can't pronounce the letters F or Th."

Doctor: "Well, you can't say fairer than that, then."

THE WINTER fuel allowance. Is it based on therms and conditions?

"YOU will develop and implement innovative and effective marketing campaigns to increase the numbers of people walking and cycling to public transport." Job description for Sustainable Travel Officer (Cycling & Walking) for the bus company Centro. You will not be surprised to learn that the going rate for encouraging people to walk or cycle to the bus station is almost £30,000 a year. Underlining the bleedin' obvious never comes cheaply.

OOH, shock, horror, outrage. A letter suggests that phone-hacking was rife at the News of the World. Well, so what? Amid all this fabricated moral posturing, no-one should lose sight of how very easy it was, thanks to a woefully insecure electronic system, to hack into someone's voicemail in the early 2000s. If you wanted to know who was talking to a prince, a film star, a corrupt councillor or a gangland boss, the simple act of keying 0000 into your mobile could open their voicemail and reveal all. Hacking was so simple, so productive and so hard to detect that you could argue that any investigative reporter who was not hacking was not doing his job properly. If everyone who had ever hacked into someone's voicemail raised their hand, you would see a forest of palms waving, all the way from Fleet Street to the BBC and perhaps even, heaven forbid, at the House of Commons.

EIN Reich, ein Volk, ein Heffer. Congratulations to Simon Heffer of the Daily Mail who yesterday caught up with what some of us have been saying for years. The dominance of sound, successful and disciplined Germany has made it pretty much the banker, and therefore the ruler, of the Eurozone.

"Welcome to the Fourth Reich," Heffer warns darkly.

It could be worse. This time no-one expects the Brits to rescue anyone.

A PRESS release promoting a restaurant's forthcoming mushroom festival in Birmingham asks the question: "Do you know your button mushroom from your shitake?"

That really is an excellent way to start a fight in Brum.

IN DECEMBER 1990, young, fit, frit and clutching my chemical-warfare suit, I arrived in Saudi Arabia as a war correspondent. The first Gulf War was about to kick off and it was rumoured that traces of nerve gas had already been detected. The real fear was that Saddam Hussein would lob one of his Scud missiles, laden with something really unpleasant, with pinpoint accuracy into our billets. Twenty-odd years on, Colonel Gaddafi has fired a single Scud missile at the Libyan rebels approaching Tripoli. It missed by about 50 miles. I wish I'd known that, back then.

I HAD a little harmless amusement with some compensation-chasing company who rang to ask if my hearing had been affected by working with heavy machinery. It's just too good to resist, isn't it?

"I'm sorry - can you speak up?"

By mishearing everything the cold-caller said, I managed to spin out the conversation for five minutes before explaining the reason I was a bit deaf was working with heavy machinery. You could almost hear the cash tills ringing at the other end.

At this point, the trick is to say: "Hang on a minute, I'm just getting a pencil," and leave the phone off the hook. They eventually go away.

OTTERS, once almost extinct, are reported by the Environment Agency this week to be back in every county in England. They have thus entered that very narrow area of animal existence between being an endangered species and becoming a pest.

AND yet more of your medical definitions:

Dilate - to enjoy a long life

Enema - not a friend.