Peter Rhodes: Ken Purchase was one of the good guys

GREAT minds think alike. You may recall my theory that the "empty" seats on the Dear Leader's train were actually occupied by the Twelve Red Bearded Dwarfs from the late, lamented Beachcomber column (okay, it is only a theory). Private Eye has now produced 13 "entirely plausible explanations" for Traingate. Read on . . .

I PARTICULARLY like the one about the seat being taken by a blind leper who was miraculously cured when he touched the hem of Jeremy Corbyn's jacket. But the one that leaps out of the page at us dwarf-conspiracy theorists is the Eye's suggestion that the seats were taken by "midget journalists from the mainstream media in a deliberate attempt to discredit Jeremy."

NEVER mind. The main thing, comrades, is that another week is over and we have all moved on and no-one talks about Traingate any more. You think?

JEREMY Paxman has come under fire for his strident views on the horrors of growing old. He was enraged on seeing a copy of a new magazine, Mature Times, and thundered: "Who wants to be called 'mature' like an old cheese? We all know that 'mature' means on the verge of incontinence, idiocy and peevish valetudinarianism'." Thanks, Paxo. "Mature" also means being too damn tired to get up and find the dictionary (valetudinarian = "a sickly or weak person, especially one who is constantly and morbidly concerned with his or her health.")

SO farewell, Ken Purchase, the former Wolverhampton North East MP, who has died aged 77. He was one of the good guys, an old-fashioned socialist with a blazing passion to help those harmed by their so-called betters. More than 20 years ago I was contacted by a former mental-hospital patient who in the 1960s had been an unwilling and uninformed guinea pig for LSD treatment. Her story was almost beyond belief. Suffering from post-natal depression, she had been injected with the mind-bending drug by a doctor who cheerfully announced as he produced the syringe: "Let's see what this does." Her life for the next 30 years was blighted by depression and flashbacks, made worse by the fact that the medical establishment repeatedly brushed her off. When her story appeared, other victims of the LSD treatment came forward. I took the dossier to Ken Purchase. He raised it in Parliament. Eventually, about 40 victims shared £200,000 compensation. It was not a huge sum but that didn't matter. What mattered was that these women, treated as hypochondriacs or trouble makers for decades, had been proved right. They had been empowered by a potent combination of a local newspaper and a local MP who cared. RIP, Ken. Shame there are not more like you.

IT is little victories like the above that make journalism, for all its present troubles, the best job in the world.

I TOUCHED a few days ago on the curse of predictive text which almost gave my readers "Christ Packham." A reader reports another close call which could have harmed Anglo-Scottish relations when a random T crept into his email about "Aberdeenshire".

I WONDER if the same predictive-text curse has struck the emailer who tells me that Mr Corbyn is a "paradigm shift" in politics. Parachute slip? Paraffin shop? Parade of sheep? All suggestions most welcome.