Mark Andrews on Saturday: Sparky gives power to the people as Meghan misses memo

Hats off to Wolverhampton electrician Ray Taylor who has had to resort to, er, shocking measures to stop thieves from stealing his tools.

After having £5,000 worth of tools stolen in two years, Ray wired up the door handles of his van to give thieves a 1,000-volt jolt if they try to gain access. Just in case they don’t get the message, he also installed two ‘sound bombs’ louder than a jumbo jet taking off, and a flashing light for good measure.

Surprisingly, the Old Bill say this is all perfectly legit - as long as he displays the obligatory health-and-safety sticker, obvs. But something tells me this will not be the case for long. As you read this, you can bet there will be armies of lawyers thumbing through the fine print of some obscure European human rights laws, probably arguing that it violates a thief’s fundamental right to half-inch your soldering iron.

And if they don’t, some MP will quietly sneak a new clause into a piece of forthcoming legislation. I’ll give it 12 months before police start warning tradesmen they face prosecution for using such devices, and there will be a right-on chief constable somewhere chomping at the bit nick White Van Man for ‘taking the law into his own hands’.

Still, we can all live in hope. Maybe Ray’s device will soon become obsolete, as the 20,000 new police officers promised by Boris Johnson will not only prove to be more than a hollow promise, but will also be deployed solely to focus entirely on stamping out real crimes like having your van broken into, and will not be used for virtue-signalling about fashionable causes.

Now that really would be a shock to the system.

Back in the real world – only joking, of course – the increasingly weird Meghan Markle has made her mark as the guest editor of pretentious fashion magazine Vogue.

Now maybe if she had stuck to writing about frocks and make-up, this might have just been a bit of harmless self-indulgence on Meghan’s part, and a tacky publicity stunt by the publisher.

But sadly, Meghan appears not to have yet received the memo that joining that royals are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves, and decided to plaster the magazine’s cover with photos of 15 ‘inspirational women’ who are ‘agents for change’. Which of course, assumes that change is, by definition, a good thing, whereas in my experience it usually isn’t.

Anyway, I would hazard a guess that if you showed the Vogue cover to the average Joe at the bus stop in Bilston, they would struggle to identify any of the ‘inspirational women’ Meghan has identified, apart from Jane Fonda. And maybe Greta Thunberg, the bolshie schoolgirl from Sweden who for some reason is fated like a sage for telling other kids to bunk off school. But who is Adut Akech? Adwoa Aboah, anybody? Sinead Burke? They talk about no-one else down the Dog & Duck.

Still, since Meghan has been inspired by Greta’s message on environmentalism, we all look forward to seeing her putting this into practice. Buying secondhand clothes from the Greenpeace charity shop, obviously. Growing her own veg in the back garden, watered with used bathwater, she's probably doing that already. Presumably she will be making nettle soup and cooking stews out of leftovers as well. And we all look forward to seeing her ride round London on a Boris bike.

But love, just so nobody gets the wrong idea, it might also be wise to lay off the private jet for a bit as well.