Best of Peter Rhodes - April 19

A WEEK has passed and there's still no compensation for Bud, the police horse who got punched in the Newcastle football riot. Where are the neigh win / neigh fee lawyers?

ON A walk across the park I found, and removed, four little "Ding Dong" stickers, stuck to lamp posts by the sort of people who think it's fun to rejoice in the death of a politician you disagree with. Doesn't it make your flesh creep?

THE sick jubilation at Thatcher's passing has been unsettling and un-British. It reminds me of those demented Middle East demonstrations where people hang effigies and attack photographs of their enemies with the soles of their shoes. There was an effigy of Thatcher in Trafalgar Square at the weekend and another in a Yorkshire pit village. Apart from Guy Fawkes, I can't recall effigies being paraded in British streets since the death of Hitler in 1945. On Wednesday, some demonstrators turned their backs on the funeral procession. The last time we saw anything like that was the dignified and understandable back-turning by hundreds of former prisoners-of-war when the Japanese Emperor Akihito visited London in 1998. Maggie Thatcher was a democrat, elected three times by the British public. Do this week's demonstrators really put her in the same league as Adolf Hitler and Japanese war criminals?

I HEARD a Scotsman on the radio raging that he could never forgive Maggie for introducing the poll tax in Scotland before England. Poll tax was nothing more than an attempt to replace household rates with something better, but from his rage-level you'd think Thatcher had sent in the troops to strangle Scottish babies. This week a minority of Brits, thankfully a tiny minority, seem to have lost all sense of proportion. Calm down, dears, she was only a politician. Let us move on.

MEANWHILE, back at the park, I had a close encounter with a little dog from what is now a rare breed who came over to make friends. It was like stepping back 50 years. Whatever happened to fox terriers?

IT MAY be a while before we know who committed the Boston bombings but you can bet this outrage was carried out in the name of either God or liberty, or both. In terrorism, the more noble the supposed motives, the wickeder the crimes.

THE price of gold has been tumbling and thousands of late investors who thought they were on to a sure winner have lost. Remember the first rule of investing - by the time you spot a bandwagon, it's usually leaving.

UNIVERSITY researchers in Indiana have discovered that a single taste of beer makes drinkers want to consume more. If that counts as a discovery in Indiana, they really ought to get out more.

WOOLWICH Crown Court heard this week how four British jihadists planned to attack a Territorial Army centre by loading a remote-controlled toy car with explosives and sending it under the gates. The irony is that as they plotted their attack, a Conservative-led government was hard at work destroying not just one drill hall but the entire Territorial Army. Whitehalls plan is to turn the TA into a reserve force of volunteers who are ready, willing and able to leave their civilian jobs for six months' full-time service every couple of years. This scheme has "doomed" stamped all over it. Over the past 20 years, as the demands of active service have increased, the TA has dwindled from 60,000 to about 12,000. I give the TA another two years at the most. Where the terrorists failed, bean-counters in dark suits are succeeding.

I HAVE no idea who Alessandro Severi is but his letter to the Daily Telegraph this week should be required reading for everyone in political life. He begins by praising the speeches in the Commons debate on Baroness Thatcher as "nobler and more statesmanlike" than anything in any European parliament. He ends: "As an Italian who has been living in London for many years, I think I will be more likely to grasp the laws of cricket than understand why the British people are prepared to surrender the sovereignty of their Parliament to the European Union."

The truth, Signor Severi, is that we Brits are not prepared for such a takeover and have never been invited to vote for or against it. The whole European project is based on the increasingly ludicrous claim that Britain has something to gain, or even to learn, from Europe. As we look at the collapse of Greece, legalised theft from bank accounts in Cyprus, 50 per cent youth unemployment in Spain, bunga-bunga depravity in Italy and the gathering crisis in Slovenia, does anyone in Britain still believe that? What have we to learn from Europe? How much more are we expected to surrender?

MARK Twain allegedly quipped: "I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly." It's worth repeating this week as the BBC's Andrew Marr admits that his near-fatal stroke was caused by intense exercise. You wouldn't thrash an old car, so why on earth do it to your own body?

USEFUL definitions from history. Thracism = dislike of people fromThrace. (From the excellent ITV2 Ancient Rome sitcom, Plebs).