Best of Peter Rhodes - August 9

IRAN'S new president Hassan Rouhani says of Israel: "The Zionist regime is a wound inflicted for years on the body of the Muslim world that must be cleansed."

Rouhani, you will recall, was the moderate candidate.

IT AIN'T my dog. My dog got stolen last week. I sold it years ago. The law on dogs that kill may be toughened up to include life sentences but killer-dog owners are not blessed with much in the way of brains and will already be rehearsing their excuses. They come from the same thicko segment of the underclass which chucks bricks off motorway bridges or steals signalling wire from railways and is surprised when a crash ensues. Worst of all, the new dog laws will be reactive. First we must wait until the slavering beast that everyone in the street knows is a potential killer actually kills someone. Better by far to pick up Chummy and his attack dog before any damage is done, identify it as a menace and have it destroyed. The dog, that is, not the owner. Mind you . . . .

AFTER playing the foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, Peter Capaldi is the new star of the BBC's longest-running sci-fi drama. Forthcoming episodes include Dr Who and the ****ing Daleks, Dr Who Gives the Cybermen a right ****ing Pasting and Dr Who Kicks Seven Sorts of **** out of those Stone Angels.

WE NOW have almost 800 members of the House of Lords – more old bottoms than red benches to accommodate them. Packing pensioners into a chamber so small is surely a form of elder abuse. The time has come for peers to be appointed not for life but for five or 10 years. After that they could keep the title but hang up their ermine, clear out of Westminster and make space for another backside.

BEWARE of premature rejoicing. After some good economic news, Boris Johnson boasts that the Tories are "in the glide path" towards election victory in 2015. As the Bible very nearly warns us, glide goeth before a fall.

A SURVEY finds that a quarter of parents let their children aged 12-15 try alcohol on holiday. Fleet Street's finest have been debating whether this is a wise way to introduce kids to booze or plain irresponsible. I bet in some cases it's the old parent-as-chum syndrome in which Mum and Dad want to be regarded not as proper grown-ups but as their kids' best pals. We've all seen them, and what a ridiculous sight they are. "We're more like sisters, really," says Mum, buying her 12-year-old daughter a T-shirt with the slogan "Porn Star" and pouring a couple of pina coladas down her innocent neck.

THIS week's furore about the number of charity bosses earning £100,000-plus prompts Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations to wail: "Many MPs on the Right hate effective charities who campaign." In truth, people don't hate charities. It's just that we're wising up to the fact that some of them are more like big businesses – with one crucial difference. Real companies are set up to make things, maintain things or sell things. They aim to complete every contract and stamp it "Job done." Most big charities have no intention of completing the task they set out to do. They grow and morph, changing their aims and expanding their brief. If you believe the animal charities, Britons are crueller to animals today than they have ever been, and are getting worse. If you believe the child-cruelty charities, Britain is populated largely by baby-batterers. And if you believe the Africa charities, the face of that continent today is exactly what it was 50 years ago, a stick-thin baby holding out a bowl. It seems the more we give, the worse things get. Far from completing the job, every year the charities' task allegedly gets bigger, the situation is more critical and they need even more money, more chuggers, more tin-rattlers, more phone-call botherers – and even higher-paid bosses to oversee it all.

DOMINICK Harrod, the former BBC economics correspondent who died a few days ago, invented Harrod's Law of Economics which stated: "The more you see of me, the more trouble we're in." I was reminded of the cartoon from the first Gulf War in 1990. A British squaddie says to his mate: "It must be serious, they've sent Kate Adie."

NICK Hewer of The Apprentice memorably dismissed Ed Miliband as "tall, arrogant, weak handshake." Now, the Canadian comedian Stewart Francis says Miliband reminds him of "a security guard who's just heard a noise in the warehouse." Once such images are planted in the public mind they are desperately hard to erase.

AS THE food boffins tinker with stem cells to create the world's first artificial burger, whatever happened to all that Tomorrow's World stuff about a machine to turn grass into milk? We have the grass. We have the plastic bottles. It seems quite bizarre that we still rely on cows to do the bit in between.