Hold the front page – dog eats car

A READER inquires: "The Leaning Tower of Pisa. Is it a listed building?"

GREG Barker, the energy minister, says middle-aged people should buy solar panels because they are a better investment than a pension. Well, that depends. In these stormy times, I can pretty well guarantee that the thing that has just flown off your roof, and landed with an expensive crash in your garden, is not your pension.

AUF wiedersehen, Aidan Burley. The Tory MP for Cannock has agreed to quit before next year's General Election. It was the only possible ending. The tragedy is that Burley showed such promise. He was Oxford -educated and a hard-working local MP. So brilliant and yet so stupid. If he had been merely on the fringes of the infamous Nazi-themed stag party in a French ski resort, as he first claimed, Burley might have survived. But when it emerged he had actually organised the party and provided the SS-style uniform, his political career was kaput. One newspaper even found an old photo of his fiancee at another fancy-dress party - with another bloke in German uniform. Burley raged that this was "gutter press personified," which is the sort of language politicians tend to use just before they clear their desks.

AN alarming aspect of the Burley affair was the intervention by Tory former minister Gerald Howarth. He complained of a media "witch hunt" against Burely and declared, rather chillingly: "This is why the Leveson Inquiry was so important." There is actually nothing in the Leveson Report which would prevent newspapers from exposing politicians caught in embarrassing situations. We have a free Press, largely because we fought and won a war against people wearing the sort of uniforms involved in the Aidan Burley affair.

ONE of the week's more surprising discoveries was that a dog can eat an Aston Martin. Royston Grimstead returned to his Somerset home to find his collie/spaniel cross, Luce, had chewed the glassfibre wheel arch of his DB9. He believes the dog may have guessed her owner was thinking of finding a new home for her, and got her retaliation in first. I can believe this. We once had a guide-dog puppy called Georgia who spent her first 10 months as a family pet at Chateau Rhodes before being taken away, in a flood of tears and much howling, to begin her training. On her last night with us, Georgia tried to eat a Welsh dresser.

PEOPLE sometimes ask whether, having had a puppy-walk labrador for 10 months, isn't the parting heartbreaking? Actually, it's worse than that.

WHAT'S the difference between the NHS and the law? The law deals with individuals but the NHS deals with populations. You see this approach at its clearest in the so-called "herd immunity" the NHS achieves by injecting everyone against diseases. The same herd approach is seen in the latest NHS guidelines on how to treat men with slow-growing prostate cancer which is judged to be low or intermediate. The idea is not to rush into radical surgery but simply to monitor it. If you are dealing with thousands of patients this may be the wisest approach. But what happens if a single patient being monitored suddenly dies and his family go to law, claiming he would still be alive if he'd had surgery? What makes perfect sense to NHS bosses makes the eyes of lawyers light up.

CIVIL engineering is a big, bold, blokey profession, railways are romantic and Cornwall is steeped in lore and music. In the good old days, repairing the storm-wrecked railway line at Dawlish would have taken years and generated enough folk songs to fuel a thousand pub crawls. The current estimate for this epic repair is six weeks. Such is progress. Take your finger out of your ear and put away that banjo.