HMP UK – the ultimate answer to the open-prison scandal

SINGING the praises of the 5:2 diet, a Daily Telegraph reader tells us that Ethiopians, who fast two days per week, have been practising this diet for centuries. What he doesn't tell us is that life expectancy in Ethiopia is about 60.

SO it's all over bar the counting. If it turns out over the weekend that Ukip has swept the board in the Euro-elections, what should the mainstream parties do? The answer is probably nothing. Ukip serves the purpose of the punchbag at the gym where we can go and work off our anger at the boss, the foreman, the cops or the government. Having punched the bag and voted for Nigel Farage on the grounds that Cameron is a Toff, Miliband is a waste of space and Clegg is a despicable turncoat, the Great British public will dutifully return to their party folds in next May's General Election. Just as they always do. Some of us remember how the SDP was going to change the face of British politics. The SDP? Ask your grandfather.

THE Prince of Wales likens President Putin's behaviour over Ukraine to Adolf Hitler's takeover of eastern Europe. So which one has the German ancestry and the son who wore a swastika armband?

HISTORY is a useful guide but it does not always repeat itself. Putin's threat to "defend the Russian-speaking people" sounds ominously like Hitler before he annexed bits of central Europe. But it also sounds like the leader of a proud but isolated nation. Russia has endured endless invasions and feels much safer behind semi-friendly "buffer" states.

I REFERRED a few days ago to the suspicion that the famous BBC 1924 broadcast of a cellist playing to an accompaniment of nightingales may have been faked. If so, it was only the first of many little deceptions. In the 1930s the hugely popular George Bramwell Evens, better known as "Romany of the BBC," presented a series of wildlife rambles. Although he was a great traveller (and, by chance, a regular visitor to my wife's family farm) Romany's rambles were actually recorded in a studio. A pile of old film stock was rustled to create the sound of walking through bracken. I refuse to get outraged at such practices. If camera crews and sound recordists had to present real events in real time, wildlife documentaries would have bored the pants off us years ago.

I MAY have the solution to all these thugs wandering off from open prisons. The Government should simply announce the creation of HMP UK. The entire landmass of Great Britain would become an open prison and a convict would be deemed to be at large only when he escapes to a foreign country. And then he's somebody else's problem.

INTERESTINGLY (a word which sometimes indicates nothing of interest is to follow), during the entire Second World War, only one German prisoner-of-war made it out of HMP UK and back to Germany. Franz von Werra, a Luftwaffe pilot and persistent escaper, was shipped off to Canada where he leaped from a train, crossed a frozen river and surrendered to the authorities in the United States, which was then neutral. He was repatriated to Germany, resumed flying, crashed into the North Sea on a routine flight and was killed. Not such a great escape.

"NOT many of we horsey types are computer literate," a jodhpur-wearing hack at Horse & Hound tells the Daily Mail. "Not many of we"? That's not computer illiteracy. It's plain old-fashioned illiterate illiteracy

A WIFE-swapping sex party allegedly held in a mansion in Kent was provided, according to the organisers, for the "sexual elite." Or, as we used to call them, adulterers.