'Historic' means 'nothing to do with me, squire.'

SO WONGA is to pay £2.6 million in compensation to thousands of people to whom it sent fake letters from bogus law firms. Now, where do you think Wonga got that money in the first place? The City of London Police will be having a little chat with Wonga this week. Not before time.

IN THE meantime, Wonga has invoked the H-word. In a statement it says: "Wonga's focus is on compensating the customers affected by the historic debt collection letters." Historic? The word, as used these days, means "Nothing to do with me, squire. It was all a long time ago." But Wonga's wicked letters were sent out between 2008 and 2010. Hardly the Middle Ages, was it?

ELTON John says Jesus would have approved of gay marriage. Strange that He never mentioned it.

BUT then Jesus can be used to endorse just about anything. In the States, you will find earnest online discussions on the subject, which assure us that Jesus would have driven a Jeep, owned a handgun and rifle (probably a Winchester) and voted Republican. God made man in His image and Man makes Jesus in his image.

WHAT has been going on with BT over the past few days? The company insisted that the breakdown in communications affected just a few phone-code regions. Yet the evidence from social websites is that vast parts of the country were affected and millions of people unable to access Twitter (which is probably a blessing) and emails (which is not). BT says "a network incident . . . . was resolved within around two hours," which is clearly nonsense. Something enormous happened. A sensible explanation, please.

"PEOPLE like me pay tax to finance an unneeded benefit to people like me." Roger Bootle, managing director of Capital Economics, writing this week about the winter-fuel payment and the "frightful mess" of our welfare system.

BOOTLE says there should be "a massive simplification" of the system. But as I observed last week on the New State Pension, which in some cases will treat one customer as two, Whitehall never does simple. There is talk today of merging National Insurance and Income Tax. So will that turn every customer into two customers? Or three? Or four? No wonder the state's computers keep crashing.

RICHARD Farleigh, the super-rich financier on Dragons' Den says people in Britain "think I enjoy being a risk taker." Maybe they do. Or maybe it's just that every reporter who writes about risk and Farleigh in the same sentence gives the sub-editor a golden opportunity to use a headline containing "Farleigh's Risks."

I REFERRED last week to the belief that the Royal Family thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint. A reader recalls a neighbour who hated the royals with a passion. It dated back to his National Service in the 1950s when, as a young squaddie, he spent a whole week painting a corridor in his barracks in preparation for a royal visit. The royal visitor came and went and didn't give his corridor a second glance. That was the moment he became a republican.

STILL on royal visits, I heard a tale in the 1970s at Catterick concerning a toilet tent erected in a field in preparation for a visit to an army exercise by Princess Anne. At the 11th hour the lighting system blew a fuse. The quartermaster, with great presence of mind, raided the depot's entire stock of dozens of torches and suspended them from the tent frame with wire. HRH needed the loo. As she re-emerged she remarked: "Like a fairy grotto, isn't it?"