Peter Rhodes: Locking up the Dinky Toy tendency

EXPLAINING why David Cameron is likely to be judged harshly by history, biographer Andrew Roberts claims that the collective noun for a group of historians is "a malice."

HOW long before the trappings and emblems of the EU are swept away? A reader suggests investing in car number-plate manufacturers as the demand surges for post-Brexit plates with no EU logo.

THE BBC, never one to overlook a post-referendum catastrophe, has the online headline: "Lowcost Holidays demise blamed on Brexit vote." In fact, that's not quite what the story tells us. The company was losing money long before the referendum. The administrators say its problems were "compounded by the Leave vote itself and the subsequent fall in value of the pound." The sorry truth is that travel companies go bust like snowflakes in the sun. Twenty-four collapsed in 2011 and 239 in 2010. Over the past few years, failures have been blamed on everything from terrorism to exchange rates, airport taxes, the Sars virus, politics and the rise of internet bookings. It is an industry which operates on the slimmest of cut-throat margins, making just a few quid on every £1,000 holiday. In the months to come watch out for Brexit being brandished to explain or excuse everything from incompetence to hurricanes and pure bad luck.

LAST week we heard how a police sergeant branded the Women's Institute as "the biggest organised crime group" for turning wild fruit into jam and selling it at a profit. After that light-hearted point, came news that Nottinghamshire Police was extending its definition of hate crime to include harassment of women – bad news for wolf-whistlers? This week we hear how a toy-car collector was held in the cells for four hours as police investigated a £16 sale of Dinky Toys online. What's going on? I suspect the cops are fed up with dealing with traditional criminals who tend to be big and aggressive with a tendency to punch or kick. By extending criminality to include wolf-whistlers, Dinky Toy enthusiasts and jam makers, you get a much nicer class of defendant. No officers get thumped and the crime figures look brilliant.

IN the interests of creating meeker lawbreakers, I have compiled a list of activities which should be criminalised immediately: yoga, tai-chi, calligraphy, origami, birdwatching and bellringing. Right, Sarge, let's start with the bellringers. . .

BBC1's latest crime drama, The Secret Agent, is steeped in Victoriana. It has all the zest of a blancmange, all the pace of a penny-farthing and all the menace of a Dandie Dinmont. In fact, rather than go for a second dramatisation of the Joseph Conrad novel (the first, starring David Suchet, was screened in 1992), the Beeb should have given us a documentary about the infamous Walsall Anarchists case of 1892. This involved a group of West Midland men who were jailed for up to 10 years - probably as a result of a police conspiracy. The Walsall case not only proves that fact is stranger than fiction but also accounts for my enduring scepticism about today's endless list of terrorist plots being "foiled."

DESPITE its faults, The Secret Agent has a memorable performance from Charlie Hamblett as the autistic boy, Stevie. Excellent.