Peter Rhodes: The rope awaits

THE Marmite controversy rumbles on. A reader asks why a fall in the pound should affect the price of a spread made from by-products of the British brewing industry. He says: "I reckon somebody is extracting the yeast."

CHANCELLOR Philip Hammond plans to upgrade Britain's defences against a growing online threat. There is a snag. Where do we get the recruits? If someone is computer-savvy enough to delve deeply into the cobweb-like world of the dark net where billions are made trading everything from drugs to weapons, why would he choose to do his delving for a Civil Service salary? If the devil has all the best tunes, doesn't organised crime have all the best hackers?

IF YOU follow this column long enough, something will eventually come true. You may recall I suggested the well-guarded storyline for the Downton Abbey Christmas Special would feature the double hanging of Mr and Mrs Bates for murder. Wrong. The producers could not resist a happy ending. Less than a year later, however, Joanne Froggatt who played Mrs Bates in Downton is starring in Dark Angel (ITV) as the 19th century serial murderer Mary Ann Cotton. It's based on a true story and this time the noose awaits.

IF you'd asked me a few weeks ago whether there should be an inquiry into the 1984 Battle of Orgreave, I'd have said no, for the same reasons Lord Tebbit gave yesterday. It's too long ago and would cost far too much. And what would it achieve? We spent £200 million on an inquiry into Bloody Sunday which has changed not a single mind, nor produced a single conviction. So let's leave Orgreave well alone, eh?

AND then, in August, came a round of University Challenge (BBC2) which shocked me, and I bet I wasn't alone. A team of four Oxford undergraduates could not name the Yorkshire village which was the scene of the most violent confrontation of the 1984 miners' strike. The world we knew only a generation ago is being forgotten. That must not be allowed to happen. We may not need a full-blown, lawyer-fest inquiry but Orgreave should be remembered and re-examined, if only to separate fact from propaganda.

FOR a start, Orgreave was not a popular, class-war uprising against the despised Margaret Thatcher that dozens of Leftie websites suggest. Thatcher was actually very popular in the 1980s. The year before Orgreave she led the Tories to a landslide election victory with a huge majority of 144 seats. Three years after Orgreave she won her third general election with another massive majority. Although many Brits had sympathy for the miners, there were bitter memories of the Three Day Week caused by the miners' strike of 1974. On the day itself, before the police perjury and evidence-tampering began, most folk supported the force's action. Victory for the police in the Battle of Orgreave may have been ugly but defeat was unthinkable.

THE 1980s were strange times, indeed. One chief constable told me how, having deployed hundreds of his officers during the miners' strike, he received a bill from a motorway service station for 299 full English breakfasts, and one knickerbocker glory.