Peter Rhodes on kid-glove justice and codswallop at the Co-op

TALL stories of our time. The Government is planning to sell off a great wodge of student loans worth nearly £4,000 million. The official line is that borrowers will not notice any changes because the terms will remain the same and repayments will still be collected through the tax system. Really? If I'd just spent four billion quid on a pile of loans, I'd be out to get every last penny as fast as possible. Wouldn't you?

AFTER taking up cudgels and leaving someone in the lurch, here's another ancient expression that's long overdue for modernising. When Michael Knee-Toucher Fallon was sacked as defence secretary, the media generally agreed his was the first scalp in Westminster's sex scandal. Scalp? For goodness' sake, how long is it since American Indians gave up scalping people?

NOT much surprises me about our kid-glove courts these days but I was shocked at the pathetic four-week sentence imposed on the thug who, for no apparent reason, knocked a pensioner to the ground in Birmingham's New Street station concourse. He was given a further four weeks by the city magistrates for breaking a previous suspended sentence; even so, he could be out before Christmas. And then what? Watch the video of the attack on YouTube. It is random, unprovoked and chilling. No-one who behaves like that is going to be cured by a few weeks in clink.

I'VE been trying for some days to get a sensible explanation from the Co-op Bank on why it no longer supplies addressed envelopes for those who prefer to pay their credit-card bills by post. Their aim, obviously, is to persuade everyone to pay digitally or by phone. The annoying part is the Co-op's claim that the new policy, part of its 'quest towards a paperless future', was demanded by the customers themselves: "You said, we listened." I contacted the bank's PR department but they couldn't tell me when this great exercise in consultation took place, nor how many people took part. They claimed it was the result of 'feedback we receive from customers on an ongoing basis'. The future may be paperless but there is no shortage of codswallop.

FATE is fickle but has it ever been quite as fickle as the monstrous piling-up of events and travel arrangements leading up to the New York cycleway massacre? What are the odds against five Argentine friends travelling to New York for a reunion and being murdered by an Uzbekistani who won the right to settle in the States in a diversity visa lottery?

IF half the latest revelations are to be believed, the Palace of Westminster is a hot bed of lust and debauchery. Maybe it's something in the water. All I can contribute is the fact that in all my years as a journalist I was only ever once sexually propositioned, and that was in the gentleman's lavatory of the House of Lords.