Peter Rhodes: Heroes or fainters?

A PAL in the motor trade tells me that if the world abandoned diesel engines, the oil industry could never refine enough petrol to fill the gap and consequently the price of petrol would go through the roof. If I try really hard I can convince myself it's just idle gossip.

PROFESSOR Armand Leroi is the evolutionary expert who claims The Beatles were not a great influence on pop music. He may well be right. The Fab Four were mould-breaking and magical, yet they were not widely imitated. But so what? Diamonds do not influence rubies but that doesn't make diamonds any less brilliant.

MEANWHILE, if you're old enough, cherish the memories. Professor Leroi is 52 so he could never have known that first semi-spiritual encounter with Sergeant Pepper, or the opening chords of Strawberry Fields Forever. We Sixties kids were transfixed by the genius of The Beatles who took us on a brief but unforgettable journey from Love Me Do to Let It Be. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, yeah, yeah, yeah.

BY coincidence, on the day this week that Tunisian police were accused of cowardice during the Sousse attack which left 38 people dead, our own anti-terror cops were on exercise at the Merry Hill shopping centre near Dudley. What a contrast. In Tunisia, a rag-bag assortment of fainters and panickers took as long as possible to get to the scene. In England, a tough, disciplined squad tooled up like Robocop seemed utterly fearless in the face of the enemy. Or so we would like to think.

BUT the profound difference between Sousse and Merry Hill is that the Tunisian attacker was using real bullets and killing real people. And whatever we may see of cops rushing heroically into the jaws of death in Spooks or Line of Duty, real police officers have wives, families and no particular desire to get killed. At the 1987 Hungerford massacre, armed officers did not close in on Michael Ryan until after he had taken his own life. At the infamous 2004 "barbecue murders" in Oxfordshire, police hung back for more than an hour conducting a "risk assessment." Video from the 2015 Bataclan massacre in Paris shows a squad of five armed officers; when the shooting starts, four of them scarper. And who can blame any of them? Until the moment comes, no-one knows whether he is a fainter, a panicker or somebody like the fifth cop in Paris who solidly stands his ground and returns fire. Our cops, thankfully, have never been faced with a terrorist atrocity like Sousse and we must pray they never are because, while equipment and rehearsals are important, heroes are born, not trained - and they are a rare breed indeed.

A READER wondered why the NHS paid more for paracetamol than the rest of us pay in supermarkets, so he wrote to the Department of Health. Here's part of the department's reply: "Comparison of the margin found in the margin survey with the agreed target margin as part of the contractual framework determines whether there need to be any adjustments to payments made to community pharmacies." Sir Humphrey is alive and well.