Frank exchanges

You may have caught an extraordinary programme of interviews with Peckham’s Lost on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago. Winifred Robinson (of You and Yours) went to meet some of the teenagers of that notorious south-east London parish, and also their parents. At one point she found herself talking to the father of the boy now in jail because he was the leader of the gang who brutally killed Mary-Ann Lenehan. (She bled to death from 40 stab wounds after being sexually assaulted; her friend survived, but only just.) There was a chilling moment as Robinson probed and needled, trying to get out of him something more than the usual bland equivocation.

‘Forgive me for being impertinent,’ said Robinson, ‘but why do people bring children into the world with less thought than some people would give to getting a pet?’ The father, who on radio sounded chirpy, smiley, a decent, if disorganised, kind of guy, had fathered four children from four different mothers, two of whom were born within three months of each other.