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Gary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty, on the evidence of blood and fibre traces, of the murder of Stephen Lawrence at Eltham in 1993. Dobson had been acquitted of the crime in 1996, but the law changed to allow a new trial to consider new evidence. A 20-year-old man charged with murdering Anuj Bidve, an Indian student, by shooting him dead in Salford on Boxing Day, when asked to confirm his name in court, said that it was ‘Psycho Stapleton’. A man shot a woman, her sister and niece in a house in Peterlee, Co Durham, and then shot himself. One policeman was sacked and 154 faced disciplinary action over their use of Facebook between 2008 and 2010. Thieves have stolen £13 million of metal from British railways in the past three years, according to the British Transport Police, including 11 miles of cabling from Bilston, in the West Midlands, one day in July.
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In the New Year honours, David Hockney, already a Companion of Honour, was appointed to the Order of Merit, to which John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia, was also appointed. Peter Bazalgette, who brought Big Brother to the television screen, was knighted, as were Geoffrey Hill, the poet, Diarmaid MacCulloch, the historian, and Paul Ruddock, the patron of the arts, who also happened to have given half a million pounds to the Conservative party. CBEs included Dannie Abse, the poet, Helena Bonham Carter, the actor, Ronnie Corbett, the television entertainer, Clive James, the writer and broadcaster, and Gerald Ronson, who served six months in jail after the Guinness scandal in 1990, but has given much of his fortune to charity. The Duke of Edinburgh walked to church on New Year’s Day, five days after being discharged from hospital, where he had had a stent fitted in a coronary artery.
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