You have to be very careful who you murder these days

So, another year closes and, with it, the window of opportunity for murdering transgendered people. Henceforth it will simply not be worth the effort. Hitherto you could have murdered one of these sorts of person and have been out of prison in rather less than a decade. Now, though, thanks to the Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, the tariff for murdering a transgendered person will double, to a full 30 years. In most other cases, Ken wants jail tariffs reduced or removed altogether, but when it comes to certain ‘hate crimes’ then, like Guardian leader writers, he undergoes a weird metamorphosis and becomes suddenly avid for the gallows.

Of course, trying to divine what goes through some murderer’s mind — hatred, or just a psychopathic dislike? — leaves the judicial system at the mercy of inexactitudes and vagaries. If, for example, you were to murder the transgendered artist Grayson Perry because he said something typically vapid on the BBC’s Question Time, while dressed as Little Bo Peep, I suppose you might try to argue that it was not his gender which had inflamed your senses but his political views, or perhaps his contribution to the world of art.