Crime

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Crime fiction – review

‘We no longer believe in God but hope nevertheless for miracles,’ remarks Frederic Mordaunt, one of the characters of John Harwood’s third novel, The Asylum (Cape, £14.99). He’s being over-optimistic, as Georgina Ferrers, the niece of a London bookseller, soon discovers when she wakes in a strange bed to be told that her name is in fact Lucy Ashton and that the year is 1882.  It appears that she has admitted herself as a voluntary patient at Tregannon House, a Cornish mental asylum run by the charismatic Dr Straker. Tregannon, the ancestral home of the Mordaunt family, is tainted with madness; and the young heir, Frederic, assists Dr Straker in

Tuesday

Steerpike

The fake-sheik strikes again, with Tulisa in the clink

The ‘fake-sheik’ has pulled off another classic sting operation, worthy of his time at the News of the World. Mazher Mahmood can add Tulisa Contostavlos, the ‘musician’ turned X-Factor judge, to his hit list today after she was arrested ‘by appointment’ earlier this afternoon following allegations of drug dealing made in The Sun on Sunday. Tulisa and a 35-year-old man are being held in custody in central London. As the summer breeze blows begins to away the chill caused by Sir Brian Leveson, it seems that newspapers are increasingly willing to take risks. This will come as blow for our grubbier celebrities and politicians, who have had an easy ride for the last

Thursday

Leo McKinstry

Less alcohol, fewer drugs: how the British seem to be shedding their harmful habits

Gripped by his habitual despair, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend in 1872, ‘I am appalled at the state of society. I’m filled with the sadness that must have affected the Romans of the 4th century. I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth.’ Warming to his bleak scatological theme, he continued, ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.’ Many commentators would feel that exactly the same words could be applied to modern Britain. According to the pessimistic narrative of national decline, Britain is now drowning in

Thursday

Toby Young

The thrill of the chase

I was in my garden office on Monday afternoon when I heard a loud noise behind me, as if someone had jumped over the back fence. Seconds later, a strange man walked past the window. I emerged gingerly from my office and found myself face to face with a giant. At first glance, he looked like a basketball player: mixed race, about 6ft 5, in his mid-twenties and built like an athlete. ‘Can I help you?’ I asked. Instead of replying, he vaulted on to the roof of my tool shed and dropped down into my neighbour’s garden. I ran up to the house, told my wife to call the

Andrew Taylor

Crime fiction reviewed by Andrew Taylor

An epigraph taken from Goebbels’s only published novel certainly makes a book stand out from the crowd. A Man Without Breath (Quercus, £18.99) is the ninth instalment in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, which examines the rise, fall and aftermath of Nazi Germany through the eyes of a disillusioned Berlin detective. By 1943, the tide of war is turning. Bernie, now working from the German War Crimes Bureau, is despatched to the neighbourhood of Smolensk, where a wolf has dug up human remains in the Katyn forest. Is this a mass grave of Polish officers murdered by the Russians? If so, the Wehrmacht is more than happy to conduct a

Friday

Charles Moore

If a policeman stops you, accuse him of raping you and force him to arrest himself.

Now that virtually any well-known male entertainer of a certain age is arrested for alleged sexual offences, it is becoming clear that this is more a culture war than a set of proper criminal investigations. This does not necessarily mean that all the allegations are false — look at Stuart Hall — but it does suggest that a new way has been found of ruining people’s reputations before anyone has established their guilt. The undeniable fact that so many of the men accused wore deplorable clothes in public all through the 1970s is not, in itself, proof of iniquity. Enraged by Leveson, the press argue that naming people being investigated for sex

Thursday

The Spectator

The hidden shame of Britain’s crime statistics

The press, declared Lord Leveson, must not be allowed to mark its own homework. There is one profession, however, which the government seems quite happy to allow to judge its own success. Every few months we are presented with the latest set of crime statistics and invited to believe that crime is falling, clear-up rates are improving and so on. It would be much more convincing if the figures for recorded crime were not themselves compiled by the police — a group with a rather obvious vested interest in presenting those figures in the best possible light. A set of figures teased out of the police this week presents a

Tuesday

Mary Hannity

Schroder – one man’s journey into night

Erik Schroder is an East German who last saw his mother when he was five years old. In 1975 only his unspeaking father crossed the Wall with him into West Berlin and on to America. It is here that Erik Schroder becomes Eric Kennedy – his fateful, fictional second skin. It is Kennedy, deflecting wide-eyed enquiries in to his ancestry with a modest shrug (‘I wanted a hero’s name’), who is accepted in to college, who gets a job in real estate, who marries a woman named Laura and has a daughter named Meadow. But after the failure of this marriage, it is Schroder who kidnaps Meadow and takes her

Steerpike Steerpike

Stolen books returned to Lambeth Palace. You read it first in the Spectator

Congratulations to the Guardian for being one fortnight behind the news. The paper’s website reports that a deceased thief returned 1,400 stolen books to Lambeth Palace’s library. The citizens of King’s Place are trying to pass this wonderful story off as news; but attentive readers will know that it first appeared in the Spectator’s spring books special on 13 April. The Guardian has neglected to mention that we beat them to this scoop by a mere 714 hours. We forgive their oversight. They remain, just, among the competition, and we know that needs must when the devil drives.

Friday

David Blackburn

Cricket is more than a game

Does this advert ring a bell? It showed a handsome young man hitting a cricket ball far into the distance. It appeared on the Tube last spring. The tagline read: ‘How far can you hit it, Rory?’ The advert said that the young man was Rory Hamilton-Brown, captain of Surrey County Cricket Club. It urged commuters to watch his team play. It suggested glamour and clamour; neither of which is associated with stolid county cricket. Something was afoot. Hamilton-Brown had been appointed three years earlier, aged 22, to rejuvenate Surrey, a once great club wandering in the wilderness. He was the youngest captain in the country, and one of the

Friday

Alex Massie

The Philpott case is horrific; so is the attempt to hijack it for any political purpose

The sorry truth of the Philpott case is that almost nothing can be learnt from it. Everything would be so much simpler if there were clear public policy conclusions that could be drawn from the horrors of this case. But there are not. How could there be if we’re expected to mine a case like this for meaning? It is almost always a mistake to draw firm conclusions from extreme examples of any given phenomenon. The perils of the small sample size should be well enough understood by now to make this clear. It is even dafter to presume too much on the back of a monstrous case such as

Thursday

David Blackburn

The Philpotts – what happened to Labour’s view that we should be tough on the causes of crime?

Several Labour MPs have expressed their disapproval of George Osborne’s comments about the taxpayer funding Mick Philpott’s lifestyle. For example, Andy McDonald, MP for Middlesbrough, said that welfare is a ‘completely separate discussion, it should not be had in the context of the most appalling crime of a father killing his six children. It just demonstrates how out of touch George Osborne is. He may as well make adverse comments about the entire population of a town or a religion, it’s absolute nonsense.’ The obvious problem with this is that Osborne acknowledged that they were separate issues. He said that the Philpotts’ crimes were their own responsibility, but their lifestyle, as

Friday

Camilla Swift

Crime fiction at Easter? Look no further than our Scandinavian neighbours

If you thought that winter in Britain had gone on long enough this year, then spare a thought for the Norwegians. Winters in Norway are famously long, dark and bitter, and – for those who experience them year upon year – can be incredibly boring. During one such winter, in February 1923, two Norwegians called Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie decided to alleviate their boredom by writing a book. The theme? A train robbery; or more specifically, a looting of the train to Bergen. The title of the book? The Bergen train was robbed in the night (or, in its original Norwegian: Bergenstoget plyndret i natt). Having written the book,

Thursday

Alex Massie

Scotland’s War on Clothes: Be Careful What You Wear

Welcome to Scotland, a land where freedoms of expression and other liberties are treated so seriously that the police and prosecuting authorities would never dream of monitoring and judging the clothes you wear. If that sounds like fantasy it’s because, alas, it is. Yes, this is now a country in which wearing the “wrong” kind of t-shirt will land you in court and, as likely as not, result in you being convicted of a breach of the peace. For real. I draw your attention toa recent case at the High Court of Justiciary and the opinion delivered by Lord Carloway (a man who, it might be noted in passing, thinks

Tuesday

David Blackburn

David Cameron’s immigration speech fails to capture the imagination

This morning’s papers have followed the lead of yesterday’s TV news bulletins: the prime minister’s immigration speech was not the success it might have been. The Times is lukewarm (£). The Guardian is suspicious. The Mail is derisive. And our own Douglas Murray is contemptuous of a speech which merely stated the ‘utterly obvious’. Yet again, the government has failed to convince the media. Part of the problem is that the numbers are inconclusive. The Guardian has built on yesterday evening’s BBC news reports, which claimed that only 13,000 migrants from that part of the EU have claimed JSA since 2009. This contrasts with Mr Cameron’s concerns about a widespread ‘something for nothing’

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers avoid awkward vote on foreign criminals as Tories rebel on press damages plan

The Crime and Courts Bill, which contains one half of the government’s response to the Leveson recommendations, has just passed its third reading in the House of Commons. An earlier amendment on exemplary damages, which the Mail’s James Chapman reports this evening has roused the ire of Boris Johnson, saw this group of Conservative rebels troop through the ‘No’ lobbies: Richard Bacon, Christopher Chope, Tracey Crouch, Philip Davies, Richard Drax, Nick de Bois, Andrew Percy, Mark Reckless, John Redwood, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrew Turner, Martin Vickers, Charles Walker and Sarah Wollaston. The amendment passed 530 ayes to 13 noes (the list above includes tellers Rees-Mogg and Drax, who are not listed in

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May tries to deter Tory uprising on foreign criminals

MPs are hard at work in the Chamber tonight: once they’ve finished voting on the Leveson amendments to the Crime and Courts Bill, they’ll move on to everything else in this piece of legislation. And everything else includes that amendment signed by over 100 MPs on Tory and Labour benches which limits the ability of foreign criminals to resist deportation. The Leveson debate has been a bit of a gift to ministers, as this big proposal would have enjoyed far greater attention had the Chamber not ben more exercised over press regulation. But that hasn’t stopped a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter going out from Theresa May to Conservative MPs to explain

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ministerial aides demand to support backbench vote on foreign criminals

All eyes are on what’s happening with the cross-party amendments to two bits of legislation on Leveson, but this afternoon in the Commons there could well be another row on the Crime and Courts Bill. As we reported last week, Conservative MP Dominic Raab has an amendment to the legislation which would limit the opportunities for foreign criminals to avoid deportation. It has over 100 MPs signed up to it, including Labour grandees such as David Blunkett. But I also understand that a number of Conservative PPSs have contacted their whips saying that they would like to support this amendment and that they want to be given leave to do

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Tory campaign on foreign criminals attracts huge support

Dominic Raab’s proposal to stop jailed foreign criminals avoiding deportation on the grounds of a right to family life turns out to be very popular indeed among MPs. It’s got 104 supporters currently, including 91 Conservative MPs, and will be debated as an amendment to the Crime and Courts Bill tomorrow when the legislation reaches its report stage in the House of Commons. The amendment would mean that foreign criminals can only avoid deportation if they risk being killed or tortured on their return, and is intended as a stop-gap ahead of any Tory plans to repeal the Human Rights Act or exit the European Convention on Human Rights. It

Monday

Alex Massie

The Myth of the Immigrant Benefit-Scrounger

The Sunday Express is at it again. It is outraged that Britain’s prisons contain some inmates who were not born in this country. Of course, everyone is hopping aboard the immigrant-bashing bandwagon these days. Immigration, it sometimes seems, is something to be feared, not valued. I understand the political calculation behind all this. The restrictionists have carried the day and there are few votes in seeming “soft” on immigration these days. Which is a shame. But there you have it. Nevertheless, the immigration brouhaha increasingly bears more than a passing resemblance to a moral panic. As tends to be the case, such fears are not utterly groundless but they are