Peter Rhodes: The legacy of the gallows

WITHOUT wishing to prolong the Jeremy Clarkson debate, those of you who seriously believe the great man is irreplaceable should consider the pint of beer test. It goes like this. Put your finger into a pint of beer. Take it out. If there is a hole left in the pint of beer then you are irreplaceable. To put it another way, the graveyards are full of indispensable people. There are dozens of TV presenters who could do Top Gear just as well as Clarkson. Alan Partridge, for one.

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I REPORTED a few days ago how buying a single shirt online generated no fewer than five emails from the company. Make that six. The "despatch confirmation" has just arrived.

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AMID the row about Britain's defence bill falling below two per cent of state spending, it's worth pointing out that military budgets can sometimes get out of hand. At the start of the 20^th century the Royal Navy was consuming about a quarter of the UK's entire annual budget. This probably explains why Britain had the biggest empire the world has ever seen – and the worst slums in Europe.

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MEANWHILE, as the armed forces are lined up for the paring knife, we are still committed to spending 0.7 per cent of our GDP on overseas aid. If this aid made much difference people would not resent it so much. But in 50 years the Third World has gone from a dictator-ruled, famine-stricken, genocidal mess to a genocidal, famine-stricken, dictator-ruled mess. It is traditional that we UK taxpayers supply the despots with their big, flashy German limousines. Why don't we just cut out the middle men, the bribes and the backhanders and send a cheque straight to Mercedes-Benz?

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BUT if the spending axe must fall and Britain really cannot afford an army of more than 50,000, then the sooner we give up the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar, the better.

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THIS will make you shudder. In Tudor times the homicide rate in England was about 30 people per 1,000. Today it is about one per 1,000. Why the huge decrease? New research by two academics in Canada and the United States puts it down to "genetic pacification," defined as the judicial culling of murderous DNA from the gene pool. In other words, 500 years of capital punishment ("the war on murder") weeded out England's violent genes. So the peaceful country we enjoy today is the direct result of thousands of poor sinners being hanged. It is sobering to consider that, no matter how much you are revolted by capital punishment, you may be benefiting from five centuries of the gallows.

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ALL power to the sisterhood. Men may snarl and snipe over the election but the bond of friendship between women transcends party politics. Or so you might assume from the Daily Mail TV pages which reported that columnist Sarah Vine, wife of the Tory minister Michael Gove, would be speaking on This Week (BBC1) "in defence of Justine Miliband's comments that politics is getting more personally vicious." The effect was spoiled slightly by a feature in the same edition of the Mail headlined: "Why their kitchen tells you all you need to know about the mirthless Milibands." It was a catty demolition job on the Milibands' London home, informing us: "It's the kitchen of a woman who considers domestic matters well below her pay-grade." The author? Sarah Vine.

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MEANWHILE, don't you smile to hear all those nerdy Top Gear anoraks telling the anti-Clarkson brigade to "get a life"?