Recently by Robert Weatherall

When I was a cub reporter on my first newspaper I made a mistake at work. I wrote something about someone which wasn't true. I wrote it in good faith and with the best of intentions but because it wasn't true they sued the newspaper.

My editor eventually settled out of court for a few grand and I got a damn good bollocking for cocking up and costing the company money. He later told me I was lucky to keep my job over the mistake.

In the real world, the world of market forces that's how it should be. If you make a big enough mistake you should be out on your ear. Not in the cushy world of the public sector though.....

It’s not often you’ll hear me defending a member of the Royal Family. I think the lot of them without exception are a bunch of over privileged freeloaders who take millions from this country each year and give nothing back.

There have been plenty of times I have been tempted to phone up the benefits hotline and report them for being a family who have millions in their personal bank accounts yet continue to live off benefits in a massive council house but I don’t think I would be taken seriously. However I must stand up in defence of Phil The Greek……

One of the worst parts of being a reporter is having to deal with people who are politely described in newsrooms as ‘nutters’. Every newsroom in the UK will have a steady stream of nutters who either phone up on a regular basis or call into reception and demand to see a reporter.

These nutters usually come in with stories about UFOs, claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of the Queen, say they have sat on an airplane next to Elvis or any other variety of bizarre and wonderful tales.....

It was Edmund Burke who said “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.� It’s something which has often been cited when people explain how fascist and tyrannical governments have sprung up all over the world during the course of history.

But it also explains why the UK is in such a sorry state as it is today. Graffiti, vandalism, cyclists who ride on pavements in busy shopping centres while old ladies with zimmer frames have to dart out of the way, litter, people who insist on talking on their mobile despite being in the designated quiet coach of a train.

These are things which are becoming increasingly common and they are becoming so because we as a society allow the scum to get away with it un-chastised – this in their mind validates their actions and they repeat them and become bolder. Well this week I decided I wouldn’t take it any more and fought back….

There are a lot of civil libertarians and do gooders out there who are constantly complaining the Government is encroaching on our privacy as individuals.

They point to things such as the UK having the highest number of CCTV cameras than any other country, identity cards and plans to compel every driver to have a satellite navigation tracking system put in their car as evidence of a future Big Brother state.

That’s Big Brother in the correct context - not a state where some slapper from London shoves a wine bottle inside herself for the entertainment of the nation.

Anyway I am beginning to think these left wing whingers may have a point. I always thought that we lived in a tolerant society where adults were free to engage in whatever they wanted as long as it was behind closed doors and they didn’t hurt anyone in the process.

Not so in the case of Scotsman Robert Stewart. In the same week a judge allowed vile paedophile Chris Langham out of jail so he could spend Christmas with the kids Robert has been placed on the sex offenders register for pleasuring himself in private...

Its every parents (barring Kate and Gerry McCann) instinct to do all they can to protect their children. But there can be such a thing as being overprotective. Asking people to shower while wearing clothes sounds like something that could have been conjured up during the height of Victorian prudishness.

But it is actually the latest example of this country’s inexplicable and irrational fear that there is a paedophile on every street corner just waiting to pounce on our children the moment we let them out of our sight.

The latest overreaction comes from a group of (no doubt) middle class do-gooders who between shopping for organic humus at Sainsburys have nothing better to do in life than read the Daily Express and believe everything in it before drumming up a petition and demanding that SOMETHING must be done….

I don’t really trust Blue Peter. I never have. Ever since I was a little child there has been something about the programme which has always rankled with me.

Each week seeing Mark Curry (a ginger four eyes), Peter Duncan (actor who exposed all on screen) or Sarah Greene (married to ludicrous jumper wearing Mike Smith) making perfect models out of cardboard and sticky back plastic while I ended up making something that looked more like the remains of Hiroshima after the bomb I knew the programme wasn’t to be trusted.

Earlier this year they admitted the phone voting scandal and now they have been caught at it again. And it’s nothing new for decades the trusty Beeb have been lieing to the public. Did you know they replaced the first Blue Peter pet in a coverup? ….

The latest series of Hells Kitchen is proving to be one of the best things on television at the moment. Now I’m not usually a fan of reality TV shows. I have no interest in watching a group of nobodies strut around like Prima Donnas.

However I always find Prima Donnas acting like nobodies much more entertaining and that is why celebrity versions are always better.

Watching an ex boxer, ex-actress, WAG, ex-air steward and ex-comedian go toe to toe while being shouted at by a Worsel Gummage look-a-like and being ordered to ‘please respect me’ is too good to miss.

The problem though is that reality TV producers don’t like reality.

It doesn’t often happen that the American press do a better job than the British press. Especially when it comes to interrogating people in the public eye and putting difficult questions to them.

You only have to see the way they pussyfoot around their Presidents to figure that one out.

But congratulations to my transatlantic colleagues for persistently asking absent father Gerry McCann, who has been visiting the US this week in the search for his daughter, the question the British Press corps should have asked him from day one.

“Just why did you leave your three children alone in an insecure hotel room while you and your wife had an evening out at the other end of the hotel complex?��?

It seems as though standards are slipping in all areas of life. Once upon a time cabinet ministers who were even slightly implicated in the whiff of a drugs scandal would have the decency to resign their post, issue a public apology and content themselves with a backbench role.

Now the buggers are queuing up to admit they once smoked dope at university. And it’s not just the ruling classes which are letting standards slip. The criminals are letting the side down too……