Of doubtful benefit

Laurence Inman is not in a hopeful mood, despite receiving good news

The name Philpott will not, I suspect, be joining Crippin, Christie and Brady in the pantheon of criminal notoriety. I would be very surprised if many people remember his name at all once the summer holidays have come and gone. This is not because his crime was not serious enough, God knows. He killed six innocent children. It is because, despite all the tabloids’ insistence that he is some kind of evil Svengali with enough cosmic intelligence to tax Doctor Who on a good day, he is only an inadequate boasting dickhead.

His ‘plan’, as far as I can fathom it, was to set this fire, rescue the children and then blame the whole thing on his other partner, all in a bid to persuade a court to give him custody of the children they’d had together. He managed to persuade his wife and a mate to help him.

Now, if it had been me, there would have been two big, glaring elements I would have wanted to get clear in my head before I did anything.

First, and most important, would I be able to get a fire going and judge the intensity and spread of it accurately enough so as to leave me exactly the time-slot I would need to wake and carry six normal-sized children downstairs to safety before smoke filled the whole house ?

Second, the person I hoped to blame; can I be completely sure that she won’t have an alibi for the time of the attack? This is a huge improbability. Most people can account for where they were most of the time, supported by witnesses.

Yes, these two considerations would have been items one and two on the agenda at the pre-crime meeting.

But of course, there was no meeting, no detailed plan, no carefully-structured scenario. There was just Mick and the other two and the back of a fag packet. ‘It’ll work, don’t worry.’ ‘Okay, mate.’

These were not evil people. They cared for their children. Everybody says so.

And now, not only are those children dead, but this whole sorry mess has given the Daily Mail wing of the Tory party a rod to lash the benefit system. It couldn’t have come at a better time for them. I’d be willing to bet quite a large amount of money that a nice juicy rubbish-hospital story will appear quite soon, just as the NHS ‘reforms’ start to reveal their full nastiness.

The NHS, four weeks ago, sent me my two-yearly bowel cancer screening kit. I didn’t ask for it. You smear some fecal matter onto some cards and post them off to this place in Rugby. The result came back today. I’m normal. This is a relief to me, because cancer runs in my immediate family. In all my dealings with the NHS in this matter, no mention has been made of money. But I dread what might develop in my children’s lifetime if we let these verminous bastards and their disgusting mates in the press have their way.

‘Dear Mr Inman, your cancer screening test is due. But first you must send £100 to Healthscam Inc, Las Vegas, Nevada.’

And by then children will be dying in their dozens, scores and hundreds, of diphtheria, typhus, TB, cholera. They’ll be dying of exhaustion, up chimneys, or sweeping the road crossings.