A fugitive in hiding after absconding from prison has emailed his local paper to complain about its "biased" coverage. Derek Watson, sentenced to five years' jail last year on 25 charges of fraud, claimed that the Dundee Courier's report of his failure to return to Castle Huntly open prison after a week-long release was untrue.
It said that Watson had preyed on the elderly and the vulnerable. "This is most certainly not true," Watson said in his email. But a spokesman for the paper pointed out that among Watson's victims were a 73-year-old woman and a 79-year-old man.
The poor man. I hope he has read the Human Rights Act and is ready to sue.
Jonathan Ross appears to be a typical example of his kind - an arrogant bully who perceives no sense of public duty despite being paid vast fortunes from the public purse. And the BBC is stonewalling in the hope the affair will blow over.
In these circumstances, the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee should summon Mr Ross, Mr Brand, the BBC Director General and all the other senior management involved. It's time they were all brought down a peg or two and shown that as recipients of the public's money, they must explain themselves to the public.
Preening and conceited Mr Ross might well be in his BBC comfort zone, but if he were to be summoned by the House of Commons to give evidence, I bet he'd crumble before our eyes.
Piers Morgan seems to me to be spot on in his judgement:
Russell Brand...is almost an irrelevance in this.
He's just a sex-obsessed ex-junkie, a pre-Raphaelite version of Bernard Manning who will say literally anything to make a cheap tabloid headline, however lewd, crude or downright disgusting. I wouldn't expect anything else from him.
But Jonathan Ross is different. He is the highest-paid star in BBC history, their flagship hero, a man given £18million of taxpayers' money to amuse and entertain the nation on the airwaves. Dwell on that amount for a few seconds while you work out how to pay this week's food and petrol bills.
What you probably don't expect for all that hard-earned cash is that Ross will use it to abuse and insult a kind, gentle, well-loved, 78-year-old actor with gratuitous sexual sneers about his granddaughter.
Yesterday I went in to a NatWest to pay in two cheques: one for £203.64 and one for £90. I filled out the paying-in slip and put the total down as £293.64. The cashier looked at my skip and informed that my maths was wrong: "That's £283.64, not £293.64". After a moment of stunned silence, I pointed out that I was right.: "If you add 90 to 200 you get 290".
This did not convince the cashier, who sneered at me: "Your cheques come to £283.64".
Eventually I got him to ask the cashier next to him, who giggled when she pointed out that I was right.
I think I might have experienced the banking industry's problems in microcosm.
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