Our obsession with paedophilia is more dangerous than Gary Glitter’s return

Hello, hello, he’s back again. Although not necessarily — as the words of his 1972 hit had it — ‘on the right track’. Nobody, these past few weeks, has accused Gary Glitter of being on the right track. The lady in my local post office wants him strung up by his gonads and, from the various websites I’ve been trawling through, this a fairly popular denouement. Glitter was convicted of downloading pornographic images of children in Britain and, after he completed his briefish sentence, of sexually abusing two young girls in Vietnam, to which country he had fled. He served a longer sentence there and is now back in the UK somewhere, having failed to be admitted to China or Thailand. I can’t imagine why they didn’t want him.

Anyway, the worry now is that he will start on your kiddies, if you have any. Hell, he might already have started. He will be placed on the sexual offenders register and the Old Bill will know where he is; also, he will have to tell the police if he’s leaving the country for more than three days. But still — he’s loose and free and currently deliberating over where he might settle down. Rumour has it that it might be Hampshire, where he is currently staying with a friend, or it might be 50 or so miles away from where my children go to school. What shall I do? Give them knives? No child is safe. Luckily, however he disguises himself, he looks exactly like a paedophile is supposed to look, so we should be able to spot him as he leaps out from behind a bush bearing a bag of lemon bon bons and a drooled promise of puppies.