Peter Rhodes: Just £2,000 for your Range-Rover?

JUSTICE Secretary Liz Truss has announced a new “fast track” system to remove foreign deportation dodgers within 25 days of their claims being rejected. We'll believe that when we see it, thanks.

“HUMANITY is destined for eternity, and death is the means by which we reach that joyful beginning,” declared an archbishop on Radio Four's Prayer for the Day this week. If clerics are to be allowed to broadcast such claims, they should at least be obliged to carry the caveat that professional psychics and mediums are forced to display by law: “For entertainment purposes only.”

I WAS walking down a street the other day, clocking the cars on the drives, and realised to my surprise that more than half of them were diesels. So quite how the proposed diesel-scrappage scheme will work is anyone's guess. Figures of up to £2,000 have been bandied about for vehicles more than 10 years old, on condition you buy a cleaner non-diesel car. But who in their right mind would willingly take that sum in exchange for, say, a 2007 Range Rover which still has a book value of £10,000 or more? And can anyone guarantee that this scheme will not be hijacked by Britain's thriving car-crime industry? The theory is that tens of thousands of perfectly sound diesel vehicles will be taken off the road and crushed. But how many will be spirited away in shipping containers, to carry on polluting in some other far smoggier corner of the Third World? Whitehall's bean counters are said to be doing the sums. So, too, I bet are the ungodly.

THE world's oldest person, Emma Morano, has died aged 117 in northern Italy. These so-called supercentenarians rarely agree on the reasons for their long lives. One will advocate being teetotal while another will swear by a daily double whisky. One will praise chocolate but another will say it's all due to pickled shark meat or yak yoghurt. Mrs Morana attributed her great age to her family's genes, two raw eggs a day and chucking out her abusive husband in 1938. Take your pick.

A TRIBUNAL in Australia has ruled that a former sailor who died of cancer became a heavy smoker thanks to “peer pressure” when he joined the navy as a teenager in the 1970s. If this does not set alarm bells ringing in our own Ministry of Defence, it should. Through two world wars and the Cold War and well into the 1980s, the five-minute break that British squaddies took on route marches or manoeuvres was always known as the smoke break. Institutionalised smoking has a lot to answer for and I bet the lawyers are already on the case.

I LIKE to think we live in an open and informed society. But the sudden death of Tim Pigott-Smith was reported on April 7 and 13 days later (at the time of writing), we still knew nothing about the circumstances. One of Britain's best-loved actors has simply vanished at the relatively early age of 70 without any explanation. While the grief and privacy of the family must be respected, we surely deserve to know more.