A SHORT while ago I read an article about the last hangings in Britain.

At 8am sharp on August 13, 1964, Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were hanged simultaneously in separate jails – Allen in Liverpool’s Walton prison and Evans in Manchester’s Strangeways.

The two men had battered to death a friend of Evans who had refused to give them cash – to pay overdue rent and a £10 fine owed by each for a previous crime. Justice was swift. Conviction, a fruitless appeal and execution came within just over four months of the murder.

Still alive today, the widow of one of the hangmen was asked if her husband’s job had ever weighed heavily upon him. “No, no, no,” she assured her interviewer. “He believed in it – that if they’d murdered somebody that was it. I agreed with him. I still do.”

Now I read that a Bangladeshi, convicted in his own country of a double murder, for which he was sentenced to life but released after seven years, is to be allowed into this country, to join his wife and three children.

That’s thanks to the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects an individual’s “right to private and family life”.

I abhor the death penalty. But it’s impossible not to wonder if its abolition here, finally achieved in 1969, would have enjoyed any support had it been foreseen that, four decades or so down the line, today’s successor to the Home Secretary who refused the appeal of the last two murderers hanged in Britain would be issuing a visa enabling a double murderer to settle here.

“AN affront to democracy.” You really can’t improve on the Electoral Reform Society’s description of the appointment of a further 22 life peers to the House of Lords. The ranks of these unelected individuals now total 850 – 200 more than the number of MPs.

The new intake includes Bosnianborn Arminka Helic, head of recentlyresigned Foreign Secretary William Hague’s office, who came to Britain in the 1990s. No doubt Ms Helic possesses all the right qualities to be given a say in Parliament, but I’m sure that among Mr Hague’s constituents there are many wise folk bred and raised in, let’s say, Swaledale or Wensleydale, who could out-match her.

AN addendum to my recent column on the Esk Valley Railway. BR’s worst blow, cementing the damage done by the useless timetable, was to remove all but a small section of double track. This now makes it difficult to improve services. The folly was greatest at Whitby, where work has had to be done – money spent – to accommodate trains of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. They could have visited no problem had not a track and platform been made redundant.

CREDITED with the “lights-going-outall- over-Europe” remark at the start of the First World War, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey always said he couldn’t remember saying it. It’s surprising no one has tracked down when the remark was first attributed to Grey.

I suppose there was a risk poking about might undermine the perfect lead-in to “remembrance”.