Neither poor record does anything for public confidence in the criminal justice system.¿ Coleen McLoughlin’s only claim to fame is that she is the girlfriend of the talented young footballer Wayne Rooney. They are even less successful at convicting their errant colleagues than they are at catching other criminals. It should be tackled separately by ending the unhappy situation under which the police police themselves. This issue is finally being addressed, and that is excellent.As for the fear that the police might “fit up” those it knows have committed similar crimes before – this is a quite different issue. Millions of pounds are eaten up putting to trial those who know that they are guilty, and know this will become obvious when their record is revealed. This is that the changes are at least in part designed to dissuade repeat offenders who cynically plead not guilty in the knowledge that they can tell elaborate lies to a jury that might just get them off. Frankly, it doesn’t leave an awful lot of room for manoeuvre.* One salient point is not being fully appreciated during the debate around revealing previous convictions in some trials.

Anyone who thinks that celebrity culture is moronic is a snob. Yet anyone who actually embodies all of this supposedly valuable “culture” is a chav, and is ripe for ridicule. Anyone who thinks that casino gambling is a waste of time and money is a snob Anyone who thinks that soap operas are third rate is a snob. They point to the swift, unashamed adoption of the word “chav” to denote the type of ignorant, crass oik that no one wants to live next door to, as evidence that they are right.They are But this is only half the story More or less anyone who is not a chav is a snob. Now, though, the backlash against elitism, along with the drive to excoriate those who cannot cope with intense freedom of choice, is shaping a narrow popular culture defined by its accessibility and policed only when this accessibility leads to absurd extremes.Some social commentators complain that snobbery, far from being absent in our meritocratic society, is more widespread than ever. The old paternalistic ideas promulgated by a ruling elite (even a socialist one) patronised ordinary people, and treated them like children who could not be trusted. The closest Tessa Jowell can come to rebutting this is to suggest that those who don’t like the idea of widespread gambling are driven by “snobbery”.

One of the accusations made against the Government’s plans to liberalise gambling is that Labour’s socialist forefathers would be horrified. Instead it believes in allowing people to make their own choices, protecting them not in the least from the follies their vulnerability might lead them to, but punishing them severely when disaster strikes.To a degree, this is the correct way for a free society to operate. If we have trouble with an 80-year-old being so passionate that his libido must be under constant watch, and so romantic that he trembles at the prospect of a prostitute’s embrace, that’s our miserable fault
More from Howard Jacobson. The most unwanted thing on the planet – desire in a frail old man Tragic in Tolstoy, but then Mr Cooper isn’t Tolstoy.

There’s a grandeur about him, though, and a nobility, thanks to Dr Barrett, in the telling of him. Too late for poor Mr Cooper, who developed pneumonia and died.”I wonder,” Dr Barrett speculates, “whether the months of indecision, close observation, and frustrated tension contributed to his decline.” Of course they did They killed him. No prostitute today, sorry, but maybe one another day, in an “in-patient setting”, where her effect could be scientifically monitored. Heartbreaking, because Mr Cooper was almost in the taxi – spruced up, no doubt, with a flower in his buttonhole – when social services suddenly changed its mind. Mr Cooper – and this is the heartbreaking part – grew “tremulous with anticipation”.

That we are able to enter into Mr Cooper’s excitement at the prospect of seeing a prostitute after all is thanks to Dr Barrett’s humanity He is thrillingly poetical on the subject. Because Dr Barrett had refused to lower his libido with bromide, an extra male member of staff was hired to shadow it day and night Not let it out of his sight.Not for a second Until someone, somewhere, finally relented. Nine o’clock in the morning, there they’d be, mingling with the commuters and the lecture-goers, carpet slippers on their feet, curlers in their hair, and bacon-bespattered pinafores under their coats. I will not make a fool of myself by wondering why any man would want sex at such an hour with such a person – there is no fathoming the perversities of male desire – but without doubt the ancient profession of hetaerism would be better served in this country if the filles de joie put a little more joie into it, affected sensuality even where they did not feel it, thought about the basics of enticement, took a few tips from Trinny and Susannah (who specialise in making respectable housewives dress like trollops), and generally got out more.Mr Cooper, meanwhile, not getting any, went into a decline. For some reason that I never got to the bottom of, prostitutes used to ply a morning trade outside the polytechnic I once taught at in the Black Country.