New to this, are you? Nah, just pulling your leg. Good to see you passing by.

Pretty much, yes. That is the Mail position on everything. Police, doctors, sportspeople, teachers, MPs, bankers, shop assistants - in fact everyone but themselves and our wonderful royals - should work out of sheer vocational pride at performing a valuable service, and be content that if they've made a middle-aged woman looking a bit like Penelope Keith happy (no sniggering at the back), they've done a useful day's work.

If they bring up annoying questions such as career advancement, a living wage and so on, just remind them that in the old days, people were born with nothing, got ill, and died. A return to such certainties would do much to remove the bitterness and rancour in our society.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

Cardboard boxes are so "Old Tory", sleeping under bridges is the way forward for todays security operatives.

I'm sure the taxpayers alliance are investigating your arrangements right now.
Something's distracted them from the Barlow / Carr / K2 story.

No, don't, there's got to be a tenner in it for whichever of us shops you first.

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"Fanaticism is the only form of willpower to which the weak minded and irresolute can rise."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z23AZ7M8uA

Good questions, but not the time to ask them.

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Sick Left-wing Zealot.

So it begins.

Over the weekend, we'll see first comparisons of this case and the Matthews one. Then comparisons to Olympic athletes, which is the real face of Britain, and so on...

Depressingly predictable from here on.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

Heard this reported on the radio earlier. One thing always puzzles me about these cases, why do the police announce that they have "found a body" without saying if it's the person they're looking for? Obviously in some cases the body might be so mutilated so there may be a problem confirming the identity, but they always seem to say it. Why can't they just say it?

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

Because they may have been unable to inform close relatives; because a formal identification has not yet taken place.

So why not delay the announcement until those things are done?

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

To forestall leaks? To inform a concerned public and prevent speculation?

Neighbours and the general public were also looking for her, which couldn't be allowed to continue.
I was possibly being unfair to the Mail. Other papers are posing similar questions.

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Sick Left-wing Zealot.

The spokesman from the Met said that the house had been full searched four times, and no body was found. He was implying pretty clearly that the body had been stored elsewhere and then moved into the house, in the last 24 hours or so, which also fits in with a Sky journo's account of being in the house but not being allowed to go upstairs, where there were people moving about.

This is following a depressing pattern that is going to test the mail's sincerity (and that of others) chez Brian in the face of A Big Story and their default setting. Which is basically to create a particularly foul-tasting pot of speculative stew from by stripping the bones from the sorry ingredients that lay before them.

Dead child (possibly). Working class people. Pictured with a fag. Crack cocaine. Step-grandfather at age 37. Sarf of the river. A police investigation that might possibly raise questions when properly understood. Any more? A pinch of hooded sweatshirts, perhaps? A light garnish of manual labour?

Plain and simple, this is a human tragedy. That will not matter a jot when the temptation to snipe from the gutter becomes just too irresistible to bear.

I hope, but doubt, I'm wrong.

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Brigate di Transizione

Which are all arguments for not announcing she was missing in the first place but I don't see how finding a body changes that.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

You forgot living off benefits.