'Honey trap' girl convicted of Shakilus Townsend murder

A schoolgirl who acted as a “honey trap” to lure a besotted teenage boy to his death at the hands of a street gang was today convicted of murder.




Samantha Joseph, 16, led Shakilus Townsend, also 16, to a quiet cul-de-sac in south London where he was set upon by gang of teenagers who beat him with baseball bats.


He was then stabbed six times by Danny McLean, Joseph's ex-boyfriend whom she was attempting to win back.


Today after a six-week trial at the Old Bailey, Joseph, McLean, 18, and five others were found guilty of murder. They will all receive life sentences.


As the verdicts were announced Shakilus's mother Nicola Dyer 34, burst into tears. Outside court she said: “This tragedy has absolutely devastated my family. The effect it has had on his siblings has been heartbreaking.


"Although I'm sure this pain will remain with us forever, it's of some comfort today that justice has been done and those responsible will have to pay the consequences for taking my son's life."

Shakilus was killed in July last year after becoming involved in a love triangle with Joseph and McLean. McLean had split up with his younger girlfriend when he learned she had cheated on him with Shakilus, but later decided to exact revenge on his love rival.


The girl, who was only 15 at the time, was said to be prepared to do anything to win back McLean and had told friends she was only with Shakilus because he showered her with gifts.


CCTV footage from the day of the murder shows Shakilus meeting Joseph, who was wearing a see-through floral dress. She told him that she wanted to introduce him to her cousin. In reality she was luring him into a trap. While on the bus she kept in constant contact with McLean via mobile phone.


As the pair arrived at the cul-de-sac in Thornton Heath, south London, Joseph laughed as the gang members attacked Shakilus, punching and kicking him to the ground before McLean plunged his blade into Shakilus's stomach.


As Shakilus lay dying he cried out for his mother and said: “I don't want to die”. Joseph turned and walked away with McLean.


He was wearing a bright orange bandana – a colour which signals he is a member of the “Shine My Nine” gang. On the first day of the trial Joseph wore a bright orange t-shirt in court.


During the trial she admitted agreeing to lead Shakilus to the ambush, but said she believed he would only be beaten up and not killed.


Ms Dyer, giving evidence, said that she had never met Joseph but that Shakilus had shown her pictures of the girl on his mobile phone. She added: “He said he was really in love with this girl, that she was to be his future wife and that she was going to have his kids - he was really smitten with her. I can't understand how she could have callously set him up and lured him to his death."


Detective Inspector Barney Ratcliffe said Joseph had "very calculatingly brought Shakilus to the scene, knowing that he was going to get beaten up. Ever since, she has been very cold and callous about the whole incident, with no signs of emotion.”

He added: “She made various phone calls during that journey bringing Shakilus to the scene, updating the gang through McLean as to where they were going to go and what was going to happen.

"She was an integral part of of what was going to happen - if she hadn't been involved it wouldn't have happened.”

Brothers Tyrell Ellis, 19, and Don-Carlos Ellis, 18, from Thornton Heath, were also convicted of murder, together with Andrew Johnson-Haynes, a 19-year-old former public schoolboy from Croydon who played rugby for London Irish.

Two other youths, Andre Thompson and Michael Akinfenwa, both 17, were found guilty of the charge as well. The defendants were remanded to be sentenced on a date to be fixed.

Sex and the modern girl: Are we witnessing a new age of female sexual assertiveness?

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Nutrition: America awakens to the sour taste of 'pink slime'

Take a cow. Chop it into pieces. Sell the edible bits to supermarkets, ship its hide to a handbag factory, send leftover bones and organs to a rendering plant. Now, what's left? In most of the developed world, the answer is simple: pet food. The sinew, gristle and fat regarded as unfit for human consumption are taken away by Mr Pedigree Chum and turned into something the salmonella-resistant stomach of your average Labrador will find vaguely digestible.

But in America, they do food differently. Here, in the land of GM corn, 26 per cent obesity and a government which classifies pizza as a "vegetable", scientists have discovered a way to turn bacteria-ridden scraps from the abattoir floor into a substance called "pink slime", which is then sold to unwitting consumers of hamburgers, tacos and other beef-based junk products. The process involves sticking bovine off-cuts in a heated centrifuge, so they separate into a mixture of liquid fat and a putty-coloured paste. That substance is then treated with ammonium hydroxide (a chemical used in household cleaners and home-made bombs) to kill off salmonella and e-coli. Then it's mixed with regular beef and – hey presto! – you have "all natural" mince.

In 2001, it became legal to sell "pink slime" in America. Today, more than half the ground beef sold in America contains the stuff. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which supposedly regulates the food industry, does not require it to be mentioned on ingredient lists. Since its provenance is a cow, they insist, you can call it "beef". If you think that's a bit rum, you're not alone. For years, US foodies have earnestly cited "pink slime" as exhibit A in the list of liberties taken by a rapacious food industry.

Not for nothing, they argue, has the stuff been banned in Europe, where mechanically-separated meat from cows and sheep has been prohibited since the era of BSE.

It took an Englishman, however, to turn their complaints into national outrage. A year ago, Jamie Oliver jollified the US version of his Food Revolution TV show by using a cow called Scarlet and a tumble dryer to demonstrate how something he calls "crap" became a staple of the American diet. Video of his stunt was uploaded to YouTube, and shared via social media. Opposition to "pink slime" slowly built.

In January, McDonalds announced the removal of "pink slime" from its burgers. So did Burger King and Taco Bell. This month, as the product became a burgeoning national talking point, several major supermarkets went slime-free. School districts were allowed to start banning it and dozens swiftly did. Yesterday, Beef Products Inc, pink slime's leading manufacturer, shut down three of its four plants, citing swiftly cratering demand. According to the American Meat Institute, 600 jobs could now be lost.

"It's a sad day for the families," claimed a spokesman. Though not, one must presume, for their diets.

Not lovin' it: McDonald's eats humble pie after Twitter backlash

McDonald's has admitted a venture into social media backfired when a Twitter campaign designed to spread good news about the fast-food giant was hijacked by unhappy eaters.

McDonald's sent out two tweets with the hashtag #McDStories to highlight the "hard-working people" who help to produce its meals and promote the chain's use of fresh produce. One tweet from a potato supplier read: "When u make something w/pride, people can taste it".

But critics fired back with abusive tweets, incorporating the hashtag, describing their dining horror stories. They accused the company of making customers sick, serving pig meat from gestation crates and offering up a burger containing a finger nail.

The official McDonald's twitter feed was forced into an extended debate with animal rights group Peta, which accused the company of using mechanically separated chicken for its McNuggets. McDonald's said the claim was false because it only uses "USDA inspected white meat".

McDonald's had used a paid-for tweeting service to promote its hashtags to the top of Twitter's "trending" lists to try and create a buzz about the campaign.

But the company was quickly forced to abandon the #McDStories hashtag. Rick Wion, McDonald's social media director, admitted: "Within an hour, we saw that it wasn't going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course."

The campaign embarrassed McDonald's on the day when Nick Clegg visited a training centre in north London to praise the company for creating 2,500 new jobs in the UK, taking its UK workforce to 90,000.

McDonald's said that half of the new jobs would go to people under 25, but some tweeters used the #McDStories hashtag to complain that they had been laid off by the company.

Corporations are regularly advised to use social media to build "engagement" with customers but the McDonald's backlash will give pause for thought.

Last year the Wendy's fast-food chain launched a Twitter hashtag, HeresTheBeef, which was aimed at sparking positive comments but only prompted similar mockery from the company's critics.

Revealed: the top 100 'crap' towns in Britain

Edinburgh, Bath and Oxford may be many people's idea of fine cities, pleasant places to live and work, and much visited by tourists. However, to others they are simply, well, crap.

Highly regarded towns and cities such as Brighton, Stratford-upon-Avon and Windsor are now consigned to a new list of Britain's "Crap Towns", alongside more predictable and much-criticised inner-city and suburban destinations like Hackney and Basingstoke.

Their inclusion is based on the nominations by hundreds of members of the public for inclusion in a new book, Crap Towns 11: The Nation Decides, due to be published later this year. The book will reveal the winner from the shortlist of 100 undesirable places to live.

CT11 is a successor to the original Crap Towns, a surprise hit when published last October, and which has sold more than 120,000 copies. In that book, Hull had the dubious distinction of topping the table of 50 towns.

The compiler of both books, journalist Sam Jordison, says the inclusion of towns previously thought desirable places just goes to show that nowhere is exempt from being actively disliked by visitors and residents.

"I don't think its possible to find an ideal town. Everywhere has the capacity to make people pissed off. But I think that there's an element of affection in this for the places we know and have been brought up in. By describing somewhere as crap, its like saying 'this could be a nice place, if only they hadn't done this or that to it','' he said.

"I'm surprised we haven't had more nominations for some obvious places like Watford and Hartlepool, but there is still plenty of time. I think in the first book we only really scratched the surface of people's hatred of these places."

The idea for Crap Towns came after Mr Jordison wrote a short article for The Idler, a small magazine dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, criticising his home town of Morecambe in Lancashire for its "desolate" promenades. He was inundated with responses from all over the country and eventually edited them into the first book. Then, said Mr Jordison, people kept asking why, for instance, Luton had not been included, and so the second will be even more based on the nominations of the public.

These include such opinions as this angry contributor's verdict on Bath: "Essentially a retirement town with an unpleasant amount of students. The centre of this beautiful city is basically a concrete trench lined with McDonald's restaurants and vicious teenagers idly playing with lock knives. In the summer it fills to the brim with loud tourists who clog the narrow streets like the coagulated grease in a Scotsman's arteries. In the winter, the only escape is incest."

And another's description of Windsor: "The big thing about Windsor is that its townsfolk believe that, by living near the castle, they are more or less royalty themselves. Indeed, once Windsor women pass the age of 60, they seem to lose the plot altogether and convince themselves they actually are the Queen."

More out of the way places do not escape criticism. The town of Cleator Moor in Cumbria has "one long, infinitely desolate main street full of dangerous pubs, smashed up cars and heavily fortified shops ... the few bored inhabitants drift around like tumbleweeds"; while Thorpeness in Suffolk is "more of a golf club than a town ... the apotheosis of middle-England snobbery."

And the affluent suburb of Kew in west London is "populated by big bankers with receding hairlines and exploding girths ... the sticky cherry on top of affluent Richmond's already calorie-filled cake"; while neighbouring Hanwell is condemned for being the place where "Deep Purple first perfected their hard rock genius".

The winner, to be announced in October, will be decided not simply by the number of votes cast - that is because central London would win by a long way - but by balancing them against the relative size of the place. Mr Jordison adds: "It's all a pretty unscientific and arbitrary process, but I think it demonstrates that almost anywhere has the potential to be crap."

Murdoch company in pay-TV piracy scandal 'paid Surrey Police'

The News Corp subsidiary at the heart of claims it used computer hackers to crack rivals' technology made a £2,000 payment to a British police force for "assistance given to us in our work", The Independent can reveal.

NDS, a London-based specialist in satellite television encryption technology, said yesterday that a payment made to Surrey Police in the summer of 2000 was a “charitable donation” for which it had received a written acknowledgement.

But a cache of 14,000 internal emails belonging to the London-based company shows that its deputy head of security, Len Withall, asked for a cheque to be drawn for £2,000 as payment for “some work” he had been doing with the force over the previous six months.

Mr Withall, who was a former detective chief inspector with Surrey Police before joining NDS in the early 1990s, asked for the payment to be made from a special budget “set aside to Police/Informants for assistance given to us in our work”.

Surrey Police, which was rocked last year by revelations linked to the News of the World’s hacking of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s mobile phone, said it could not find a record of the payment on its accounting records but was conducting further investigations.

Payments to police by private companies are not illegal and are made frequently for events such as the policing of a football match.

But the revelation that a corner of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was seeking to pay a British police force for unspecified work will fuel the controversy surrounding allegations that NDS supplied the encryption codes of rival companies to hackers in several countries, including Britain, who then created pirated “smart cards” for sale on the black market.

NDS, which is being sold to computing giant Cisco for a $5bn in a deal which is expected to net News Corp $1bn, has issued a comprehensive statement strongly denying that it promoted piracy or provided any codes to hackers, saying it was in contact with them only to gather intelligence on their activities and assist law enforcement bodies. It has successfully defended four claims from rivals complaining their business was damaged by its activities.

The NDS email cache, published yesterday in Australia by the Australian Financial Review, suggests that the company was also prepared to pay police in return for their assistance. The payment was first identified by the BBC’s Panorama but it was not included in this week’s programme outlining allegations about the activities of NDS in Britain after Surrey Police failed to confirm it.

In a message written at 9.27am on 9 June 2000 with the subject title “Cheque for Police”, Mr Withall outlined the reasons for the payment, mentioning that it would need to be authorised by his superior, Ray Adams, a former commander in the Metropolitan Police and its one-time head of criminal intelligence.

Mr Withall wrote: “Over the last six months, I have been doing some work with the Surrey Police. In our budget under code 880110 there is an amount set aside for payment to Police/Informants for assistance given to us in our work. With Ray’s authority, could you please make out a cheque in the sum of £2,000 payable to the Surrey Police and forward it to my office.”

The Australian Financial Review, which yesterday produced a fresh barrage of allegations about the business activities of NDS in Australia, said it had received a demand from London law firm Allen & Overy on behalf of the company asking for the email cache to be removed because it contained confidential details about NDS staff.

When The Independent yesterday approached NDS asking about the nature of a payment made to Surrey Police, the company said in a statement: “This was a one-off charitable donation of £2000 to Surrey police in August 2000. NDS’ support and donation was acknowledged with a thank you from Surrey Police.”

After being provided with details of Mr Withall’s email, the company said: “Thank you for pointing out the copy of the email from the 9th June 2000 that highlighted a request made by the appropriate channels to our finance department. The payment was a charitable donation and we have a letter of thanks from Surrey Police to confirm that.”

Mr Withall did not respond to a request last night to comment on his email.

In a statement Surrey Police said: “Surrey Police has been made aware of an apparent payment of £2,000 made by NDS to the Force in August 2000. We are currently making further enquiries regarding this matter.”

Under so-called “private hire” rules, police forces can be requested to provide officers for duties such as the policing of large public events such as sports matches or music festivals. Such arrangements are governed by strict rules of transparency and it would be unusual for a company to have to pay officers carrying out law enforcement work.

The requested payment to Surrey Police by NDS, whose global headquarters is located in Staines, a part of west London which falls under the responsibility of the Surrey force, is part of a pattern of links between the company and law enforcement bodies around the world which have proved a valuable recruiting ground for the News Corp subsidiary.

As well as recruiting former British police officers, the company has employed former members of the Israeli security services, including the former deputy head of the Shin Bet domestic security service, and an American Army intelligence officer.

In separate development, the Australian Federal Police also revealed yesterday that it was assisting Scotland Yard with its inquries following a referral “in relation to News Corp” received at the height of the News of the World phone hacking scandal last summer.

Universities in crisis as student numbers fall

Colleges that have offered most to poorer students will be biggest losers as impact of fees bites

More than 30 universities are facing a 10 per cent fall in student numbers this autumn, according to figures released today.

A breakdown of next year's university budgets shows that middle-ranking universities and former polytechnics will suffer as a result of the new funding system, which will see tuition fees rise to up to £9,000 a year.

Worst hit, according to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, will be the University of East London and the University of Bedfordshire, which are likely to suffer falls of 12 per cent. In all, 34 universities in England will have their student numbers cut by at least 10 per cent. HEFCE estimates there will be 10,900 fewer student places across the country. Academics said it was universities who had done the most to open themselves up to disadvantaged groups that appeared to be suffering the worst cuts.

By contrast, most of the members of the Russell Group – which represents most of the country's leading research institutions – are set to expand student numbers. Michael Driscoll, chairman of the million+ university think tank and vice-chancellor of Middlesex University, said the overwhelming majority of institutions were losing student places.

"These allocations show the true extent of the Coalition's reform of fees and funding and the cutback in the overall number of university places being funded," he said.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, added: "At a time when record numbers of people are out of work, the Government should be making it easier for people to access education."

Although overall student numbers have been cut, under the new system universities can recruit beyond their fixed target so long as they take in students with at least two As and a B at A-level. In addition, 20,000 places have been set aside for higher education providers charging less than £7,500 a year.

As a result, elite universities with a higher percentage of AAB students tend to benefit, as do further education colleges charging lower fees. An extra 65 such colleges are receiving funding for higher education degrees for the first time.

According to HEFCE, just over 10,000 of the 20,000 places for low charging universities have gone to further education colleges. The shake-up appears to have created a "squeezed middle" among universities, which are unlikely to recruit large numbers of AAB students but are still charging higher fees.

Sir Alan Langlands, chief executive of HEFCE, said he did not believe the changes would see universities "going into substantial financial problems". "All of these can cope with this level of reduction," he added. He said they were all "confident they can ride it out".

A new serif in town: The fonts used on London's signs and shops have an army of fans

It's the dots that do it, on the "i's". Except that they're not dots at all, but diamonds. The adornments on an otherwise beautifully simple typeface are an identifying quirk of Johnston Sans, a font that is as synonymous with London as Big Ben. It has become known as the "handwriting" of the city, but can you identify it? Did you even know its name?

Antony Harrington is obsessed with type. It is partly the job of successful fonts to be invisible and as such they are usually overlooked. Johnston Sans, as it happens, is the font of London Underground. Harrington wants everyone to know this and is inviting fellow enthusiasts to draw a typographic map of the capital. He wants to use modern technology to record great or endangered examples of lettering to show the unique and quiet way the words around us can help shape the identity of a place and how we feel about it.

I meet Harrington, a partner at a branding and design company in north London, outside the Covent Garden Tube station, where lunchtime shoppers steer a course around two men behaving strangely. We are doing what few Londoners ever do, looking up to admire the Underground's unmistakable roundel sign, as well as the more ornate typeface used on the station's façade. After a few minutes I reach for my phone, start the app Harrington has devised and take a photo. I write a caption and upload the image to the London Typographica website, where it is added to a map of the city now dotted with examples of type.

Harrington admits to being a font geek, but says there's a reason we should all look with fresh eyes at the words in our own towns and cities. "Typefaces work well as little milestones," he says. "They anchor a building to a time and a function, whether it's commercial or social, and this is a heritage worth preserving."

Edward Johnston was commissioned in 1913 to design a unifying font for an underground network still made up of lines owned by different companies. Using a quill at his studio in Sussex, he ignored the conventions of the time to design a typeface of startling simplicity. It was among the first functional fonts to communicate only information but nothing about class or education and first appeared on posters in 1916. It has survived minor tweaks to appear as clean and as modern today as it did on the drawing board 100 years ago, diamonds included. Johnston also inspired, directly or otherwise, several other sans serif fonts (serifs are the little flourishes that appear at the end of the strokes in, for example, Tiempos, the typeface you're reading now; it's Georgia if you're online. Sans serif type does away with these marks).

Gill Sans, designed by Eric Gill, a student of Johnston's, became the font of the old British Railways and, now, the BBC logo. Helvetica, a Swiss font designed in 1957, has been embraced by corporations and cities and, in New York City, is as strongly associated with the subway as Johnston is with the Tube.

Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type, a book about fonts, says the letters on signs as well as shopfronts and buildings have a crucial and increasingly overlooked role. "You should be able to be parachuted into any city in Europe and know where you are instantly from seeing the typeface," he says. "You can land at a London airport and know you're there because you see Gill Sans everywhere." But Garfield says the power of type to characterise a place is threatened by the digital drop-down menu. "Since computers arrived, type has become internationally homogenised," he says. "In the old days someone would come up with a typeface and great metal blocks had to be carted around. Now someone designs a typeface in Hawaii and gives it to a big typographical sales bureau and it's all over the world within a day.

"If you're branding a place today you go with the font everyone else has gone with – and only a few of these have an impact."

In some cases the fonts that once marked out cities face a physical threat. From Covent Garden Tube station, Harrington guides me down Long Acre, one of the area's busiest shopping streets. We're following a route originally charted by Phil Baines, a professor of typography at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. "Can you see it?" Harrington asks as we stop to look up at a branch of H&M. "See what?" And then, like a camera coming into focus, my eyes begin to see the ghostly remnants of words in the stone: "London's favourite fruiterers, T Walton & Sons (London) Ltd."

The shapes are the shadows left by metal letters that once identified this handsome building, which stands a few cartwheels away from the old Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market. "It won't be long before that disappears completely," Harrington says. We take a photograph and record the ghost font on Harrington's website, before continuing our walk.

If the modern typographic landscape fails to distinguish cities as it once did, one man is trying to preserve the role of the font, casting himself as a modern-day Edward Johnston. Jeremy Dooley is a type designer who lives in Chattanooga, a small city in the southern American state of Tennessee. Once known as one of America's most polluted cities, Dooley says it's now a thriving centre for a creative industry that struggles to separate itself. In 2012, Dooley wondered, could a font help a city make a comeback?

Dooley joined forces with a fellow type designer, Robbie de Villiers, to create Chatype, unveiled this year. "By creating a custom font for the city we wanted it to immediately say, in every application, this is Chattanooga," Dooley says. "We wouldn't even need to say it – it would be subliminally communicated."

Dooley says the design of a city font is "as important as picking the colours in a flag". His font combines the city's Native American heritage with its industrial past and entrepreneurial, creative present. Chatype has already been used by a handful of Chattanoogan businesses and Dooley has had good feedback from the city's authorities.

"Chattanooga already has a vernacular language but not one that distills down into a font," Dooley says. "And we're big on distilling in Tennessee."

It was not always clear what the designers of the last font on Harrington's tour were trying to achieve. We have walked from Covent Garden down St Martin's Lane, where we nip down May's Court, an alley, to admire the vast Art Nouveau letters built in stone which mark the London Coliseum, the home of the English National Opera. At Trafalgar Square we pause at the clock installed to count the seconds until the 2012 Olympics. When London revealed its Olympic logo in 2007 it was ridiculed.

The more recent unveiling of 2012 Headline, the official Olympic font, passed more quietly but its shouty angles and jaunty slant have not won it many fans. Garfield calls it "surely the worst new public typeface for 100 years". Harrington was similarly unimpressed but has since changed his mind. "I think it's a stroke of genius," he says. "They've managed to predict a feeling, that we'd grow into the type. There's a vibrancy to it and an emotional impact." Most importantly, Harrington says, "when you look at it now, you think London".

Revealed: the top 100 'crap' towns in Britain

Edinburgh, Bath and Oxford may be many people's idea of fine cities, pleasant places to live and work, and much visited by tourists. However, to others they are simply, well, crap.

Highly regarded towns and cities such as Brighton, Stratford-upon-Avon and Windsor are now consigned to a new list of Britain's "Crap Towns", alongside more predictable and much-criticised inner-city and suburban destinations like Hackney and Basingstoke.

Their inclusion is based on the nominations by hundreds of members of the public for inclusion in a new book, Crap Towns 11: The Nation Decides, due to be published later this year. The book will reveal the winner from the shortlist of 100 undesirable places to live.

CT11 is a successor to the original Crap Towns, a surprise hit when published last October, and which has sold more than 120,000 copies. In that book, Hull had the dubious distinction of topping the table of 50 towns.

The compiler of both books, journalist Sam Jordison, says the inclusion of towns previously thought desirable places just goes to show that nowhere is exempt from being actively disliked by visitors and residents.

"I don't think its possible to find an ideal town. Everywhere has the capacity to make people pissed off. But I think that there's an element of affection in this for the places we know and have been brought up in. By describing somewhere as crap, its like saying 'this could be a nice place, if only they hadn't done this or that to it','' he said.

"I'm surprised we haven't had more nominations for some obvious places like Watford and Hartlepool, but there is still plenty of time. I think in the first book we only really scratched the surface of people's hatred of these places."

The idea for Crap Towns came after Mr Jordison wrote a short article for The Idler, a small magazine dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, criticising his home town of Morecambe in Lancashire for its "desolate" promenades. He was inundated with responses from all over the country and eventually edited them into the first book. Then, said Mr Jordison, people kept asking why, for instance, Luton had not been included, and so the second will be even more based on the nominations of the public.

These include such opinions as this angry contributor's verdict on Bath: "Essentially a retirement town with an unpleasant amount of students. The centre of this beautiful city is basically a concrete trench lined with McDonald's restaurants and vicious teenagers idly playing with lock knives. In the summer it fills to the brim with loud tourists who clog the narrow streets like the coagulated grease in a Scotsman's arteries. In the winter, the only escape is incest."

And another's description of Windsor: "The big thing about Windsor is that its townsfolk believe that, by living near the castle, they are more or less royalty themselves. Indeed, once Windsor women pass the age of 60, they seem to lose the plot altogether and convince themselves they actually are the Queen."

More out of the way places do not escape criticism. The town of Cleator Moor in Cumbria has "one long, infinitely desolate main street full of dangerous pubs, smashed up cars and heavily fortified shops ... the few bored inhabitants drift around like tumbleweeds"; while Thorpeness in Suffolk is "more of a golf club than a town ... the apotheosis of middle-England snobbery."

And the affluent suburb of Kew in west London is "populated by big bankers with receding hairlines and exploding girths ... the sticky cherry on top of affluent Richmond's already calorie-filled cake"; while neighbouring Hanwell is condemned for being the place where "Deep Purple first perfected their hard rock genius".

The winner, to be announced in October, will be decided not simply by the number of votes cast - that is because central London would win by a long way - but by balancing them against the relative size of the place. Mr Jordison adds: "It's all a pretty unscientific and arbitrary process, but I think it demonstrates that almost anywhere has the potential to be crap."

News in pictures

Tanker drivers' strike talks to begin next week as panic buying continues to spread

Despite increasingly feverish panic buying of fuel and an escalating row over government advice, no further talks will be held to resolve the tanker drivers' dispute until Monday it was announced this afternoon.

Acas officials said today they have been in contact with the seven distribution companies involved in the dispute as well as the union Unite.

An Acas spokesman said:

“We are now in the process of receiving more detailed briefings from the parties on the various issues underpinning the dispute. This will enable us to determine more clearly the form substantive talks should take to provide the best opportunity for a negotiated settlement.

”We should conclude that process by Monday and would then hope substantive discussions would follow shortly afterwards.“

The announcement followed a day of panic buying across the country, which caused the closure of some petrol stations as demand for fuel from worried motorists soared.

It was estimated by the AA today that the revenue from the spike in fuel sales could result in an extra £32m in extra excise duty.

Across the country motorists queued for petrol.

In Dorset police called for petrol stations to temporarily close where there is queueing because of panic buying.

And in Hampshire police were forced to issue a statement saying there were no fuel shortages in the county, a rumour they claimed was being spread on the internet.

The Petrol Retailers Association, which represents around 5,500 garages, reported a sharp rise in petrol sales of 81% with sales of diesel also up by 43%

There was also a sharp rise in the sale of jerry cans as worried motorists took the advice of Cabinet minister Francis Maude to stockpile fuel.

The rise in prices comes against the backdrop of confused advice from the government on how motorists should prepare for the - as yet unconfirmed - tanker drivers' strike.

Labour leader Ed Miliband called on the Prime Minister to apologise after the government issued conflicting messages to motorists.

“The prime minister is presiding over a shambles on petrol. The country is paying the price for the incompetent way he is governing,” he said.

Brian Madderson, chairman of the Petrol Federation, today gave his response to the government advice to stockpile petrol, telling Radio 4’s The World at One,

”This government appears intent on creating a crisis out of a serious concern.“

A spokesman for the Petrol Retailers Association, which represents around 5,500 outlets, also attacked the Government advice to keep vehicles filled up, and Minister Francis Maude’s suggestion that the public should keep jerry cans in their garages saying,

”This is exactly what we didn't want - people panic buying. Deliveries are still being made to garages and we are advising people to continue with their normal buying habits.“

As the union concerned, Unite, would have to give seven days notice of any strikes - industrial action over the Easter period is looking increasingly unlikely.

Some 90% of UK forecourts are supplied by about 2,000 drivers in the Unite union.

The Energy Minister, Ed Davey, today advised motorists to top-up their vehicles with fuel when they are half empty.

Speaking to the BBC Mr Davey said,

"I think our major advice is that people just need to do the sensible thing if they're going into the petrol station, they should get a full tank of petrol, not a half-tank of petrol, and they should top up where necessary."
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      murdochlies 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

      Fuel duty going up again in a few weeks. A disgraceful budget for the millionaires. The granny tax, pasty tax, more VAT. Economy getting worse by the day, £250,000 for a nice meal with Sam and Cam.
      Lets bury the news and take peoples simple little minds of things.

      No petrol, buy, buy, buy, hoard up, stock up or you will die. Panic, panic, panic. That should keep them off our case for a while.
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      Lynda Davies 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

      Alright for Ed Davey to say fill your tank up - where's the money coming from I haven't been able to fill my tank up for months due to the increasing costs of petrol and the reduction in my available pension. How out of touch this government are. I live about 1 1/2 from the nearest petrol station and can't waste petrol driving there on the off-chance they still have some petrol left.

Ten adverts that shocked the world

Advertising is a world in which the normal is beautified, cracks are airbrushed over and real-life is portrayed with rose tinted glasses. And all with the intention of getting the consumers to buy into such ideals.

It is all the more uncomfortable therefore when advertisers seek to shock rather than tantalise, although the effect can be incredible as we have seen today, following the controversy sparked by a French anti-smoking group's poster campaign (right).

We've picked nine other controversial advertising campaigns to test how the shock factor compares.

Most voters see Tories as the party of the rich

The cash-for-access scandal engulfing David Cameron has inflicted deep damage on the Conservative Party's standing, according to a ComRes survey for The Independent.

The polling gives Labour a 10-point lead over the Tories, the highest in a ComRes survey for seven years. But, significantly, in interviews conducted since the affair emerged on Sunday, Labour was a remarkable 17 points ahead.

In the 337 interviews conducted on Saturday, before the cash-for-access revelations, Labour enjoyed a lead of only four points. Labour was on 39 per cent, the Tories on 35 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent. But in the 350 interviews that took place on Sunday and yesterday, after the disclosures, Labour was 17 points ahead. Labour was on 47 per cent, the Tories on 30 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 11 per cent.

The survey also found two out of three people regard the Tories as "the party of the rich" as a result of last week's Budget, which cut the 50p top rate of tax on incomes over £150,000 a year while imposing a "granny tax" on pensioners.

Tory modernisers fear Mr Cameron's drive to "detoxify" his party could be undermined by the combination of the Budget and the revelation that the Tories' treasurer Peter Cruddas offered potential donors dinner in the Prime Minister's Downing Street apartment if they gave £250,000 to the party.

Mr Cameron tried to draw a line under the affair by publishing a list of Tory donors he entertained at both No 10 and Chequers, his official country residence. But he was criticised for refusing to make a Commons statement on the affair or take questions from journalists on it.

Labour will today keep up the pressure on the Prime Minister by challenging him over Mr Cruddas's suggestion to undercover reporters from The Sunday Times that the Tories might be able to find a way round the law banning foreign donations. It also emerged that:

* One of Mr Cameron's private dinner guests runs an oil trading company that stands to make millions from the new British-backed government in Libya. He had given £50,000 to the party.

* Another invitee gave an interview in which he said he "had it first-hand" from "very senior" members of the Government that Mr Cameron would oppose a European financial transaction tax.

* Sir Christopher Kelly, chairman of the anti-sleaze watchdog, rejected as "much too high" Mr Cameron's proposal to bring in a £50,000 cap on individual donations to political parties.

* The Conservatives paid for some functions at Chequers attended by donors, leaving the party open to criticism this was a reward for giving money to it.

On a torrid day for the Conservatives, Downing Street was forced to release a list of 12 major donors who were invited with their partners to four dinners in Mr Cameron's flat. Between them the guests had given or lent the party almost £18m since Mr Cameron became leader. A second list of five donors invited for lunches at Chequers was released later.

According to the lists, those entertained at Downing Street included Michael Spencer, head of the biggest broker of financial transactions in London, who was invited to Mr Cameron's flat for dinner last month. Mr Spencer has given more than £3m to the Conservatives through his company and £200,000 personally.

A few weeks earlier he gave an interview to a financial magazine in which he said he had it on first-hand authority that Mr Cameron would veto a financial transaction tax.

The other invitees included:l Ian Taylor, head of oil trading firm Vitol, who played a vital role in helping Libyan rebels by supplying them with petrol for their vehicles.

* JCB chairman Sir Anthony Bamford, who has donated £70,000 to the Tories since Mr Cameron became leader while his company has given almost £1.7m.

* The financier Michael Farmer, who has given around £2.5m and tycoon Michael Hintze, who gave more than £1.2m.

In remarks before making a speech on dementia, Mr Cameron confirmed that in future the Conservatives would publish a register of major donors.

The Government dispatched Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, to make a statement in the Commons to shield Mr Cameron from Labour demands he address MPs.

Amid rowdy scenes, Ed Miliband accused Mr Cameron of showing "utter contempt" for the Commons by failing to attend. "I think we all know why," the Labour leader said. "He has got something to hide." He called for an inquiry.

Mr Maude was almost drowned out by Labour shouts of "Where's Cameron?" He said Conservatives were ready to accept a cap on donations, but only if it applied not only to individuals and companies but to trade unions too – which Labour has resisted.

In a sign of how damaging the episode has been to the Conservative Party's reputation among its donors as well as the public, Lord Fink, who agreed to replace Mr Cruddas, wrote to donors to "apologise profusely for the embarrassment and reputational damage caused".

Alastair Campbell to host Have I Got News For You

The former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell is to make his debut as a host on satirical panel show Have I Got News For You.

He will be among nine guest presenters for the BBC1 show when it returns to Friday evenings on April 13 for its 43rd series.

The programme has continued with a flow of different hosts since Angus Deayton left the hot seat in 2002.

Campbell, 54, has regularly come in for mockery on the series from team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton during his years as Tony Blair's director of communications and beyond.

The new series will also see returning hosts such as actors Stephen Mangan and Damian Lewis, TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, and comics Jo Brand and Alexander Armstrong.

The series will again include extended repeats - Have I Got A Bit More News For You - to be screened on a Sunday.

Since Deayton left the show in 2002, its hosts have been an illustrious mixture of comedy's great and good; click HERE to view our pick of the faces to grace the centre seat

David Cameron wanted to wave through donor's policy to destroy rights of workers

Controversial report by venture capitalist who gave Tories £600,000 was blocked by Lib Dems

A major donor to the Conservative Party proposed the dilution of workplace rights in a report which won the backing of David Cameron but was blocked by the Liberal Democrats.

Adrian Beecroft, a venture capitalist who has given £593,000 to the Conservatives since Mr Cameron became leader in 2005, recommended companies be allowed to sack unproductive workers at will. The businessman, whose interests include payday loans company Wonga.com, argued that "coasting" workers inhibit economic growth and deter employers from recruiting.

Many of his sweeping proposals would have gone ahead if the Tories governed alone, Lib Dem ministers claimed, because Nick Clegg's party could not have mounted its strong rearguard action inside the Coalition.

Following the cash-for-access row, some civil servants are said to be worried about the involvement of a Tory donor in the Government's policy-making process. "It has raised eyebrows," said one Whitehall source.

Peter Cruddas, the Tories' former co-treasurer, claimed to undercover reporters that big donors could have their ideas fed into the Downing Street policy unit – a charge denied by No 10.

Cameron allies insist there was no reason to bar Mr Beecroft from advising the Government because he had given money to the Tories. He was not among the Tory donors entertained by Mr Cameron at Downing Street or Chequers and there is no suggestion that his companies would have benefited directly from the reforms he proposed.

His report, submitted last autumn, remains shrouded in mystery. Unusually for a Government-ordered study, it has not been published. Downing Street is coy about who commissioned it. The driving force is believed to be Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron's strategy adviser, who is leaving No 10 in May.

Ministers believe the report has not been published as it is too sensitive. Ideas are said to include watering down maternity rights, which would have jeopardised Mr Cameron's goal of making Britain the most "family-friendly" country in Europe. Another official said: "His report was full of the Tory millionaires' philosophy that government should not interfere in anything."

Mr Beecroft's plan for "no fault dismissal" was taken up by Mr Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor. It would allow a company to fire unproductive workers without the right to claim unfair dismissal, but they would receive statutory redundancy pay.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, whose department is responsible for employment law, said he did not want to bring in a "hire and fire culture". Unlike Mr Beecroft, he detected little demand for such rules.

After a row in the Coalition, a compromise was reached in which Mr Cable agreed to consider "no-fault dismissal" for firms employing fewer than 10 people. But he said he has no intention of bringing it in. A Liberal Democrat source said: "It's in the long, long grass."

Ed Miliband will today seek to capitalise on the cash-for-access controversy by linking it to the Budget. He will say: "The last week has shown this Government for what it is: one that works for the millionaires... David Cameron prefers to listen to those who have given millions of pounds to the Conservative Party in exchange for donor dinners and special access in Downing Street."

The Labour leader will issue a five-point "action plan" to help a squeezed "Middle Britain" similar to the credit-card sized "pledge card" which helped Tony Blair win a landslide in 1997. The plan includes stopping the Budget's "granny tax" and the reduction in the 50p top rate. In an attempt to reassure voters worried that Labour would spend too much, Mr Miliband will say: "These are measures that do not require extra spending. But they do require a different set of priorities; different values; a government that is on your side, and sometimes the courage to take on powerful and well-financed organisations which will not like it."

The £100m man: Beecroft's fortune

Adrian Beecroft has been a leading figure for 25 years in venture capital and private equity. He joined Apax in 1984 and grew its funds to $20bn before retiring as its senior managing partner. He is now chairman of Dawn Capital – which owns Wonga.com, the online short-term high-interest loans company – and his estimated wealth is £100m. He conceded a "downside" of his main proposal is employers could be accused of firing staff they "did not like," but said: "While this is sad, I believe it is a price worth paying for all the benefits that would result from the change."

Party's over for persona non grata

Sarah Southern used to boast that at one time she had spent more time with David Cameron than "with anybody else in my life". But yesterday Downing Street made clear that she would never knowingly be allowed in the same room as him again after her pivotal role in introducing the party to fake potential donors.

The Prime Minister's spokes- woman said Ms Southern was "persona non grata" after she unwittingly brought undercover reporters to the door of the party's joint Treasurer Peter Cruddas and unleashed the cash-for-access scandal.

Although not high profile, as an events manager Ms Southern had significant access to Mr Cameron. She travelled on the Conservative battle bus and was responsible for making sure trips went smoothly.

"I spent more time in the first third of [2010] with DC than I did with anybody else in my life," she said. "I am friends with all the people who are now his closest advisers... I'm also friends with a number of people in the Cabinet."

In June 2011 she set up her own company, Sarah Southern Consulting – with a business card showing her with the Prime Minister.

UK heading back into recession, says OECD

The UK has slipped back into recession after the economy contracted in the first quarter of 2012, an influential think-tank warned today.

Gross domestic product (GDP) - a broad measure for the total economy - is on course to have fallen by about 0.1 per cent in the three months to the end of March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said.

The gloomy forecast comes after official figures revealed the economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in the final quarter of 2011, which was worse than the previous estimate of a 0.2 per cent fall.

A decline in the first three months of 2012 will mean the UK is officially back in recession, which is defined as two quarters in a row of declines.

The OECD also warned the recovery for the world's biggest economies would be fragile, with the outlook for Europe "very weak".

The worse than previously thought contraction in the UK in the final quarter of 2011 meant the economy entered 2012 in a worse position than previously thought.

But economists are divided as to whether GDP will fall in the first quarter of the year. A number of upbeat surveys have suggested a return to mild growth in the quarter.

And any slump would be modest compared with the 2008/09 recession and the OECD predicts a return to growth in the second quarter of the year.

The Office for National Statistics today said the powerhouse services sector grew by 0.2% between December and January, after a slight decline in the final quarter of 2011.

However, it is generally agreed that the UK's economic growth will be feeble for the first half of 2012 at least, although falling inflation should increasingly deliver a boost to consumer spending as the year progresses.

The Government's independent forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, predicts the UK will avoid a recession but the economy will grow by just 0.8% over the course of 2012.

Philip Shaw, an economist at Investec, predicts the economy will grow by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year.

He said: "Recent indications suggest the UK's economy will have expanded in the first quarter. Our own view is that the OECD is being too gloomy.

"The services sector appears to have strengthened, the manufacturing sector is recovering since the end of last year and there's been signs of strength in retail spending."

Meanwhile, the OECD warned of a two-speed recovery developing in the G7 nations, with North America enjoying a rapid expansion but Europe weighed down by austerity measures.

The OECD said the recent hikes in oil prices, which have pushed Brent crude to above 120 US dollars a barrel, would push inflation up higher than it previously thought, wiping up to 0.2% from growth across G7 nations over the next year.

It expects Italy. which is already in recession, to contract for te first two quarters of 2012, while France will contract in the first quarter and Germany's growth will be lacklustre.

In November, the OECD warned the eurozone crisis was a key risk for the UK economy and it today called for the firewall to be increased in size to help prevent the crisis worsening.

It last year slashed the UK's 2012 growth forecast to just 0.5% from 1.8% earlier in the year and said it expects unemployment to hit 9.1% by 2013, putting another 400,000 people out of work.

Tanker drivers' strike talks to begin next week as panic buying continues to spread

Police urge public not to panic buy fuel amid reports of congestion at petrol stations around the country and plans for talks next week

Despite increasingly feverish panic buying of fuel and an escalating row over government advice, no further talks will be held to resolve the tanker drivers' dispute until Monday it was announced this afternoon.

Acas officials said today they have been in contact with the seven distribution companies involved in the dispute as well as the union Unite.

An Acas spokesman said:

“We are now in the process of receiving more detailed briefings from the parties on the various issues underpinning the dispute. This will enable us to determine more clearly the form substantive talks should take to provide the best opportunity for a negotiated settlement.

”We should conclude that process by Monday and would then hope substantive discussions would follow shortly afterwards.“

The announcement followed a day of panic buying across the country, which caused the closure of some petrol stations as demand for fuel from worried motorists soared.

It was estimated by the AA today that the revenue from the spike in fuel sales could result in an extra £32m in extra excise duty.

Across the country motorists queued for petrol.

In Dorset police called for petrol stations to temporarily close where there is queueing because of panic buying.

And in Hampshire police were forced to issue a statement saying there were no fuel shortages in the county, a rumour they claimed was being spread on the internet.

The Petrol Retailers Association, which represents around 5,500 garages, reported a sharp rise in petrol sales of 81% with sales of diesel also up by 43%

There was also a sharp rise in the sale of jerry cans as worried motorists took the advice of Cabinet minister Francis Maude to stockpile fuel.

The rise in prices comes against the backdrop of confused advice from the government on how motorists should prepare for the - as yet unconfirmed - tanker drivers' strike.

Labour leader Ed Miliband called on the Prime Minister to apologise after the government issued conflicting messages to motorists.

“The prime minister is presiding over a shambles on petrol. The country is paying the price for the incompetent way he is governing,” he said.

Brian Madderson, chairman of the Petrol Federation, today gave his response to the government advice to stockpile petrol, telling Radio 4’s The World at One,

”This government appears intent on creating a crisis out of a serious concern.“

A spokesman for the Petrol Retailers Association, which represents around 5,500 outlets, also attacked the Government advice to keep vehicles filled up, and Minister Francis Maude’s suggestion that the public should keep jerry cans in their garages saying,

”This is exactly what we didn't want - people panic buying. Deliveries are still being made to garages and we are advising people to continue with their normal buying habits.“

As the union concerned, Unite, would have to give seven days notice of any strikes - industrial action over the Easter period is looking increasingly unlikely.

Some 90% of UK forecourts are supplied by about 2,000 drivers in the Unite union.

The Energy Minister, Ed Davey, today advised motorists to top-up their vehicles with fuel when they are half empty.

Speaking to the BBC Mr Davey said,

"I think our major advice is that people just need to do the sensible thing if they're going into the petrol station, they should get a full tank of petrol, not a half-tank of petrol, and they should top up where necessary."