Several months before he disappeared, Andrew Elphick sat down with his friend, Sasha Westcourt, in the house they shared on the edge of a neat little village in Surrey, and the two of them wrote out their ambitions in life. Westcourt jotted down a few lines about health and happiness and a steady income, but Elphick filled a whole page with his plans, which he spelled out step by step in capital letters.
Karyn Smith and Patricia Cahill are, of course, our enemies. All drug dealers are our enemies. That’s the point of the war against drugs. So of course these two young women deserve all the abuse that has been heaped upon them – even if one of them does turn out to be innocent, even if the other one is guilty of nothing more than daftness, and even if they were both exploited first by the dealers who set them up and then by the avaricious officials who made money out of them on the other side of the world. That’s war. That’s collateral damage.
One evening in the early summer of 1991, a police constable named Sean Oxley received an unusual phone call in his office in Bow Street police station. Oxley was then working with an undercover unit, mixing with homeless people to gather intelligence about street crime and he was well known among the social workers in the soup kitchens and hostels of central London. It was one of these social workers, an unpaid volunteer, who now called him.
Harry Roberts was once the most famous man in Britain. It was the summer of 1966: England had just beaten Germany in the World Cup; Harold Wilson was talking to the TUC about a wage freeze; Francis Chichester was getting ready to sail round the world; and at 3.15 on a Friday afternoon, on a street in Shepherd’s Bush, three London policemen were shot down dead in the sun.
At ten o’clock this morning (Mon Feb 15), a 24-year-old nurse is due to step into the dock at Nottingham Crown Court for the beginning of a trial which has already been the focus of extraordinary emotion, media interest and political manoeuvre.
We’re dealing with a mystery here. Look, first of all, at Meridian’s big PR plug for itself, broadcast on New Year’s Day, in which the South East’s new ITV company celebrated its plans for the future. It was great.
