If the Tories are so tough on crime, why are Britain’s burglars running riot?
If you’re worried about burglars stealing your jewellery, here’s the best place to hide it. It’s not a bedroom drawer. It’s not a box under your floorboards. It’s not even a safe. It’s a bean bag.
That’s the advice of 58-year-old Darryl Kennedy of Salford. And he should know. Because he used to be a burglar. Not just any burglar, either. He claims that, in a criminal career that began when he was just nine-yearsold, he broke into more than 20,000 homes.
Indeed, he would break into as many as 15 in a single day.
What remarkable numbers. Even more remarkable is that he was only caught and sent to prison on four occasions. This suggests extraordinary powers of stealth. Forget banging him up, we should have sent Mr Kennedy to work for MI6. He’d have made an excellent spy.
At any rate, he says he’s now a changed man and regrets his criminal past. So, to help make up for it, he gave an interview this week in which he offered householders his top tips for protecting their valuables from burglars.
For example, stashing them inside a bean bag – because burglars, he says, would never think to look there.
Unfortunately, however, there’s one small snag. Burglars might not have looked inside a bean bag in the past but now that Mr Kennedy has shared this tip with the nation’s press, they all will. In fact, it’ll be the very first place that burglars will look. They’ll be tearing open every bean bag in Britain. You’ll get home from a night out, only to find your carpet covered in three inches of polystyrene. Your living room will look as if a blizzard has hit it.
From now on, therefore, the safest thing to do with your jewellery will be to leave it on the kitchen table. Your burglars will be so busy hunting through your house for bean bags, the table will be the last place they look.
Anyway, it’s worth thinking about because, as you’ll know from yesterday’s Telegraph, Britain’s burglars are currently running riot – and hardly any of them ever get caught.
According to the latest figures from the Home Office, more than 500 burglaries go unsolved every single day. An alarming number. And not just for householders. It’s alarming for Boris Johnson because the Conservatives have always sold themselves to voters as the party of law and order. So voters are bound to be wondering: how on earth have the Tories become so soft on crime?
Forget partygate. Of course it’s bad that the Prime Minister got fined for law-breaking but what will do for him is his failure to tackle other people’s law-breaking. The way things are going, burglary will soon be so widespread, you’ll have burglars coming home from a night’s burgling to find that while they were out they’ve been burgled themselves. All the stuff they nicked the night before will be gone. So, they’ll have to nick even more stuff to replace it.
If voters are angry about crime, the Tories’ prospects of re-election are sure to suffer, especially if some of the crime is being committed by Tories themselves. Only yesterday, we read that a Tory police and crime commissioner who had pledged to crack down on speeding motorists has been caught speeding five times in 12 weeks. Meanwhile, a Tory MP has finally quit the Commons after being found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy.
Then again, the Opposition benches aren’t exactly spotless. Just six months ago Labour was forced to expel its former MP, Claudia Webbe, after she was convicted of harassment. A court heard that she’d threatened to throw acid at a female friend of her boyfriend. An appeal hearing is due to be held later this month.
It’s all very depressing. Perhaps none of the parties is capable of tackling crime in this country. No matter which one we elect, more and more crimes will be committed, while fewer and fewer will be solved. In which case, I fear there is only one way forward.
Forget A-levels, degrees and apprenticeships. Let’s just raise all our children to become burglars, instead.
As the old saying goes: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And, in these straitened times, burglary is just about this country’s only growth industry. So our children may well find it an attractive career. On the downside, they won’t be able to work from home. But they’ll make lots of money. They’ll pay zero tax. They won’t need to incur vast amounts of student debt.
And, judging from the latest Home Office figures, there’s virtually no chance of them being caught.
If voters are angry about this, Boris’s re-election prospects will suffer