...are applauded by bystanders after mass in Praia da Luz church on Saturday

AGAIN, THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION on Human Rights raises its perverse head and wags its censorial finger at Britain. All we wanted to do was return a convicted criminal where he came from but the word is no. Not from Europe, you understand, although they started it all, but from our own legislators who are following the guidelines set by the Blair administration’s Bill of Human Rights. God, the things that man is responsible for.

Hey, but hang on here, aren’t we talking about Learco Chindamo, son of an Italian mafia hit man and the murderer of schoolmaster Stephen Lawrence, knifed to death by Chindamo in 1995 when he intervened in a violent attack by Chindamo’s gang of thugs on a pupil? Yes we are, unfortunately, but it doesn’t make a gnat’s breath of difference. It’s ‘yuman rites’, geddit? Here to protect the criminal, not us for God’s sake.

Chindamo was born in Italy and holds an Italian passport. He is currently in jail serving his minimum (read maximum) sentence of 12 years for Mr Lawrence’s murder and will be paroled, as is the course of sentences in Britain, next year. The law forbids deportation moves to be started more than a year before a prisoner’s release, so the Lawrence murder is only now back in the news. Not, however, for Frances Lawrence, the widow. She has lived with her husband’s death for 12 years.

But now immigration judges have ruled that knifeman Learco’s right to a family life would be infringed if he were not allowed to return to his Filipino mother and his elder brother Wolfgang, a key member of the gang of which Learco was a member when he slew Philip Lawrence outside the school in Maida Vale, West London. One might think that Mr Lawrence was himself denied the right to return to his family at work’s end that day, but this counts for nothing with our abrasive legislation that favours the wrong doer. I have often voiced the opinion that Britain should pull out of the European Convention forthwith and then begin to resolve its problems of immigration created by the soft EU laws. Perhaps now it might happen if we all shout at once.

Frances Lawrence says she has always been a staunch advocate of the Human Rights Act – sadly most people who don’t understand its interpretations are - but now she admits it is badly flawed. Must then we wait until this heinous slop of legislation affects us all personally before we demand the long needed changes? Lord, I hope not.

WHAT A RIOT OF NONSENSE the Portuguese handling of the Madeleine McCann disappearance has been. Suspects picked at apparent random from the expatriate Praia da Luz community, contaminated crime scenes, police statements that change every day, promised actions that never occur and solutions that never come. It took the appearance of British police officers to shake the investigation out of its torpor and leave us all with hope of closure however tragic that may prove to be. But bear in mind that as far as crime investigation is concerned the enquiring minds of the British police and their forensic teams are second to none. If little Maddy had disappeared from a Brighton seafront chalet this would have been solved the day after. In Portugal, I have a sneaking suspicion that Fawlty Towers’ Manuel was on the case.

AND FINALLY – St Peter’s church in Witherley, Leicestershire, has got itself a critic by ringing its church bells too often for new village arrivals, the Eltons. Mr and Mrs Elton are property developers, the type of people who block our view of the countryside with yet another building development or change Granny’s old Victorian house into an apartment block – yet the bells of St Peter’s are not ringing their till so, according to the Elton’s, they have to stop. Hopefully their complaint to the village council will be thrown out – with the advice to move out if they don’t like village life. Why do so many people move to the country and try to get the cows shot? Beats the hell out of me…