Richard Ingrams: Emptied streets give the lie to Anglo-Irish bonds

Notebook

It was Sir Sacheverell Sitwell who recalled that, "I did once drive down a crowded street with Queen Mary, and she did lower the window and say 'Why don't you cheer, you little idiots'."

Queen Elizabeth was in no position to follow her grandmother's example when she visited Dublin this week, even if she had felt the urge. Little idiots or not, the Dubliners were kept well away from their royal visitor and the streets through which the Queen was driven were completely deserted. Her visit to Croke Park was noticeable for the thousands of empty seats in the stadium.

We may be idiots, but we are clued up enough to realise that if Dublin has to be cleared of all its citizens before the Queen can drive through the streets then this makes nonsense of all the talk about a new dawn in the relationship between Britain and Ireland.

The Queen is probably experienced enough to realise that it is nonsense. She is probably aware, too, that while it may be all right for politicians to sit in bulletproof cars and avoid all contact with people in the street, the monarchy can only do its job, such as it is, if it is allowed to go walkabout.

Tell us more about Fred the Shred

Considering we all bailed it out, every taxpayer has an interest in what goes on at the Royal Bank of Scotland, said Lord Stoneham, the man who named and shamed Sir Fred Godwin, the banks former chief executive, in the House of Lords on Thursday.

And not just the taxpayers. As a long-time customer of the NatWest, which is owned by RBS, I personally have an additional motive for being kept fully informed about all the goings on at the banks headquarters.

And don't let us fool ourselves into thinking that we now know the full story of Sir Fred's alleged affair with a "senior colleague", the story he was hoping to keep a secret thanks to the super-injunction which Mr Justice Henrique's generously granted to him.

For a start we do not even know the name of this so-called senior colleague. The Daily Mail, which I tend to turn to for this kind of information, tells its readers that, alas, she cannot be named "for legal reasons" (unspecified).

But if it is in the public interest to know about Sir Fred's alleged misdemeanours on the grounds that they could adversely affect his performance in the banking world, the same presumably applies to this "senior colleague". There are plenty of questions we NatWest depositors would like answered, quite apart from her name, such as is she still working for the bank? And has she received a six- or seven-figure bonus like everybody else?

Madeleine McCann, yes. David Kelly, no

For some months a campaign led by Dr Michael Powers QC and a group of fellow-doctors had been gaining ground for a proper inquest to be held into the death of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly.

There were always plenty of arguments in favour, not least the fact that Lord Hutton, who replaced the Oxfordshire coroner on government orders, made such a cursory attempt to deal with the many suspicious elements in Dr Kelly's supposed suicide, which remain unexplained to this day – the lack of blood on the ground, the evidence that the body had been moved after death, the lack of any fingerprints on the knife, not to mention the lack of any suicide note or, for that matter, any evidence that Dr Kelly was in a suicidal state. Hutton made little or no attempt to address any of these awkward points

Then, presumably in order to silence the many doubters, the Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, last year released the post-mortem report made at the time of Kelly's death by pathologist Dr Norman Hunt who described it as "a textbook suicide". It was hardly surprising that Dr Powers and his colleagues failed to be satisfied with this bizarre conclusion.

Then this week Dr Kelly surfaced again at Prime Minister's Questions when veteran Tory MP Sir Peter Tapsell asked David Cameron for a full investigation "into the suicide or murder of Dr David Kelly". Cameron replied: "I don't think it's necessary to take that case forward." So that appears to be that. As a former PR man, Cameron prefers to reopen the Madeleine McCann file, for obvious reasons.