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One Deborah Scroggins has written a book, Wanted Women, contrasting Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the al-Qaeda terrorist Aafia Siddiqui. By all accounts, the terrorist is the one who is intended to come out better. Scroggins has portrayed her work as a journey of discovery, but in fact she arrived at her conclusions a long time ago. 

For years Scroggins has pursued a sinister vendetta against Hirsi Ali. Some years back she used the anonymity of the Economist to abuse Hirsi Ali's memoir Infidel. I have even heard word of private campaigning to prevent people who might be sympathetic to Hirsi Ali's situation from financially or otherwise supporting her need for security protection.

All this is strange. But strangest of all is why a house like HarperCollins would publish this stalker-like biographer.

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The argument — quite popular outside the House of Lords — that people should be better paid if they work than if they do not has received a terrific boost from the BBC. In a piece apparently intended to arouse sympathy for a family which would lose £4,000 of benefits under the government's reforms, exactly the opposite effect was produced. 

The BBC spoke with a man in North Wales whose family income would be reduced to £26,000 a year. The pseudonymous "Raymond" said: "I see eight people here having to choose between eating or heating." Except that Raymond's weekly shop included a large pack of tobacco and 200 cigarettes. So perhaps a choice between eating and smoking. Or drinking. For the taxpayer also funds the man of the house to go down to the pub on Fridays, as well as 24 cans of lager a week and Sky television so the family never feel bored.

 Public sympathy for this sort of thing is clearly drying up, if the responses on the BBC's website are anything to go by. Most people felt, as I do, that the cost of buying our own drinks in the pub was high enough, and there was no reason why we should keep standing rounds for someone we don't know who hasn't retrained to find work in ten years. Recessions are awful, but they can also prove strangely clarifying.