Forget the Stock Exchange or cashing in on rising house prices – here’s a sure-fire investment that will pay daily dividends. Give £150,000 to the Tory party and you get the salary of a Scottish Office minister – over £100,000 a year – and on top of that you net a lifetime peerage with £323 for every day you turn up in the Lords, although no-one actually checks if you are there or not.

That’s what Malcolm Offord did and now, together with the perks and emoluments, he’s able to vote to pass laws affecting us, the un-ermined, while we’ve never so much as cast a vote for him. Or even knew who he was before Boris Johnson parachuted him into power.

This is one of the most blatant abuses of democracy since, well, since 2006/07, when Tony Blair’s government was involved in the cash-for-honours scandal. It came out when several men nominated as life peers were rejected by the House of Lords Appointment Commission. In theory, this could happen to Offord, but of course it won’t.

Back then three MPs, including the SNP’s Angus MacNeil, complained to the Metropolitan Police about an alleged breach of the law over selling honours and an investigation was launched into whether it all amounted to perverting the course of justice. Blair was interviewed and his chief fundraiser Lord Levy was arrested and released on bail.

The case was eventually dropped for lack of evidence. It’s time to pursue again it over Offord and have Johnson and cronies interviewed under caution.

Arresting sight

YOU don’t imagine that prosperous Gloucestershire is a hotbed of crime, but apparently it is. Last week, two men were arrested for acting suspiciously behind a tree.

A few days earlier, two men, presumably not the same two, were arrested after police found them hiding under a false section in a double bed. According to the cops’ tweet about it they “lost a game of hide and seek”.

In other police news the local crime commissioner says that Gloucestershire police horses either need to be sponsored or sent to the glue factory. “Two of our horses are going to be used in the climate conference in Glasgow in the coming months. That’s an example of where we can provide support,” said commissioner Chris Nelson.

Hive of activity

BUZZING about the exhibition by Australian artist Angelica Mesiti which opened in Edinburgh University’s Talbot Rice Gallery on Friday. She has adapted a 400-year-old musical score by Elizabethan polymath Charles Butler which mimics the sound that queen bees make when, well, buzzing.

Butler wrote the four-part choral work 300 years before Flight Of The Bumblebee, so get it right up ye, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Apparently, Mesiti’s exhibition has several installations, one of which involves images of flowers shot under ultraviolet light which Mesiti said “mimics the way bees see the world”.

It is said that bees see better than humans, which isn’t saying much in my case, but they also can’t see red which I see just about every day.

Crashing boars

IN more animal news the singer Shakira has been attacked by a couple of wild boars in Barcelona. They made off with her handbag which had her mobile phone in it and they destroyed everything, so I guess I won’t be getting that call back.

Who knew there were wild boars in Barcelona? I’ve been there a few times but never seen one. Apparently, their population is exploding and there are 10 million of them across Europe.

In 2016, Spanish police had more than 1,000 calls about boars attacking dogs, holding up traffic, and ploughing into cars and the like. Three years earlier, one cop came up with his own solution – he shot at a rampaging boar with his service revolver, missed and hit his partner instead.

It’s worse in Berlin where the place is hoachin’ with them and urban assassins have have been taking the law into their own hands. They’re everywhere, the boars. There’s even a clip on YouTube of a male nudist in a Berlin park last year chasing after one which had pinched his laptop.

It was called Elsa and she is no more, just one of the more than 2,000 slaughtered by the hunters.

In hot water

A KILMARNOCK man is in hot water over his hot tub. In what is the ultimate example of petty officialdom John Lang has been told the he can’t have his blow-up tub and pop-up gazebo on his back green because it breaches his tenancy agreement.

A letter from Killjoy, rather Cunninghame Housing Association, told him he needed permission from them, as did any other neighbours with structures in their gardens like huts, trampolines and football goals, although gnomes are probably OK.

John owns Ginger Hot Tub Hire, named, I presume, after the hue of his top thatch, so this is all good publicity. He says he’s not deflating his tub for anyone and as it’s not a permanent structure he doesn’t need permission, although he does admit that the grass underneath it has been killed.

The housing association denies that if he refused to comply it’ll have men with sharp sticks on the case.

Aye, right then

AS an excuse to take some time off your work it takes some beating – having to deal with “unresolved existential fragilities”, which I guess could cover everything from work shyness to fear of the dark or spiders. But it was the excuse that spin doctor Luca Morisi peddled to his boss Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s far-right League party.

His fragility emerged after a 20-year-old Romanian male prostitute claimed that he had staggered out of Morisi’s home in a dwam after a 12-hour, paid, sex and drugs party, although I don’t know what music was featured. Morisi has denied supplying the cocaine and the GHB.

Morisi was the creator and manager of Salvini’s vicious and successful social media campaign against illegal drug use and immigration, and in favour of Christian family values. Salvini called it a private affair and condemned the “voyeurism” of the media.

Criminal injustice

ONE of those who suffered the immigrant backlash provoked by Salvini is Domenico Lucano, aged 63, known locally as Mimmo and the former mayor of Riace, a tiny hilltop town in the southern Calabria region. Last week, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison – double what the public prosecutor had asked for – plus a €500,000 fine for abetting illegal migration and for “irregularities” in managing asylum seekers.

He had revitalised his small community by welcoming and integrating immigrants, settling 500 in Riace, a town of just 1,800 inhabitants, thus reversing depopulation and preventing the closure of the local school.

Lucano was hailed in 2016 by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders.

In 2018, he was put under house arrest a week after Italy’s then-interior minister, Salvini, announced a series of anti-immigration measures, including slashing funds for migrant reception centres and integration.

Mimmo had also fought against the most powerful and organised organised crime group in Europe – the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta.

After the sentence, which he is appealing to the Supreme Court, he said: “I’ve spent my life fighting for my ideals. Against the mafia. I sided with the least among us, the refugees who arrived.

“I imagined myself contributing to the redemption of my land. It was an unforgettable experience, fantastic, but today everything ends for me.”