Anthony Garcia, sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison for plotting to blow us all up in the name of Islam, was not your usual fundamentalist terrorist. Or at least not what we expect from devoutly homicidal fundamentalist maniacs.

For a start he had a neat little goatee beard rather than one of those full-on, thorax-length, death-to-the-infidel type things. Then there’s his would-be occupation: male model. I am no Koranic scholar but I reckon Muhammad (PBUH) would have preferred his jihadists to be librarians or something less fleshly.

Garcia’s hobbies lacked religious conviction: he enjoyed having sex, getting rat-arsed on beer and clubbing. An Algerian, Garcia referred to his co-conspirators as “Pakis” and “hairy hobbits” and clearly didn’t like them too much.

Some of the bombers you read about changed their names in order to present a more Islamic face to the world: Garcia did the reverse. He changed his name from Rahman Adam, because he thought it would improve his chances as a model. His character brings to mind a faintly hilarious failed contestant from Pop Idol, rather than a murderous fanatic. His choice of targets was similarly beguiling - the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub, places where he would have felt at home.

Potential suicide bombers, like the 7/7 boys, are supposedly driven to martyrdom by the promise of 72 virgins - though some suggest this is a mistranslation and that Allah actually promises 72 raisins.

Blow yourself up and receive a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut: not quite the same, is it?

But Garcia would have been unconcerned either way. His commitment to the Islamic cause seemed casual, begrudging but counter-intuitive. He wished to liquidate the things in life he valued and he seemed as feckless in his attempts to blow us all up as he was in every other thing he did. Clubbing? Yeah, fine. A few pints of beer and a quick shag? Sure, why not. Kill a few hundred people in a shopping centre or a nightclub? Yeah, whatever.

This is scarcely religious fanaticism - it does not even deserve to have the derogation “nihilist”. The nihilists, from Bakunin onwards, were at least convinced that the things they wished to destroy were worthy of destruction. Garcia liked the things he wished to destroy. It is not even Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, or the murders at Columbine and Virginia Tech.

Garcia’s involvement was amoral and moronic - it was just something else he did in his spare time because his friends did it and so he thought it was okay, planning to murder people. That says more about our society, I reckon, than Islam.

Greatest Living Briton

A tabloid newspaper has invited its readers to select the Greatest Living Briton from a list it has drawn up. Almost all the individuals who’ve made Britain what it is today are present – Kate Moss, Wayne Rooney, Lenny Henry, Ozzy Osbourne, Charlotte Church and so on. But there is one glaring omission: where on earth is the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt?

I suspect a fix: the paper realised that Pat – like Churchill, Shakespeare and Nelson in previous contests – would walk it and thus rob the feature of its edge.

Hewitt was on Question Time last week, reaping her usual harvest of public adulation. “Boooooo! Booooooo!” and “Resign, you useless cow!” people shouted, with enormous affection. Cabinet ministers should only resign, she told the howling audience, when they have made a serious policy blunder – and then admitted presiding over a record three catastrophes in her brief tenure (a useless computer system costing billions, putting thousands of junior doctors out of work and increasing bureaucracy).

But it is part of her selfless nature that she is unable to take responsibility for any of it. In fact, ministers never resign as a result of a policy blunder. They resign because they have been caught out on a technicality, or discovered with their trousers down by the side of the M4, watching badgers. Which fate will befall Pat?

Paris Hilton’s other offences

The affluent nonentity Paris Hilton has been sentenced to 45 days in prison for driving offences – and also, maybe, for having the same name as a hotel and thus influencing thousands of thick chav parents to call their offspring Droitwich Radisson or Eaglescliffe Holiday Inn.

There were plenty of motoring transgressions for which the LA court could have had the woman banged up – not all of them, it has to be said, illegal in the strict sense. Driving a car while in possession of a bowl of oxtail soup between the ears, for example. Driving a car while wearing a profoundly irritating expression midway between arrogance and superciliousness. Driving a car after having wilfully met – and liked – a whole bunch of similarly annoying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan. Alighting from a car and thrusting no fewer than two apparently acrylic breasts in the direction of 356 press photographers, all of them shouting “Over here, Paris, love!”, while wearing a profoundly irritating expression midway between arrogance and superciliousness.

The court decided instead to go for driving a car while pissed and not having a valid driving licence. But you suspect, given the severity of the sentence, those other offences were taken into consideration.

Too good to play for England today

My guess is that the late Alan Ball, a World Cup winner, would not have made it into today’s England team. All those things that once endeared him to us – tenacity, a relentless pursuit of the lost cause – are now about as socially acceptable as 6in sideburns and calling Zimbabwe “Rhodesia”.

I saw Ball play a few times: there were no swallow dives and writhing in the penalty box as if he’d been engulfed in nerve gas. When he scored I never saw him attempt to have sexual intercourse with the corner flag. And when England lost – a rare occurrence then – he was hopeless at the job of exculpating himself from all responsibility and blaming instead the referee, alcohol, girls, gambling and lack of hair gel.

Today’s England midfield is better equipped. While mourning Ball, we should rejoice that Lampard, Gerrard and co have Wags, agents, multi-million contracts, franchises and ghost-written autobiographies – within which they can explain how come the national team are such a grotesque, abysmal failure.

Tea party

Are chimpanzees deserving of the same legal status as the rest of us? A British woman, Paula Stibbe, is in court in Austria fighting for the “human” rights of a confused-looking chimp she calls Matthew.

Chimps share most of our DNA – but then so do silverfish, bananas and David Miliband. And should Matthew be subject to the same strictures as the rest of us? If he tries to force himself upon his youngest daughter – as chimps are wont to do – will there be a coven of screaming, working-class women waiting for him outside the court? Should he be forced to take part in Red Nose Day?

There is more to being human than simply recognising yourself in a mirror.

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