Shambo, the sacred Hindu bull, was executed by lethal injection on Thursday night and reincarnated the next morning, quite possibly as a member of the Welsh assembly or indeed a spiteful Welsh farmer. The gods have always had a sense of irony.

There were fervent protests across the Hindu world but the Skanda Vale sect, which both harboured and revered Shambo, was rather more sanguine. One monk said: “This will simply add to the drama of his life cycle and he will come back again.” In which case, what was all the fuss about?

I still find it difficult to understand what threat Shambo posed to anyone or anything, despite the probability that it was afflicted with bovine tuberculosis. It did not lead the life of an ordinary bull, few of which get to live in a temple surrounded by chanting human supplicants.

It was isolated from other livestock and, being divine, was unlikely to find its way into the food chain. The campaign to have it killed seemed motivated at least in part by pure vindictiveness on the part of those angry, badger-strangling Welsh farmers. And a sort of paralysis on the part of the authorities, terrorised by their own health and safety legislation and indeed by the baying farmers.

Our agriculture officials wear hobnailed boots and carry a humane killer, as we might recall from the last outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Nothing, these days, is permitted to transgress health and safety rules and regulations, in agriculture as elsewhere - certainly not anything so recherché as common sense. It does not matter any more how remote the threat to public health may be, nor how palpably absurd and injurious the stipulations imposed.

In the case of Shambo, another sect offered to transport the bull to India where it could live out its days peaceably among similarly divine cloven-hooved herbivores, but this suggestion was dismissed out of hand by the Welsh assembly. Why? The only conclusion is that by this stage they wanted the creature dead and there’s an end to it.

But I wonder too if the members of the assembly would have dared to make their decision if it were Muslims rather than Hindus who chose to revere cattle? And what would have happened if they did? By now there would be priests set alight from Jakarta to Rabat, effigies burnt, fatwas issued. Cardiff airport would be missing an international departure gate.

The assembly would probably have come up with a compromise: okay, the bull lives but it has to wear a burqa when it goes out. I suppose Britain’s Hindus can console themselves with the thought that having their sensibilities trampled on suggests they are a community with whom the rest of us feel at ease and can thus victimise with impunity.

Stripper Myrna can only help Ming

Myrna R Bushell is a Liberal Democrat member of Bideford town council in Devon and sits on the market subcommittee. Perhaps both literally and figuratively - for she works as a stripagram girl.

Bung her about a hundred quid and she’ll get her kit off before you can say Campbell-Bannerman. She’ll also talk to you on the phone in a “sexy” manner for £1.50 a minute, no doubt huskily explaining the council’s new parking restrictions for the market square, dressed in nothing more than a thong and whipped cream.

Myrna’s choice of profession has displeased some of her more strait-laced Lib Dem council colleagues, three of whom have resigned from the party in disgust. But the party leader may view the matter rather differently. Menzies Campbell’s public profile is so low that in a recent opinion poll nobody at all recognised him, not even his own family. Perhaps the next time he is interviewed on Sunday AM he should turn up in a leather basque and ask Andrew Marr if he’s been a naughty boy recently. It’ll get him in the papers, at least.

By the way, a Lib Dem press officer told me that through “administrative error”, Myrna wasn’t a member, even though she’d stood as a Lib Dem. Curiouser and curiouser.

That’s not a UFO, it’s a drunken astronaut

Flying saucers have been spotted circling the night sky above Stratford-upon-Avon. A collection of bright lights hovered over the town and began darting back and forth.

This phenomenon was spotted at 10.36pm outside the One Elm pub, by some people who had been drinking all evening inside the One Elm pub. The light show continued until just after last orders. No official explanation has been forthcoming but we may, using the information above, grope towards a sort of unofficial explanation at least.

Or maybe not, because on Friday Nasa revealed its astronauts occasionally set off in rockets pissed out of their skulls. So we have another possible explanation: that a bunch of inebriated astronauts had messed up the controls of their craft and mistaken Warwickshire for a celestial body, maybe Saturn’s arid, chilly moon Hyperion, or an undiscovered planet.

So what’s it to be? A bunch of paralytic people in the sky looking down and saying to one another: “What the hell’s that?” Or a bunch of paralytic people on the ground looking up and saying: “What the hell’s that?” Or neither? Or both?

- A Remembrance Day parade held for the past 60 years or so in Horwich, Lancashire, will not go ahead this November. The police and local council want the marchers to provide barriers, pay countless “marshals” at £50 per day to manage the route and charge up to £800 for every road that needs to be closed.

The war veterans can’t afford it. What they should do, of course, is ignore the council and the police and march anyway, refusing to pay a penny all the while and with a total absence of barriers of any kind. And almost certainly find the entire town has fallen in step behind them. Go on, copper; prosecute that.

- British teenagers are the worst in Europe, according to yet another cheering survey published last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). They are all fat, drug-addled drunkards whose only social activities are vomiting and transmitting sexual diseases - and even worse than Danish teenagers who, everybody accepts, are thoroughly horrible.

The IPPR suggests giving them activities to do such as playing ping-pong. But this is avoiding the issue. I suspect they are badly behaved because we do not beat them enough, corporal punishment having become terribly unfashionable in recent years. Greek and Spanish parents knock the living daylights out of their children and are rewarded by long periods of silence and obedience.

Also, we no longer warn youngsters about the mortal perils of self-abuse which, as Lord Baden-Powell put it, “brings with it weakness of heart and head and if persisted in, idiocy and lunacy”.

Old B-P began the Scout movement 100 years ago this week with a rousing chorus of Ging Gang Gooli, plenty of cold showers and blind obedience to God, the king and the British Empire. But such sentiments are sneered at today and the Scout movement is regarded by many as being full of wrong ’uns.

rod.liddle@sunday-times.co.uk

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