Here’s a tip. If you’re thinking of faking your own death so you can trouser the life insurance payment and flee to somewhere more agreeable, don’t subsequently pose for a photograph grinning like a jackass. It’s what we call a hostage to fortune.

If you are going to pose for a photo, at least have the sense to wear a Radovan Karadzic-style disguise. It was the snap taken in an estate agent’s office in Panama which helped to do for John and Anne Darwin, who last week began sentences of more than six years each for having defrauded insurance companies. That’s roughly what you’d get, on average, if you raped someone and 19 times longer than the average sentence for people convicted of knife crime.

The courts are vengeful when you try to put one over on big business and especially insurance companies — despite the fact that, as George Orwell put it, insurance is a swindle and a racket and everybody knows it. You will know it, too, if you’ve ever tried to claim on your policy.

John Darwin may now wish that his canoe really had overturned and he had succumbed to the baleful embrace of the North Sea all those years ago. His stretch inside may not be an easy one: the lags will not take kindly to news of his previous occupation — which was, uh-oh, a prison officer.

Meanwhile, his wife, who appeared cheerful and loyal when the money was safely in their bank accounts, has now decided that John was a wrong ’un after all. She removed her wedding ring, shunned him in court and tried to put the blame squarely on his shoulders to minimise her sentence. Unfortunately for her, though, she was in that Panama photograph grinning like a jackass, too; neither the jury nor the judge bought her anguished denials.

Now the pair also face financial ruin as the insurance companies launch a civil suit to retrieve the money stolen from them. Both companies concerned — Norwich Union and Unat Direct — are well acquainted with the principle of wrongdoing. Norwich Union Life was recently fined £1.26m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for having exposed customers to an estimated £3.3m of fraudulent transactions. Norwich Union hived off its call centres to Mumbai to save money, but in doing so failed to keep its customers’ financial data secure.

Unat was also fined by the FSA this year, again over call centres. The company had exposed its customers to “unacceptable levels of risk” by utilising call centres on the cheap to sell policies, despite the fact that in some cases these call centres were not authorised by the FSA to do so. The company, the

FSA announced, had not shown “due diligence” to the customer. Unat’s parent company, the American insurance giant AIG, has been investigated for fraudulently boosting its loss reserves by £250m. For none of these crimes — all of which amounted to rather more than the £250,000 nicked by John Darwin — can I find any record of people having been sent to prison, let alone for more than six years.

It may well be mistaken to have sympathy for Darwin; as we all know, he did wrong. Nonetheless, I do have some sympathy for him — and not simply because I don’t like insurance companies and can understand that anyone who lives in Hartlepool would wish to fake their own death and start again.

Beset by the sort of financial miseries and worries which are familiar to all of us, he took an illegal gamble. It paid off until he suddenly realised that he missed his sons more, perhaps, than he wanted the money — and so he pitched up at a police station and gave a transparently stupid story about losing his memory which, when matched up with that dumb photograph taken in Panama, saw him lose everything, including (it would seem) his previously devoted wife.

There is something plaintive and tragic about Mr Darwin.

Tall stories in a small world

What shall we do about our dwarf problem? They seem to be getting up to mischief all over the place at the moment. At an airport in Sweden last week one popped out of a suitcase at the check-in desk, causing “stress and humiliation” to the staff. Another, Lee Kildare, was caught by coppers in Newcastle upon Tyne burgling homes by crawling through cat flaps and the like. Kildare says he commits crime because he can’t find a job in a “tall person’s world” and is in demand from burglars, who utilise him in much the same way as Filipino fishermen use cormorants. Perhaps the police should instigate a dwarf amnesty and encourage members of the public to deposit them, anonymously, in secure black bins.

What a load of bleeding nonsense

I’m not sure I understand why Mr Justice Eady placed such importance on who Max Mosley was pretending to be while being whipped by some prostitutes. The implication seems to be that if Mosley had been pretending to be a Nazi then the invasion of his privacy would have been justified. But you would have had to invade his privacy first to find out such a thing.

As it transpired, Max was definitely not pretending to be a Nazi; it was consensual and inclusive sado-masochism: he was pretending to be either Nick Clegg or Tony Blair (“bring that gimp mask over here, fraulein — I’m a pretty warped kinda guy”).

Push ajar the bedroom door of any number of people, famous or otherwise, and you may well see strange things going on, although I’m not sure how many acts of love nationwide are preceded by a rigorous examination for headlice. Conducted in German.

As for Max blaming the newspaper for destroying his marriage — surely returning to his wife with profusely bleeding buttocks would, in the end, have given the game away?

- This was once the most congenial time of the year. Tony Blair took his family off to the Caribbean and the country was left in the hands of John Prescott, who was always too busy vomiting or copulating to cause much damage. Now Gordon Brown has limped off to Southwold, leaving Harriet Harperson in charge. Listen: book a flight now. It doesn’t matter where, just do it. Tell the kids they’ll have to fend for themselves for a bit. Just get the hell out.

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