The most ill-advised picture opportunity of this or any other week was of Afghan refugee Jawad Saiedi, grinning in jubilation while pointing at the £1.2m house that Ealing council has just given to his family at a rental cost to the taxpayer of £12,458 a month. It has not engendered an enormous degree of sympathy for Jawad, his mum Toorpakai and her six other children (whom we’re also paying for, natch).

They fled here a few years ago, having rubbed the Taliban up the wrong way. One or two local residents quoted in the newspapers reckon the Taliban may have had a point, all things considered.

Under some council loophole, the house is being let out at more than three times the cost of similar houses in the area, much to the delight of the landlord Ajit Panisar. Both recipients of our largesse – Panisar and Saiedi – think that Ealing council is bonkers, which one would not dispute for a moment. Ealing has since sacked the three staff who arranged the Saiedis’ new home, although on what grounds I cannot be sure. Perhaps even more interesting details will emerge soon.

While hopping up and down with glee, Saiedi told the press that being given the house was like “winning the lottery” – but that’s not quite accurate.

If he had a job and were white, British and had lived in the borough all his life, contributing hundreds of thousands of pounds to the exchequer in taxes, then the chances of him being given that particular house – or indeed any other property, even a studio flat – by Ealing council would be like winning the lottery. As, however, he is none of those things, it is simply par for the course. The odds were very much in his favour.

Earlier this year, the local Ealing newspaper reported the case of 60-year-old Peter Wright and his wife who have been evicted from their home in the borough and will not be rehoused because their need is not considered sufficiently pressing. The home in which Wright has lived for 50 years is being redeveloped and there’s no room for him any more, so Ealing council have told him to get lost and make his own arrangements.

Wright pointed out that he has worked all his life and paid the rates without interruption. I expect he was one of the many who read about the Saiedis’ good fortune with great equanimity, but I can’t be sure because I haven’t been able to discover where he lives now. A private paper produced by Ealing council earlier this year reckoned that 80% of those who applied to the council for housing are immediately “placed in Band D [the lowest category] without any prospect of being rehoused”.

It is this disparity, I reckon, which most galls the public, rather than the astronomical sums involved. Sure, Toorpakai and her family cost the taxpayer an estimated £170,000 every year, which sort of pokes its wet nose somewhere beyond the edge of my compassion, but it’s not the real point. Nor, of course, is it the Saiedis’ fault, though they might be advised to confine their celebrations to their new living room, or perhaps the 120-ft back garden.

It is that every public institution – the councils, the courts, central government – seems to have a list of priorities upon which, for the best of reasons, the most deserving people come last.

The victim of crime, the Gurkha, the man who puts up barbed wire to prevent burglars and is told to remove it by the council in case the thieves injure themselves, the taxpayer, people who work for a living, those who have invested their lives in an area and are then told by the council to get lost. It is that the story of the Saiedis is commonplace that most annoys.

Many happy returns to the lovely Clara Meadmore, who celebrated her 105th birthday this weekend. Her excellent health and longevity she puts down to never having had sexual intercourse, despite living for much of her life in Cornwall. She says that she could never be bothered to have sex and that it all seemed rather a fuss. Well, of course she is right – it is indeed the most ghastly business; morale-sapping, uncomfortable and exhausting.

However, there are certain obvious counter-Darwinian implications if we are all to follow Clara’s example, so I suppose the rest of us will have to keep beavering away, so to speak, for the good of the race. And I have doubts that it is her abstinence in this particular regard that has resulted in her living so long – the writer Georges Simenon lived to the very creditable age of 86 having been at it like knives with the entire population of Belgium every day of the week, according to him. And why isn’t Sienna Miller dead already, then?

No – Clara thinks it’s not having sex that did the trick but I reckon it’s the fact that she has never, in her life, owned or watched a television.

The £5,000-a-minute diva

Apparently, the fee to have Peaches Geldof turn up to an event dressed as a cretin, sulk, throw a tantrum and walk off within precisely one minute is £5,000.This was the high-quality service a House of Fraser store in Ireland received for its outlay recently. If you’ve got a birthday coming up maybe you should give Peaches a call; she could pout in the kitchen for a few moments, demand some drugs and then storm out. I mention this only because you might have thought that capitalism was on its last legs. Nope, nope. Big companies are still prepared to give away large sums of money to young people who have nothing to offer but an overdeveloped self-regard. The wheels are still turning.

Maybe we should tattoo you, vicar

Should all homosexuals be tattooed with a health warning, similar to the sort of thing you find on the side of cigarette packets?That was the suggestion from the Rev Peter Mullen, a City of London rector, although he has since claimed that it was meant to be all a great big joke – an alibi which would have gone down poorly at Nuremberg in 1946, I reckon.

I’m aware that the Old Testament takes a dim view of homosexuality, but I’m not sure where Mullen gets this stuff about tattoos from – there’s nothing in the Bible about them at all, although it’s possible that Mary Magdalene had one of a leaping dolphin over her left breast, she being the sort of girl she was.

Mullen’s principal worry is about the act of buggery – although he seems censorious about it only when it takes place between two consenting adults, rather than when it is applied without consent to the entire country.

Yes, that’s right – the Rev Mullen is chaplain to the London Stock Exchange.

All part of the service

I’m informed that now is a very good time to place a bet on Labour winning the next general election, what with Coral quoting odds of 3-1 for the party securing an outright victory.

“It’s unmissable,” I’m told. “Get yourself down to the bookies.”

My tipster has already put a couple of monkeys on at this price. I suppose you could call it kind of insider dealing: he’s a Conservative MP.

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