What on earth have the people of Broughton, Buckinghamshire, got to hide from us all? I think the old bill should have a closer look. The residents of this small Milton Keynes suburb, hemmed up close to the M1, went doolally last week when the Google camera car turned up to photograph the place – as part of the internet search engine’s latest attempt to sequester the entire known galaxy.

The locals manned the barricades and blocked the roads with their Peugeots and Nissans, claiming it was an affluent residential area that had suffered many burglaries recently; the Google driver was forced to turn back.

Perhaps, I thought, they are all smack dealers or part of a child-kidnapping ring. Maybe they have Lord Lucan or Osama Bin Laden hidden away behind those twitching net curtains: it would be a good place for Osama, Milton Keynes, a very good place from which to cultivate a fearsome loathing of the West. But then I remembered the “mole man” and all became clear.

Gordon Stewart, 74, died of dehydration inside his home in January this year. His house was crammed from ceiling to floor with rotten rubbish and assorted clutter, and he had been forced to burrow a labyrinth of tunnels through it all to get from one room to another.

It is presumed that he got lost inside one of these tunnels attempting to find the tap in the kitchen and eventually died of thirst. Where did poor Mr Stewart live? Broughton, Bucks, that’s where.

And it suddenly occurred to me that this was probably an entire village of mole men and mole women, all of them living a dark subterranean existence beneath unending mounds of filth; weird, alien-type creatures from a John Wyndham novel – The Mole Men of Broughton, perhaps.

No wonder they didn’t want the cameras around; indeed, the Google car driver wants to be thankful he wasn’t eaten on the spot, or vaporised with a death ray. They should get the army to seal off the village; that’s what they’d do in a John Wyndham novel.

Affluent area? Burglaries? Nobody manned the barricades in Great Missenden and Tring, did they? Although these are strange places, too. There is a museum in Tring that once held an exhibition on excrement, for example, which is a bit weird. So perhaps it’s the entire region. Let’s head over the Chilterns and see the mad folk burrowing around in filth and putting their poo on display in glass cases.

They called it right over Google, though, the albino alien mole men of Broughton. It is not simply the risk of alerting burglars to the precise location of pleasantly furnished houses – which is, I would guess, a real risk. It is the effrontery of it all, not so much an invasion of privacy as an appropriation of privacy, or the insistence that privacy should not exist.

And we should worry a bit about Google, too. It has a suspiciously smiling facade for one of the most powerful and wealthy companies in the world. “Don’t be evil” is its rather cringy message to employees; everybody wears casual clothing, they have days of the week when they can work on stuff which interests them and there’s probably a Red Nose Day every afternoon.

At least, in the good old days, with Rio Tinto-Zinc and Lonrho, you knew where you stood; these big corporations didn’t pretend to be nice. Google, however, tells everyone not to be evil and then connives with the authoritarian Chinese authorities in the creation of a firewall to keep out all sorts of stuff that might annoy them.

Meanwhile, the company knows more about you than any intelligence agency could dream of. Use any of Google’s services and, like it or not, as a consequence of the much-criticised cookies, your every internet movement will be logged.

All that’s missing, one critic said five years ago, is it doesn’t know precisely where you live . . .

+ I don’t suppose very many women wish to go outside their homes in Afghanistan, accompanied or otherwise, so perhaps President Hamid Karzai’s latest stricture to the country’s Shi’ite Muslim women won’t cause too much unhappiness. Given that, once outside, they are likely to be stoned.

Karzai has decided that rape within marriage is tickety-boo, too – as part of his gradual transformation from agreeable western-leaning smiley man in a suit back to medieval savage. It still seems to shock our liberal evangelist politicians that other cultures do not always want the same as us – free speech, free passes, class distinction, democracy and proper drains, as John Betjeman had it.

Quite often they want tribal warlords, sharia and women being whipped. I had no moral problem with us attempting to exterminate the Taliban, but the notion that once this was done, the Afghans would suddenly turn into a nation of Shirley Williamses always seemed to be pushing it a bit. And whoever eventually replaces Karzai will be no better.

We should stop them harbouring terrorists but not kid ourselves that we have their hearts and minds.

He doth protest too much

Your celebrity imbecile of the week is – once again – the comedian Russell Brand, who took part in the anti-G20 demonstrations last week, without, apparently, knowing why he was there. “I’m interested in learning and interested in knowing why these people have come to this. Also, I think it is beautiful,” the former skaghead told reporters.

What was most beautiful, Russell – the smashed windows, the injured demonstrators, the wounded policemen, the dead Londoner? And which is more incongruous and offensive: the salaries paid to those loathed City bankers or the salary paid to you – a comedian only slightly funnier than Marcus Brigstocke?

Those dreaded night errors

Spare a thought for Paula Griffin, who awoke in the middle of the night with an irritation in one of her eyes, reached out for her eye drops and sleepily applied nail glue to her eye. She was temporarily blinded and the doctors had to slice off her eyelashes. We’ve all been there, Paula.

Once, very early in the morning, I attempted to make a mobile telephone call, light a cigarette and urinate simultaneously. What of course happened, given that I was still half-asleep, was that I dropped the telephone down the toilet and applied the cigarette lighter to my penis. It is hard to recover, over a day, from a setback like that.

I have also brushed my teeth with Canesten cream once or twice, which was unpleasant. I just hope my girlfriend didn’t make the same mistake in reverse.

+ The police have been issued with a 140-page book designed to make them a little more aware of human diversity. It advises them, for example, that it is wrong to describe a person with what we might call restricted vision as being “as blind as a bat”. Nor should they push someone’s wheelchair out of the way without first asking permission. I don’t know if it says anything about trying hard not to shoot Brazilians when they’re on a Tube train.

My favourite piece of advice from the book is this: “A woman paying close attention to passing vehicles is not necessarily a prostitute.” Then what is she up to, watching all those cars? There’s clearly something wrong with her. Bang her up, I say, and ask questions later.

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