A fine thing it would be if we could rely on paragons of virtue to administer just laws impartially at all times. But I reckon it's wiser to assume otherwise, as I and many others did after the killing of my good friend Blair Peach on St George's Day, 23 April 1979. At the time we were derided as paranoid extremists by public officials. The more time passes, however, the more the paranoid extremists seem to have been the public officials.

Take the late Dr John Burton, the coroner who presided over the one feeble inquiry - the inquest - there has ever been into Blair's killing. I sat through most of the wretched thing. It was pretty clear to me that Dr Burton, a foolish and cadaverous old bat, had made up his own mind well before the inquest even started.

Certainly, if Blair hadn't been an anti-fascist, and if he hadn't gone to Southall, West London, to resist the National Front, he would not have been killed there. But the fact that at least 10 eye-witnesses saw him struck by a police officer, and no-one saw him struck by anyone else, suggested to Dr John Burton not that Blair had been killed by a police officer, but that he, Dr John Burton, was the unfortunate victim of a plot.