Richard Ingrams’s Week: Desperate Dave tries to avoid the dinosaurs

Is there such a thing as a gay dinosaur? I only ask because of a distinct lack of logic in some of the arguments being advanced by David Cameron in the hope of becoming the next prime minister.

Cameron is very keen to promote the picture of a new-look Conservative Party and he does this by calling for more women, more gays and more candidates from the so-called ethnic minorities. They will then force out all the dinosaurs – men like Sir Nicholas Winterton who likes to travel first class on the trains to get away from the burger-guzzling yobbos in the standard-class carriages.

The fallacy in the Cameron thinking, which is modelled on Blair's, is that women, gays and ethnics are by their very nature progressive, liberal and forward looking. But there is no reason at all why they should be. Women are no more liberal than men. Gays can be just as bigoted and reactionary as anyone else. And are such ethnic standard bearers as Keith Vaz and Baroness Scotland any more forward looking, let alone more competent, than their white equivalents?

Cameron, meanwhile, has expressed his concern about unsuitable pop songs and the bad effect they have on young children. He named in particular the singer Lily Allen. (Sample lyric: "When you first met me/ I was wanting more/ But you were fucking that girl next door/ watcha do that for?")

Some of us might have thought better of Cameron if he had expressed his distaste for this kind of rubbish, but he was at pains to insist he was only concerned about the possible effect on children. He stressed that he personally was a Lily Allen fan. But of course. He wouldn't want us to think that he was some kind of dinosaur.

At the mercy of the police

The 74-year-old BBC journalist Ray Gosling is only the latest person to confess to a mercy killing. On a TV programme shown on Monday he claimed that several years ago he had smothered his lover who was dying a painful death from Aids in hospital. According to his solicitor, Gosling made his confession on the spur of the moment and was rather taken aback by the consequences.

The police arrested him, releasing him on bail after 30 hours in custody. They also took papers from his Nottingham flat. However, he has consistently refused to give the police his lover's name and it may be difficult for them to charge a man with the murder of person or persons unknown.

A precedent of a kind was established in April 2008 when the flamboyant magazine publisher Mr Felix Dennis apparently admitted to being a murderer, though in his case it was far from being a mercy killing. In an interview with Ginny Dougary of The Times, Dennis claimed that 25 years previously he had killed a man who was threatening and abusing his girlfriend at the time. Things got so bad that he decided to adopt extreme measures. "I had a little meeting with him," he said, "and pushed him over the edge of a cliff. Weren't hard."

Dennis later made some attempts to retract the story which had been taped, pleading a thyroid imbalance for which he had been prescribed powerful drugs which caused him to imagine things. And though the police did show some small interest, nothing was done.

It would be regrettable if the police were shown to adopt different standards when dealing with a multimillionaire and impoverished old hack.

Thrills and spills from a quiet man

Dick Francis's first half-dozen thrillers are among the best ever written. They sold millions of copies and were praised by discerning critics such as Kinglsey Amis and Philip Larkin.

I met him a few times when I was briefly involved in the bookselling business in the 1980s. He made a point of visiting all his local bookshops in Berkshire and Oxfordshire every year and signing copies of his latest book. It made little difference to his sales which were enormous, but was simply an act of kindness to small, often struggling booksellers.

I can understand why some people couldn't believe that he wrote his books, with some even claiming that in fact they were written by his devoted wife Mary.

Dick was a quiet and very unassuming man who hardly ever spoke about his work. But there wasn't anything odd about that. I remember meeting the great thriller writer Patricia Highsmith and finding it difficult to connect this charming quietly spoken American lady with her disturbing murder stories. PG Wodehouse struck many people as a bit of an old pipe-sucking bore interested only in public school cricket and the soaps on American television.

Then people like Graham Lord, who wrote a biography of Dick Francis, point out that he was not an educated man and so not really qualified to write books.