No one looking back on the last fortnight could say that Middlesbrough didn’t make the most of its time in the spotlight. I’ve been in the north-east these past few weeks and opening the local papers has been like a diabolical advent calendar: a new horror for every day.

On Saturday 22 August we discovered that five Middlesbrough boys, aged 17 to 23, with 22 convictions between them, had raced the wrong way down the A66 and smashed into a police car, killing themselves and the two poor officers too. On the Sunday we learnt that the speeding boys had been chasing another car, a Volvo, which, in the early hours of Saturday had reversed repeatedly into the front of one of the boys’ houses.

There was stern talk of ‘joyriding’ in the press, but joyriding doesn’t begin to do credit to the imaginative uses a Middlesbrough man can find for a stolen car. It’s not uncommon, apparently, in parts of town to find your house caved in and a Volvo in your front room. Such ‘ram-raiding’ is the calling card of one of the town’s criminal gangs.

In parts of the town, it’s not uncommon to find your house caved in and a Volvo in your front room

In parts of the town, it’s not uncommon to find your house caved in and a Volvo in your front room

They all enjoy arson, which is why on Wednesday last week, after another fun ram-raid, a caravan was torched; and the next day, a mother and her young niece burned to death in their house. If Facebook is to be believed, in a separate part of town there was a machete attack,........

© The Spectator