Things have come to a pretty pass when a freeborn Englishman is not allowed to kill his wife

ROD LIDDLE

The government is considering a new law which would make it illegal to kill women, no matter how annoying they may have become.

Men should lose recourse to the defence of 'provocation', argues Harriet Harman. the Solicitor General. The idea came to her one night while she cowered in the utility room as her husband, the prominent trade unionist Jack Dromey, roamed the family home with an enormous axe, just like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, all unshaven and saliva dribbling down his chin, grinning and sweating and bellowing, 'Hhh heeeerrrrrre's Daddy!'

'He's going to claim I provoked him,' Harriet whispered to herself, hunkered down behind a row of plastic bottles of Mr Muscle. Vecta window cleaner. powerball tablets for the dishwasher and unblemished copies of Will Hutton's exciting, seminal work, The State We're In.

'Well,' she muttered defiantly, silently disentangling herself from a nest of J-Cloths and forest-fresh pine-scented New Labour toilet cleaner, 'sod that.'

This scenario is only a guess, I should point out, if only to forestall a letter from Ms Harman's legal people — who, with her being Solicitor General, are probably quite formidable. I was just surmising, i.e., indulging for a moment in fiction.

And it's true that even under current law, if Jack were to kill Harriet with a couple of swift blows from a big axe and then claim 'provocation' as a defence, the prosecution would be entirely justified in dredging up and levelling against him that other discredited legal qualification: contributory negligence. Jack did, after all, take the strange decision to marry the woman in the first place. Suffused with lust, or perhaps simply out of respect for her incalculable political acumen, he at some stage popped the question, presumably. By which I mean that he knew exactly what he was getting into.

But it will be a sad day for British justice if Harriet's proposals — about which I was not joking — become enshrined in law.

Harriet is angry that men charged with murder of their wives all too often cry provocation and see the charge reduced to manslaughter. This should be stopped, she thinks. For countless centuries British men have been allowed to kill irritating women and suffer nothing more than a stern ticking-off from the judge, and maybe a couple of weeks mending dry-stone walls in the Peak District. Not for much longer. No more will a judge be permitted to look kindly upon a man who claims he dispatched his wife in rage because she wilfully confused the preliminary stages of the Champions League with the Uefa Cup qualifying round. Or wrote off three cars, including his, while trying to park in a 'Women with Toddlers and a Lack of Spatial Awareness'-designated parking spot at the local branch of Waitrose.

Nor will we be allowed to kill women if — well, let's face it, when — they are serially unfaithful to us, sexually. In future, we shall just have to smile indulgently and put up with it, instead of resorting to the trusty old chainsaw, or the hairdryer flung in the bath.

I ought to admit that I have a personal interest here. A very early girlfriend of mine took the opportunity, while I was on holiday with my mum and dad in Paignton, of engaging in sexual intercourse with someone who was not only my best friend but also — crucially — the lead guitarist in our horribly cacophonous rock group, Dangerbird. The reasoning, as she explained tearfully upon my return, was this: 'I did it in order to feel closer to you.' I mean, come on, Mr Zimbabwean War Veteran — pass me the panga for a minute or two, will you?

I didn't actually kill her, as it happens. But I did smash my best friend's copy of the groundbreaking post-punk single 'Shot By Both Sides', by Magazine, which he'd kindly loaned to me before my vacation, instead.

Anyway, on average, two domestic murders occur every week, of which 95 per cent are committed by men. That gives you an idea of the disproportionate level of provocation taking place in homes the length and breadth of the country. The enormous pressures under which men struggle to control their righteous and consuming wrath, and then just twice a week fail to do so. And yet Harriet proposes to discount such overwhelming evidence.

Not only that. She has also turned her attention to the remaining 5 per cent of domestic murders: the murders committed by women on men. Clearly, in her view, the number of men being killed needs to be substantially increased. Perhaps it was a New Labour manifesto pledge. So Harriet has proposed a new form of defence which — and I quote — 'would allow women who kill their husbands after years of physical abuse to be treated more leniently'. That is, a ticking-off and a couple of weeks in the Peak District.

At present, women who kill their husbands 'after years of physical abuse' can expect anything up to a year in prison, perhaps even more, and, even after this has been reduced on appeal to several months, it still serves as an enormous disincentive to committing oneself to the socially desirable act of murdering men. Perhaps Harriet will only be happy when the domestic murder statistics are split, gender-wise, 50-50. Or maybe she wants all domestic murders to be committed by women in future; a sort of women-only shortlist of murderers. Who can tell? It makes one suspect that it must have been a very nasty row with Jack, that evening she ended up in the utility room.

What she's proposing, when it comes down to it, is that women should be allowed the defence of something called 'provocation'. Whereas, by startling contrast, men should be denied the defence of the thing called 'provocation'. Men, her reasoning surely goes, are beasts prone to murdering women at the drop of a hat; women, meanwhile, are unnecessarily quiescent creatures who should, really, resort to murder rather more often than they do at present. Women are not capable of provoking men; but men, invariably, unforgivably, provoke women.

It is a long time since we had a government minister who attempted, by changing the law, to encourage British nationals to murder each other. I am no expert on matters legal: I know, sort of intuitively, that it is both histrionic and the height of bad manners to kill women, no matter how seriously they occasionally get one's goat. It is a fragile notion of civility, then, which keeps me on the straight and narrow. I fervently hope women have that same self-restraining notion of civility, too, or the Tiber will foam with blood and corpses bestrew our streets from Thurso to Truro as men are chopped down, one after the other, where they stand, by a newly emancipated monstrous regiment.