Richard Ingrams' Week: After the jury's verdict, the backlash begins

We're not looking for anyone else. That used to be the traditional police response when a convicted murderer was proved innocent and shown to have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

It was repeatedly said after a judge halted the trial of Colin Stagg before a decision was made over the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992.

What it means, in a supposedly non-libellous sense, is that the accused person has got away with murder thanks to the machinations of clever lawyers or other natural enemies of justice.

In the case of Barry George, released last week after spending eight years in prison for the shooting of the BBC reporter Jill Dando, the message was worded rather differently, but the meaning was exactly the same. A police spokesman said that they were "disappointed" by the jury's verdict.

And the only possible reason why they might have been disappointed when an innocent man was released after eight years in prison was because they didn't believe that he was innocent in the first place.

We have been there before. And just as in the case of Colin Stagg – when the press, particularly the Daily Mail and its sister Sunday paper, was happy to print all kind of anti-Stagg propaganda provided by the police – the anti-Barry George campaign is already gathering momentum.

Like Stagg, he is a "weirdo" and "a loner". Altogether, not a very nice type of person. All right, the evidence against him was "mostly circumstantial and shaky" admits a typical Daily Mail columnist, Jan Moir, "but in my opinion it still remains a curious case".

And that's her non-libellous way of telling us that, like those policemen, she is disappointed by the jury's verdict.

Ever-growing menace of Heathrow

A friend tells me he can no longer face going to airports, and I am beginning to feel the same way. The queuing, the chaos, the pointless security checks, not to mention the delays and cancellations, are enough to deter any sane person from getting on an aeroplane if it can possibly be avoided.

Contrast this feeling, which I guess is nowadays shared by a great many people, with all the talk from politicians of how Heathrow airport needs to expand and build a new runway in addition to its Terminal 5 so that Britain can preserve its place as the hub of international air travel.

More planes, bigger planes, and bigger airports to cope with them all. So why is it that British Airways is in such a poor state that it is having to merge with the Spanish airline Iberia, with the possible loss of 7,000 jobs? According to the experts, it is the only way it can hope to survive.

And BA is not alone. Faced with what one report calls an economic meltdown, all airlines are cutting their flights and increasing their fares. There has already been a 7 per cent fall in the number of flights offered in the last three months of this year.

It would be nice to think that the great meltdown would put paid to the new runway at Heathrow, but I doubt if it will have the slightest effect. Heathrow has become a giant and nightmarish status symbol, rather like Concorde used to be, and no amount of mergers and cutbacks are going to affect its non-stop expansion.

* In the course of the debate about religion, which has been rumbling along for some time in the pages of this newspaper, someone – I can't remember who – said that the more intelligent you are, the less likely you will believe in God.

It may well be true. But the mistake that people like that make is to think that very intelligent people are necessarily best equipped to decide on such important questions as whether God exists or not.

I tend to believe the exact opposite – that the cleverer a person is, the greater the likelihood that they will consistently succeed in getting hold of the wrong end of the stick.

I have known one or two very clever people like this, the sort of people who got double firsts at Oxford, and I would never for a moment trust their judgement on any important matter, be it the credit crunch or the existence of God.

Germaine Greer, for example, is not only an extraordinary brainbox – knowledgeable about all kinds of things, able to talk and write with astonishing fluency and, in many ways, an absolutely admirable human being. But not someone I would choose to rely on even to tell you the right time.

As a matter of fact, to return to the God question, I don't accept that very intelligent people don't believe in God. You could make a long list to prove the exact opposite – Descartes, Dr Johnson, Isaac Newton, Mr Gladstone, T S Eliot, W H Auden. Cleverer men than I would be able, no doubt, to think of other names.