As the Sunday Times reported at the weekend, Gunn has now won the right to be called by the title he wishes after a battle with the prison authorities at Whitemoor HMP. Gunn revealed his victory in a letter published in this month’s issue of the prison inmates newspaper Inside Times.

I raise this issue because I have written at length about the misery that Gunn and his cohorts brought to the people of Nottingham and beyond. There is nothing wrong with the idea that prisoners should be addressed in a formal manner; a civilised society should not seek to treat inmates as animals if there is any hope of rehabilitating them from the wrong road they have taken. What is wrong here is that Gunn has been afforded some kind of respectful status in the face of some truly brutal crimes for which he is rightly facing a 35-year tariff. I make no mention of other crimes he hasn’t been convicted of which currently lie in the dusty shelves of detectives trays marked “case unsolved”.

Surely until we start treating the victims of crime with the respect that they deserve, the human rights concerns of the likes of Colin Gunn should be pushed to the back of the queue. Colin Gunn is clearly revelling in this latest burst of publicity because he thinks he has got one over on the system that he is constantly seeking to pervert. His idea of a just world is one where might is right and the mob rules and where he is considered as a role model for others…that seems to me a recipe for the end of civilised society.