Mark Pack

There’s one item in today’s list of items stolen from the Ministry of Defence that has really caught my eye: a bridge.

This bridge has not yet been stolen

Not the easiest of things to steal, you might have thought.

Nor the easiest of stolen objects to then make use of.

(Unless, boring, boring it’s a pontoon bridge and was stolen for its scrap metal value.)

But looking into how you might steal a bridge (and researching a blog post is the excuse I’m giving any law enforcement officials who coming asking why my search trails are full of queries about how to break the law), I’ve been surprised about how often bridges get stolen.

Bridge thefts include:

• A 4 tonne railway bridge in the Czech town of Cheb
• An 11.5m long bridge in Khabarovsk, Russia
• A £25,000 bridge in Selby
• Part of a canal bridge in Rochdale
• A 13m long bridge in Mostar, Bosnia

Now if only we still had a Labour Home Secretary we could be looking forward to the weekend newspaper stories about how Labour is going to crack down on crime by banning bridges.

But as we don’t, I’m off to start a campaign to standardise the units used in describing stolen bridges. We can’t be having this mixing up of weights, lengths and costs. Standard units for comparable reporting please.