JEREMY Bentham, the eccentric utilitarian philosopher whose skeleton and pickled skull sit in a display case at University College London, Bloomsbury, might have raised a wry smile if he’d heard Camden police chief Mark Heath speak last week.
Bentham, who died in 1832, is best known for his invention of the Panopticon, a circular prison with a tower at its centre that allowed a single hidden jailer to see into every corner of every cell.
The knowledge that they could be watched would force prisoners to behave, he argued.
Police and councils have relied on his thinking as they have spread a network of CCTV cameras across Britain over the last decade, while French philosopher Michel Foucault used the Panopticon as a metaphor for everything wrong with the modern world.
Chief Superintendent Heath – a keen clay pigeon shooter not noted for his love of fashionable Parisian philosophers – revealed last week that he had sent an officer to University College London (UCL) to advise on crime prevention at the new Panopticon, a multimillion pound arts centre named after Bentham’s invention. The centre will provide “a window on all of the university’s work” when it opens in nearby Gordon Square in 2009.
Philosophy professor Philip Schofield told me: “There’s a space for Bentham’s body at the new centre and I hope he’s at the centre of it.
“He was in at the beginning of the modern conception of surveillance. He believed that a public right of inspection would ensure good behaviour and he wasn’t really interested in things like civil liberties, which he considered abstract compared to preventing crime.”
Charles Clarke, the current Home Secretary, would probably approve.
But what Bentham – an early proponent of open government – would make of Camden Police’s refusal to divulge the advice they have given UCL about the Panopticon, is less clear.

A Mustoe for food lovers

IT was a great shame when Mr Mustoe closed his bistro. Regular readers will know I used to visit the Primrose Hill eaterie when I felt like a no-nonsense meal.
And I have felt a little sad each time I walk down Regent’s Park Road and see the door with a sign telling me it’s closed.
It became a beacon for traditional home cooked British cuisine, served up by Edward Mustoe (pictured) and his wife as their cat Squeak looked on. Mr Mustoe refused to change with the times. It was always meat and two veg followed by spotted dick and custard, even when Mustoe’s neighbours joined the culinary boom and dished up fancy foreign fare.
Now I hear Kentish Town estate agents McHugh and Co have the property on their books and will be auctioning it off in May.
With a reserve price of £675,000, the shop – which has an A3 license for food and drink – and a two bed maisonette upstairs could make an attractive proposition for the right people.
While the shop has lain empty, with faded curtains hiding a dusty interior that still boasts unpolished cutlery and salt and pepper mills still on the tables, Mr Mustoe and his family have moved a few streets away in to Chalcot Road.
A salesman said: “It’s not often a property like this comes available in Primrose Hill. It needs modernising but it’s marvellous.”
In his retirement Mr Mustoe builds model boats out of scraps of wood he finds on skips – and before he moved out, the disused kitchens became a workshop.
“I’m building a boat with four propellers fixed in the air,” he told me. “It works on the same principle as a hover craft.”

Smudge’s great will power

Her shop was always for the well-heeled and so I felt it was somehow fitting when I heard of the number of generous bequests left in the will of Smudge Whiteman.
Smudge – real name Berenice – set up and ran the iconic Chic Boutique in Heath Street, Hampstead and numbered among her regular customers beauties as Elizabeth Taylor, Peggy Ashcroft and Judi Dench. Her eye for great clothes brought fame to designers such as 1960s fashionista Jean Muir and the Fashion and textile Museum founder Zandra Rhodes.
Smudge died last August of leukaemia and one of the beneficiaries of her estate was the Royal Free Hospital’s charitable trust. The money has been earmarked for the work done by Professor Victor Hoffbrand, a world expert in blood disorders at the Royal Free Hoispital, Hampstead – an honorary consultant who is likely to have treated Smudge.
Professor Hoffbrand, who teaches at the hospital, wrote a tome that stamped him as the leading authority in his field – The Colour Atlas of Haemotology. He lives with his wife Jill, a former head teacher and Ofsted inspector, in Lyndhurst Road – near the site of Smudge’s old shop and the cash will no doubt go towards funding his groundbreaking research.
And Smudge also remembered others outside her locality: Macmillan Cancer Relief received a similar sum, while the Hendon Reform Synagogue was left £10,000.
What is more, Smudge was born in Wales and never forgot her roots – Newport Borough Council was given £8,000 to buy new equipment for a children’s centre.

Politicians are getting younger

THE Lib Dems have unveiled a secret weapon in their election campaign – Mac Chapwell, 14, an Acland Burghley student, who has written an article against tuition fees in the Camden Liberal Democrats newspaper. I ask his mother Clair for him over the phone. She says: “He’s out canvassing right now”.
Later he told me: “Since the Iraq war I’ve not really been into Labour. And I think tuition fees are terrible”.
But after handing out 5,000 Lib Dem leaflets, I suppose you’d know your stuff too.