Cruising Tate Modern does not stop us being furious about shambolic trains. Lottery-funded architecture may be a transient distraction, but it can also be a sharp reminder of the disparities and cynicism that so concern Glancey.His small book is peculiarly significant because it is totally unself-conscious, a final, despairing shout from a humanist for whom architecture is too often vacuous bunkum. What he wants – huge spending on architecture that changes lives – is impossible. But by wanting it so passionately he may focus some minds on what may, just, be possible, and not just in London. The city’s pre-war director of Transport, Frank Pick, to whom the book is dedicated, knew that good architecture and effective infrastructure went hand-in-hand, and that it required strategy, massive investment – and nerve.In Manchester, the new Lottery-funded projects will suck in more tourists and business conventions, taking earnings from this slice of the city’s activities to well over £500m. At Deptford Creekside – in Glancey’s “mongrel London” – the trickle-down will be harder to judge.Jonathan Glancey’s ‘London – Bread and Circuses’ is published by Verso, £12. William Stobie, the loyalist paramilitary and police agent whose testimony alleged collusion between British intelligence and loyalist death squads, was shot dead outside his Belfast home yesterday.

Relatives have accused police and British military intelligence of collusion with the UDA in the shooting.His trial for aiding and abetting the 1989 murder of the Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane collapsed last month and he had been warned just days ago that the UDA was after him. The loyalist death squad that killed him almost certainly came from “C Company” of the UDA ­ the same unit responsible for shooting Finucane.The assassination is the latest twist in a 12-year saga seen as one of the most suspicious of the Troubles and which raises disturbing questions on the role of intelligence agencies.The most straightforward explanation is that Stobie was killed by the UDA because he was, by his own admission, an RUC Special Branch informer. But the Finucane case had generated so much suspicion and left so many questions unanswered that ulterior motives are widely assumed. Within hours of the killing, Sinn Fein described it as another twist in “an unravelling story of collusion which smells of the RUC Special Branch and British military intelligence getting rid of an embarrassment and potential problem”. Civil liberties groups reiterated demands for a public inquiry, with British-Irish Rights Watch saying this should be done “before anyone else associated with this case is murdered”.

The Irish government said the shooting “may have been an attempt to stifle the search for the truth”. The affair began in February 1989 when Pat Finucane, one of the best-known solicitors in Belfast, was killed in his north Belfast home by three loyalist gunmen They fired 14 shots, all of which hit the lawyer. Within hours, the killing was immersed in controversy and calls for inquiries. A month earlier a Conservative minister had declared in Parliament that he believed there were “a number of solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA”. While Mr Finucane had a number of loyalist clients, he was particularly associated with high-profile republican cases.