He told them a gang had kidnapped his wife, who was found suffocated.Carol Wardell’s mother, Joan Heslop, 67, welcomed the guilty verdict and said that her daughter could now “rest in peace” She said: “She loved life. You killed your wife in a brutal manner then cynically attempted to escape detection by going to elaborate lengths to make it appear that your crime was the work of a gang of robbers.”This murder was an outrage to your wife, her family, and to everybody who knew her.”There were gasps of “yes” from the public gallery and Mrs Wardell’s mother, Joan, burst into tears. He bound and gagged himself at the couple’s home in Meriden, Warwickshire, where he was found by police. Not to mention the totally unearnest and indelicate men who make Tube travel a nightmare, morning (groping), noon (ogling) and night (vomiting).RUTH PICARDIE. JASON BENNETTO

Crime Correspondent
The husband of a building society manageress was jailed for life yesterday for murdering his wife after a jury rejected his story that the couple were victims of a gang of armed robbers.Gordon Wardell, 42, had claimed that he had been drugged and gagged by criminals for 16 hours during a raid.A jury at Oxford Crown Court unanimously rejected his story and decided he strangled his 39-year-old wife Carol last September and dumped her in a lay-by near Nuneaton, in Warwickshire.Sentencing Wardell, Mr Justice Cresswell said: “You are an extremely dangerous, evil and devious man. It may have caused problems for people travelling with children.”Funny old word, offensive.

Funny how it doesn’t apply to the ad’s use of the words “condom” (probably named after a Dr Condom, who made one for King Charles II) and “sheath” (the Egyptians made them from animal membranes). I suspect that it is male Tube passengers who come over all earnest and delicate when faced with details of female anatomy; except when it’s breasts, as in the totally unbanned Wonderbra ads.Personally, what I find offensive is the level of hypocrisy and fear that still surrounds the subject of family planning 77 years after Marie Stopes first tried to clear the air, and the fact, therefore, that Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe. Also offensive, though slightly less so, you say, are the words “contraceptive pessary” (honey and elephant dung was a popular one in 9th-century Arabia) and “cervical cap” (Casanova made them using half a hollowed out lemon).Marie Stopes International offered to withdraw the ad if there were lots of complaints It even offered to black out the word “vagina”. But no, the whole subject was branded too offensive to inflict on the capital’s earnest and delicate Tube passengers.”Offensive is always difficult to define,” says your unfortunately named company spokesperson Jeremy Male, “but the Underground is a non-selective media choice. Your poster people, now privatised and called Transportation Displays Inc, are particularly offended by the ad’s use – in a short history of contraception – of the word “vagina” (the ancient Egyptians favoured plugging them with honey and natron).

Some earnest and delicate minds may feel apprehensive that such frankness in details is ‘dangerous’, because the effect on prurient minds might be to give them food for their morbid fancies.”

Sadly, Dr Stopes’s pioneering movement is still struggling to educate those earnest and delicate minds – most recently yours, the boys at London Underground, who have banned an “offensive” advertisement celebrating the family planning charity’s 75th anniversary.
What on earth could be offensive about an ad for the world’s most venerable family planning service, whose honorary sponsors include such controversial characters as Sir David Attenborough and the Rt Hon David Steel? The fact that it reveals – gasp – that Marie Stopes’s services include company health screening, pregnancy advice and sterilisation? That it runs – shock – a clinic in central London?Well, actually yes. “In this little book,” explains the preface to Married Love, first published in 1918, “Dr Marie Stopes deals with subjects which are generally regarded as too sacred for an entirely frank treatment. Where architects such as Francis Johnson gave us true 18th-century construction, style and values and as late as the 1990s (in a number of beautifully refined and restrained country houses in the north of England) so Foster, Rogers and Grimshaw at one end of the spectrum, Ritchie, Mather and Alsop in the middle and Zaha Hadid, Caruso St John, Herzog and de Meuron at the other, represent the best of contemporary British design and engineering in architectural guise.Where Post-Modernism was a roundabout leading nowhere and the latest Classical revival has been a cultural dead end, new forms of radically energised Modernism offer the glimmer of a likeable, workable and, above all, glamorous architecture for the next century.. Alsop & Stormer, architects of “le Grand Bleu” (the show-stealing new local government headquarters in Marseilles) have proposed moving the Institute of Contemporary Arts from its Regency home in The Mall to a dramatic bridge across the Thames.Now that the last of the architects capable of building honourably in traditional styles are all dead (Francis Johnson, the Yorkshire classicist, was the last – he died this year), we need this new breed of Moderns to nurture an approach to architecture that mirrors the best in British design.