In my book it’s always OK for anyone, male or female, to cry. Indeed for the most part I’m tempted to think better of someone who in adult life is prepared to get in touch with and release their emotions.

It’s a funny old world. It’s fine for us to laugh, but when it comes to tears, dare we be so open? The more I travel, the more I become aware of just how locked up we Brits are.

One of the great boons of recent immigration has been the influx of young, more emotional Latin blood – Spanish, Italian, French, Brazilian. Maybe we are picking something up from them in this regard.

I guess I’d be alarmed if George Osborne burst into tears as he opened the budget box, just as I’d be worried if Alex Ferguson responded to a dodgy line call in the same way.

But being candid about the utter grief Sir Alex felt in giving up a 26-year-long romance with football and its players is not only understandable but necessary.

I have cried on the news. I have cried reporting in the field. I’m better for it. One does one’s best never to let it show, but if we in public life are not touched by what we witness and experience, then we are not giving a true account of events.

I remember linking an Egyptian father in London, live and in full vision, with his protesting son in Tahrir Square. He told us that “never in my life, did I ever expect these events to come about”. Then he cried, uncontrollably. I defy anyone not to join him in so emotionally charged a moment.

We are too steeped in the playground – “Cry baby bunting! Cry baby bunting!”

Let’s indeed cry for Argentina..and anything or anyone else we fancy shedding a tear for. Cry on, Fergie – your horse may have come second in the 3.45 at Chester yesterday, but Butterfly McQueen will win one day – and you’ll have the last laugh!

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Perhaps Etna heard that Giulio Andreotti was dying, and this morning is pronounced dead – seven years older than Margaret Thatcher when she died last month. Andreotti dominated Italian politics from 1946 to 1992. He was also tried repeatedly for his links with the Italian mafia. Although eventually cleared of numerous charges, the court declared he had indulged in “criminal association” with the “mob” before 1980, but the statute of limitations would not allow prosecution of these matters.

As the FT puts reports today: “In its judgment, the court declared: ‘Senator Andreotti knew full well that his Sicilian associates had friendly relations with some mafia bosses; he in turn cultivated friendly relations with those bosses’.”

So this mafia associate served as Italy’s Christian Democrat prime minister seven times, its defence minister eight times, foreign minister five times, and finance minister twice. None of his postings lasted very long – so short-lived were the governments he served.

Since Andreotti’s last term as prime minister in 1992, the country has been blessed with Silvio Berlusconi’s premierships and manoeuvrings. His media empire so dominates what Italians read and view, that his influence was, and is still, as pervasive as Andreotti’s was. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, Mr Andreotti will be seen off at a private funeral in Rome – far away from Etna’s sooty deposits.

Why do I tell you all this? Because for all the sneering about Italy’s delicate national governance, who else has elected a full time comedian – in this case Beppe Grillo – to dominate a democracy’s opposition?

National vs local politics

The reason Andreotti’s death is important, beyond his mafia connections, is that it underlines a central truth about Italy and in turn about the UK.

The “national” in Italy may indeed be weak, so weak that mafia and “mogul” influence has been commonplace for years.

But the local is strong. When Etna blows, Sicily sorts it for itself; the local is strong and organised – as it is in the virtual city-states of Venice, Naples, Rome, Genoa, Milan and beyond. Strong local government, strong community, strong extended families are the norm. They are the lifeblood of this country.

In effect all real politics in Italy is local. The EU was founded precisely to relate with these regional entities, as it does in Spain and Germany.

In Britain our local is in many ways all but dead. Local politics, as the latest local elections demonstrate, are increasingly national. There are strong pockets like Birmingham and Manchester, but the very fact that 80 per cent of local funding for public expenditure comes from Whitehall, de-links the local from its local voters – hence the terrible turn-out figures.

So we have the spectre of Ukip, a party that appears to stand for very little “local” but for national issues such as immigration and leaving the EU altogether, somehow making a splash at the local level.

It’s one reason why EU regional funding – so common in other countries – is so relatively rare in the UK. The Highlands and Islands, and Devon and Cornwall are noteworthy exceptions.

It’s one reason why many Italians waking to Andreotti’s passing suspect that when it comes to the critical issue of “quality of local life”, it is they who have the last laugh.

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This last weekend, I got my two days and a night. They were spent in valley in the west Berkshire downs. Hills rich in chalk with sheep grazing on the evergreen grass, and a winding single track road keeping the rest of the world at bay.

The place I slept is in a hamlet in the midst of a 2,000 acre estate. On Sunday the local gamekeeper, whose job it is to breed pheasants and partridges to be shot, took a couple of dozen people who live around the area on a “conservation” ramble across the acres above which his winged charges are expensively dispatched.

I had always regarded game shooting as next to fox hunting – essentially destructive and counter-conservationist. But as the gamekeeper, James, described what was going on around us, I began to think again. For James surprised us all by stating that the policy here is to shoot nothing beyond the reared pheasants and partridges.

No rabbit, hare, squirrel, pigeon or rat is ever shot. For as James explained: “You violate the food chain at nature’s peril.” Break the food chain and a whole species can disappear.  Rabbits, stoats and weasels need to be left for hawks to kill and red kites to eat. Indeed some of the reared pheasants augment the food chain.

When we wandered into woodland on a sharp escarpment we found the topography upheaved by badger diggings. Vast piles of chalk stone stood at the myriad entrances to a maze of badger setts. Some of the tunnels ran 150 yards into the hill only to emerge again higher up.

James described hearing the thumping under ground as 30 or 40 badgers in one sett were expanding their tunnels. In fact in this particular sett the old badger “king” had been deposed and driven out by a younger male pretender. Later on our walk we came across the lone sett of the old badger in a flat field of wheat.

Three holes defined it, sitting about 500 yards from his old empire. It had the feel of Napoleon about it. On the escarpment on the other side were foxes’ faeces and their own small empire. The flint-covered top of the down had been freshly ploughed for the stone curlews to nest in the ruts. We found three pairs. High above our heads lapwing wheeled.

When James moved here 25 years ago there were no songbirds. His predecessor had shot everything that moved. Today the dawn chorus chatters into action with enormous verve from April to October.

But as we shall be reporting next week, what I experienced in west Berkshire is far from Britain’s rural norm. On 8 and 9 May, Channel 4 News will devote a serious portion of the programme to the rapid decline of  the UK countryside and wildlife.

The figures I have already seen are both shocking and terrifying. We have had an exclusive sighting of a report by 40 prominent scientists charting all this. I want the strand to be entitled “This Sceptic Isle?” Tune to see what we end up calling it.

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The president of the United States is in the White House, his every waking minute subject to briefings on the progress of the police operation to ensnare the 19-year-old. His day-to-day work of running the country is stilled. The twittersphere throbs to the ins and outs, lies and truths of the manhunt.

The president of the United States is nursing his own political wounds – but from what? A failed attempt in the highest political gathering in the land – the US senate, no less – to persuade legislators to pass a simple law to strengthen background checks on people who buy guns. His tentative bid to outlaw the sale of automatic weapons is so smashed that it never even made it to the senate floor.

The world remains stunned by the horror of bombs that blew the legs off spectators, spattering shrapnel across the living bodies of over 150 spectators at the charity raising Boston marathon.

Finally a hail of automatic rifle rounds fired from his own automatic rifle and those of the pursuing police officers, catastrophically wounds and finally floors the 19-year-old.

Why is the president of the United States not himself back in the Senate today – out on the media – demanding again, and again, and again, why the constitution of the United States cannot be amended to outlaw the sale of such weapons and amended to ensure the most rigorous background checks for those who seek to buy a weapon of any kind?

Because America fixates not on the lessons of weapons availability but on the threat of the bombs of “the abroad” at home; and because America basks in the brilliance of the police operation that has revealed, removed, arrested and resolved the threat that held a million hostage for a day. America breathes again, and moves on.

But we, who live with America abroad, with America our ally, dare not ask the abiding question. Is this America the mad? America held hostage itself by a gun lobby that brooks no limits?

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We had stood in the bitter January wind waiting for what seemed hours. In our grey flannel suits and inadequate coats, we waited for the coffin of a man we had been told was perhaps the greatest prime minister of all time. In short, a man who saved the very country into which we had been born.

I was 17. I had no memory of the war, I was a bulge baby born after it. In life Churchill had seemed a remote figure from history. And yet as the train bearing his coffin drew closer, announcing its presence with a wailing horn, I and the boys among whom I stood felt huge emotion.

We had all grown up among parents who still grieved for lost loved ones; parents who had lived in the Blitz; parents who spoke chillingly of Hitler and the concentration camps; parents who talked of the “few”.

There had been strip cartoons about Churchill in our Eagle comics. We knew of his time in the Boer war as a correspondent. We knew too that he had written a remarkable multi-volume History of the English Speaking Peoples.

History records his flaws: spirits, a temper, a headstrong sense of his own being and capacity. But above all we knew that this was a man like no other who had led our families and the country through the country’s darkest hour.

Margaret Thatcher’s funeral – reaction, video and tweets in our live blog

When I saw Churchill’s coffin, draped in the union flag, flanked by a guardsman at each corner of the wagon. I cried and bowed my head. This was history, and every fibre of my being knew it. I glimpsed the driver in the engine cab, the guard at the rear, and then the disappearing red tail light as the train wound its way on to Blaydon and his final resting place.

I find myself thinking of that day, on Oxford’s Port Meadow. Today we bury another prime minister, a leader who leaves a population divided upon her legacy. It is a kind of moment in history.

For me, however – and, I feel sure, for a good many who witnessed Churchill’s passing – the emotions are less stirred. Respectful, aware that this day is not the same, and not eliciting the same acknowledgement of history.

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Consequently she revelled in the controversy, the hatred, and the fan-base that she stirred. As I reported in Maggie and Me on Channel 4 last night, Mrs T didn’t appear to have many really close friends.

“Crawfie”, her loyal aide throughout most of her premiership, told me that when it came to Christmas, her family - beyond her husband Denis and her tested children, Mark and Carol - were her domestic staff, who would sit round and eat Christmas lunch together.

Mrs Thatcher would have hated to be universally loved in death. Indeed, it would be completely impossible that she could be. She was as hated as she was admired. In this sense, she was no Winston Churchill, who for all his faults was loved for leading Britain forward in her hour of wartime need.

So we come to her funeral. And here, for once, we can thank the complex, arcane processes of governance under which we live. For there will be no state funeral such as was accorded to Churchill.

To anyone who knew her, it will come as no surprise that she played a role in sorting her own disposal. In this she seems to have recognised the divisions she has left in the society that she presided over for 11 and a half years.

A state funeral would have required the monarch, no less, to bless the divisions she wrought. A “state” funeral might well attract noisy protest from the very forces most alienated by her rule. And, ever the thrifty housewife, Mrs Thatcher could not abide the cost of the jet fuel and man-hours that would be expended in the required “fly-past” that a state funeral would have necessitated.

So it will be a plain old “ceremonial” funeral for Maggie. Not so plain. Streets lined with troops; seamen; airmen; a gun carriage for the coffin; a procession from the Houses of Parliament to St Paul’s, and all the full organ, choir and pageantry that that place can muster.

We won’t notice the difference. But her agreement to avoid that state funeral would seem to recognise that, in death at least, she did finally know her limits.

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To crown the enterprise Sir Dennis, soon to become “Lord” Stevenson, was secured to become the chairman of  HBOS.  Stevenson was already a director of numerous other companies and chairman of Pearson, prestigious owners of the Financial Times no less. Make no mistake, Stevenson was an establishment man – cross party, and with access to any boardroom or dinner table he wanted to attend.

(Sir James Crosby, Andy Hornby, Lord Stevenson)

Smooth, confident, and yet a self-confessed depressive, Stevenson made his way too in both charitable and arts sectors. He was a key fundraiser for the building of Tate Modern. Despite all this, he was apparently able to spare three full days a week to chair and oversee HBOS – at some £800,000 a year plus bonuses (reportedly in the millions).

Crosby and his cohorts grew the bank at what proved to be a catastrophic rate. Whistleblower Paul Moore began to blow like hell. A senior finance officer in the bank,  Moore recognised that if the bank kept going at this rate, it would go bust – he told the board so repeatedly from 2004 onwards. A respected firm of City accountants was brought in to check if he was right. Moore was moved and then sacked for his pains. But Paul Moore could have written today’s report himself.

Here’s the exciting bit. The banking commission says Stevenson, Crosby, and subsequently Andy Hornby, ran the bank so badly that it would have gone bust even without the global financial meltdown in 2008. So what happened? The regulator, the FSA, appoints Crosby to its own board in 2004, just as HBOS is running wild.

Indeed when the whole HBOS enterprise is running out of control altogether, the FSA make Crosby their deputy chairman. He only resigned in 2009 after his bank had to be rescued by Lloyds TSB in a shotgun marriage that resulted in you and me having to bail it out to the tune of £32bn. No wonder today’s report castigates the FSA for being asleep at the wheel.

Will there be an investigation into anyone’s dereliction in public office? You bet there won’t be.

Crosby retains his £570,000 pension,  which you and I are effectively supporting. Stevenson still enjoys several homes and the consequences of vast monies earned in the course of bankrupting a British bank.

So, will anything be done? Will any of these people ever be brought to book? Will “Lord” Stevenson continue to enjoy the terraces of the House of Lords?

The record thus far – with the least establishment-connected operative of HBOS, Peter Cummings, the only HBOS director barred from the City – suggests not a lot will happen.

It’s been like this for generations. For some strange reason, the City of London, and the British banking system in particular, is a prison-free zone, and there’s no sign that either the coalition government or the opposition are ever going to change it. So shall we get used to it, and keep paying our taxes!

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In my reporting experience, what he did was wildly aberrant, abnormal, horrific, and indicative of very little beyond the need to spot, and respond, to so dangerous an individual at a much earlier stage in their development.

Some six months ago the excellent Channel Four News fact-checker Patrick Worrall came up with the statistic that there are thirty families in the whole of the UK with eleven children, who like Philpott, have claimed child benefit.

See this link to see the figures – the vast majority of claimants have just one (over 600,000), or two (400,000), children. The idea that an entire system should be re-jigged to cope with a lunatic who burnt to death half the children he’d fathered seems questionable at the least.

It is unfortunate for both the proposed welfare reforms, and claimants themselves, that they should have become ensnared by something that almost certainly revolts them as much as it does the policy makers themselves.

All I can do to assist, is to commend our Mr Worrall’s researches. They render the true state of affairs with enviable clarity.

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Once again Mandela’s ailing health at 94 summons us south, in case. Yes, in case he dies.

A huge enough event here, but an event with vast global impact too. Many people, many struggles, across the world have seen in Mandela’s example of forgiveness, leadership, and hope, a lodestar by which they can win their own struggles.

It is hard to imagine the eventual passing of anyone in the world today being marked in the same way, on the same scale, as at some point Nelson Mandela’s will be marked.

He hasn’t been seen in public for more than two and a half years – when he was present at the World Cup when it was staged here in South Africa. Since then he has been at his home in the Eastern Cape and from time to time in hospital for remedial treatment from pneumonia and other irritants.

Yet despite his physical absence from the scene here, the political classes within the ruling ANC still crave the shield of his spiritual existence to protect them from the developing ructions beneath them. Corruption, maladministration, and incompetence, besiege their government.

Yet so long as Mandela actually lives – even if unseen – there is reluctance both within and beyond the ANC to confront head-on the failings from which they suffer.

Mandela is, these days, ill enough to die, and well enough to survive. But at 94, those close to him recognise that he cannot have that much longer amongst them. The sad reality is that here at least, in South Africa, people see that in living he somehow keeps a dream alive, but also unintentionally delays the moment when a step change in this country’s fortunes can be achieved.

Increasingly race is a reducing, even if historically present problem. The issues now are familiar to us in the north – poverty, excessive wealth, inequality and corruption.

There has been huge progress, the country feels to be more of a melting pot – three million immigrants from all over southern and central Africa. And money rather than race dictate access to the best and worst life offers. I was in the Alexandria township yesterday – as poor and wretched in parts as anywhere I have ever been – open sewers, uncollected garbage, and shack homes unfit for human habitation.

But in Soweto, great progress – still some bad spots, but a huge investment in new housing, a university, schools, hospitals, businesses, roads and sanitation.

South Africa remains a country with vast potential – bright people, vast wealth in natural resources, and yet. And yet it also has the capacity to fritter it away. Increasing violence between and amongst all communities, poverty at the bottom, and corruption at the top, have the ability to eat South Africa from within.

Mandela’s fading years merely serve to remind us of the great breakthrough and opening he achieved and the vast work that still needs to be done to take South Africa to where it truly belongs — amongst the coming economies of the 21st century.

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Despite the almost complete lack of medical staff, drugs, equipment and even sanitation, the clinic tends the cascades of brutally injured civilians and fighters alike pouring through its door. So short of nursing staff are they that 12-year-old Mohammad and 11-year-old Jussuf are amongst scores of youngsters who have been harnessed to tend to the injured.

They swab, they staunch, they pump, they wipe some of the very worst injuries that man’s inhumanity to man can inflict

The nearby river Quoeiq finds rebel forces one side and government forces ranged upstream. From time to time each day, the unseen upstream presence dispatches a body. The day that we filmed four came down in the space of five minutes. Their hands tied behind their backs, there was a child of no more than 10; an old man stripped naked, and two others.

On the streets in this city in which Christians and Muslims lived in harmonious unity, the Islamists now hold sway and they are radicalising by the day. They are winning hearts and minds too with their tender collecting of bodies; their food drops; their tending of the wounded, and their cleaning of the streets. They run informal schools too in the absence of any others – schools which have the Koran as their guiding light.

As time ticks by, Syria is splitting into a thousand smithereens. Though moderates still just prevail on the rebel side, the Islamist hardliners are in the fast ascendant.

This is what our latest report - filmed in Aleppo over the past few weeks – reveals. Don’t miss it. It is the most affecting piece of television news I have seen in a very long time.

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