SOMETIMES you need to damn someone for what they do, but sometimes if you let them do the talking they'll do the job for you.

Billie Piper, for example, probably needs to be told that it's not the end of the world to have to talk to her fans, even if it means running slightly over her time slot. Especially because it's Swindon - but even more so because it's polite - you'd think that she'd make an effort when everyone seeing her was actually buying a hardback copy of her book and so, at least indirectly, lining her pocket.

But anyway, but anyway.

Moving on to a more grubby side of Swindon life - and I'm not suggesting that La Piper has ever or would ever firebomb a religious institution - in the last week we've seen a guy called Mark Bulman admit he tried to burn down Swindon's Broad Street mosque earlier this year.

Bulman, or Bullock as he is also called, has been a persistent irritant in recent times. He's regularly been thrown off college sites for leafleting on behalf of far right groups, and has been known to bend the ear of anyone who comes into contact with him with "theories" of racial mixing - or rather how races shouldn't meet.

Now, the main thing is, this guy needs help, and let's hope he gets some rather than just being either locked up for the rest of his life and left to fester, or being released and doing the same thing again.

When he was in court last week the case was adjourned - after his guilty plea - so he could have psychiatric tests and, after listening to him for a while, there can't be much doubt about his mental state. For example, jumping on the "Jews rule the media" conspiracy much beloved of far-right loons, he once asked a reporter here whether he was taking notes in Hebrew. He looked slightly disappointed when he was told it was actually shorthand, but never mind.

But going back to hoisting people on their own petard, it's more Bulman/Bullock's relationship with the BNP which is illuminating.

Go back a couple of months, and you'll find that his was not the first attempt made at defacing the mosque. A teenager called Michael Matthews tried to set fire to the same mosque, and graffitied the Sikh temple in Kembrey Street.

After he was sent down for it in January, a spokesman for the Swindon branch of the BNP said: "We don't know anything about him.

"We just want to say that justice has been done and he deserves to be locked up for this attack on the Muslim community."

The speaker? A certain Mark Bullock. Which tells you pretty much all you need to know about him, the BNP, and everything in between.