A decade of anarchic capitalism had followed 50 years of Stalinism and the population had swollen from 200,000 to 800,000, with no sewerage system or rubbish collection.Mr Rama had found the municipality employed 800 people to tend public spaces. In any other European city this would be no reason to celebrate, but Albania’s capital has little in common with other cities.
When Tirana’s maverick mayor, Edi Rama, took office as an independent 18 months ago the park was just another derelict public space, its trees lost amid illegal kiosks in a jumble of mud and concrete.In a normal city, Mr Rama admits, he would never have become mayor but in this “strange and special place” the former artist believes a normal mayor could not help.During the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999, Tirana reached its nadir. In Tirana’s central park the grass is growing. Dozens of suspected paedophiles, including six in the UK, were held in synchronised raids today in a worldwide operation.
Officers from the National Hi-tech Crime Unit worked for a year to smash an Internet-based child abuse ring which called itself the Shadowz Brotherhood.Hundreds of officers swooped on homes this morning in six countries, seizing dozens of computers.Even hardened detectives described the images and videos involved as the most horrific they had ever seen.

The age thing is always about women – it’s never about men.”. “Look, I’m not going to answer that question – I never do. And even innocent questions about her age draw her into a polemical discussion. I hope this government will tackle this job, but I don’t think it will.”Vera Baird has shown she is unafraid to speak her mind when she has strong views. It’s nothing to do with having independent judges; they can still be paid and trained to do their job in a modern way, but they have to be brought into a modern society. She describes the UK’s body of judges as a “powerful pressure group, which is operating for its own purpose and not serving the community and refusing to get involved in the community.”She says: “The judiciary has got to be changed radically; understand that they are public servants and they should be appointed and trained to do their job in an answerable way.

But you ask the chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, which is not dominated by defence barristers, and the Law Society, and they will say most delays are caused by the grossly underfunded Crown Prosecution Service and the police.”She adds: “We ought to shake off attachment to the defence or attachment to the victim and look at the criminal-justice system – and how it works – more objectively, without benefiting one side or the other.”But Baird, who has agreed to head up an independent commission investigating how women are being failed by the criminal-justice system, reserves her sternest criticism for the judiciary. “They blame either delays or unsatisfactory outcomes in the court. The signals from Whitehall suggest that ministers have watered down the plan to curb the right to jury trial for thousands of defendants, but the White Paper is still expected to contain enough illiberal measures to provoke opposition from the back benches.”When ministers talk about criminal-justice reform, they tend to say things have gone too far in the direction of the defendant,” she says. “We hope the Government will support us in this, and I’m surprised at the strength of response from ministers,” says Baird.But the Redcar MP will curry less favour with the Government if she opposes its flagship criminal-justice legislation, which is expected to be unveiled later this month. That ruling would, on the face of it, have saved Tracy Housel.Baird has also been in the vanguard of the campaign to toughen the law against rape – especially in drug-rape cases, where defendants have, previously, escaped conviction by arguing that they believed the victim had consented. “We could show the state parole board the strength of British feeling.”Although the 11th-hour mercy mission ultimately ended in failure, and Housel was executed, a US federal court has since ruled that passing a death sentence on a defendant with brain damage is a breach of his human rights. “It was intended to be another blow against the death sentence in the US,” she explains.

This year, she flew out to America, with the blessing of the Prime Minister, to try to persuade the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole to spare the life of Tracy Housel, a British death-row prisoner who had suffered brain damage. The veteran politician and darling of the Labour Party must be gratified in the knowledge that Vera Baird QC has easily surpassed that minimum requirement.In the short time since her election, Baird has shown that she is capable of being just as brave and outspoken a politician as Mowlam. The only words of advice Mowlam offered her constituency party were that her successor should be a woman. Since then, she has served her time by contesting and losing a number of seats where she has agreed to fly the Labour Party flag with no expectation of winning.Then, two years ago, Mo Mowlam made it clear that she was standing down from Parliament, and Baird found herself in pole position to succeed her. Recently, she acted for Jane Andrews, a former assistant to the Duchess of York, when she appealed against her conviction for the murder of her boyfriend, Tommy Cressman.Baird’s political career began at university, when she was elected vice-president of her student union at the same time as Jack Straw was president of the National Union of Students Not long afterward, she joined the Labour Party. In the Orgreave trials, where 90 men were charged with riot, I met other lawyers who shared my beliefs, such as Michael Mansfield QC, Tony Gifford, and Gareth Pierce.” Shortly afterward, she joined Tony Gifford’s chambers and then Michael Mansfield’s Tooks Court.For the past 15 years, she has been involved in most of the leading industrial-dispute cases, as well as defending those charged in the Strangeways Prison disturbances and the poll-tax riots. But Baird had outgrown Newcastle; she was now being recognised by the bigger radical chambers in London.”I was deeply involved in defending miners in Northumberland and Durham during the miners’ strike.