Jenni Murray evicts her squatter

Jenni Murray (pictured), the formidable presenter of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, is not the sort of person you want to mess with, as a squatter who broke into her London home recently discovered to his cost. "I hadn't been to my flat for a while and when I returned a window had been smashed," the presenter told her audience at the Oldie magazine literary lunch, at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, on Tuesday.

"Nothing seemed to be stolen, but when I walked into the bedroom, the bed was messed up and I found a man in his thirties furiously stuffing things into a suitcase. He said: 'Excuse me, Miss, I need to go.'"

But Murray, who recently fought a battle with breast cancer, did not let the matter rest there. "I told him: 'First, go into the kitchen and clean the dishes. Then, when you've finished, clear up the glass on the floor.' I then called the police.”

Clearly Scotland Yard are not regular listeners to Woman’s Hour, over which Murray has ruled for two decades. When, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, they asked her whether she needed to talk to someone from victim support, she responded: “Do you really think someone who got an intruder in their home to do the dishes needs help?"