Slow-boat chase leaves a warm fuzzy feeling

EVEN in these gloomy days as lockdown creaks to a very slow close there are moments of quite zany insanity that force a laugh.

Last week some rogue in Leicester dodged police custody and escaped – on a canal boat. Not quite Concorde but he did his best, flashing down the waterways at 4mph.

And if you think our police never get out of their cars, you’re wrong. The Leicester fuzz shot after him down the towpath on bicycles. Straight out of the old Boulting comedies from Elstree Studios.

They finally got him when he ran into a closed lock. One must just hope they were all able to adjourn to a waterside pub for a freshener in the sun before a gentle cruise back to where the barge came from, to a chorus from Gilbert and Sullivan.

No need to take this law and order business too seriously unless one is redecorating the Prime Minister’s flat.

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FRESH figures reveal there are now just a whisker under a million burglaries unsolved, most uninvestigated, in the country at the moment.

Traumatic though the event may be for the taxpayer and householder, for the boys in blue it’s a bit of a bore unless there is a film show with usherettes and choc ices or fingerprints that match those on file.

But they can’t even recover those unless they send a SOCO along with dab powder. Forget late-night TV. That’s fiction.

Mind you, if the householder responded and put the marauder into traction, there would be two teams within the hour. One to arrest the citizen defending his home and one to visit the horizontal one with an offer of counselling.

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THE FORCES of officialdom have used the excuse of Covid to remove huge tracts of our civil rights and freedoms.

Now they are fighting tooth and claw to retain those powers over us. The reduction of Covid deaths to a couple a day changes nothing. What we need is a gutsy champion in Downing Street. Unfortunately we don’t have one.