Why not hypnotise the Old Bill to catch criminals?

The Government committee which meets regularly to give me something to write about has surpassed itself. After much deliberating, cogitating and digesting, they’ve come up with the perfect storm.

Over the years, this select group of civil servants has provided me with a rich supply of nuggets. Often these bonkers initiatives are so wide-ranging that I haven’t been able to work out whether to file them under You Couldn’t Make It Up or Mind how You Go.

There have been others which straddled You Couldn’t Make It Up and here We Go Looby Loo, and a few which could have comfortably embraced both here We Go Looby Loo and Mind how You Go. But never before, to the best of my recollection, has any single story covered the waterfront and qualified for all three categories at once.

So you can imagine my delight when I opened my Daily Mail yesterday and alighted upon the headline: ‘Police bring in hypnotist to help officers going through the menopause.’ Now there’s another sentence I thought I’d never read, let alone write.

how long must it have taken them to come up with this idea? It will have involved more than a short session over coffee and biscuits in some Whitehall committee room.

Perhaps they were flown business class to an all-expenses-paid conference in Las Vegas, where their imaginations could run wild.

‘Now then, ladies and gentlemen, what are we going to give Littlejohn to write about this week?’ ‘he likes daft police stories.’ ‘Good.’ ‘Well, I’m just running this up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes, but you know we went to see David Copperfield at the MGM Grand last night . . .’ ‘Yes?’ ‘how about we say that the police are going to hire a hypnotist to . . .’ ‘To what?’ ‘Oh, I dunno, help young offenders turn away from a life of crime?’ ‘Nope, too mundane.’ ‘I’ve got it. To help women police officers cope with the menopause.’

‘Brilliant!’

AND so it came to pass that a pilot scheme has been launched in the West Midlands, where a hypnotist has been engaged to help WPCs going through the change. I wonder if he’s like Kenny Craig, the stage hypnotist played by Matt Lucas in Little Britain.

‘Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, not around the eyes, don’t look around my eyes, look into my eyes, you’re under.’

Perhaps while they’re under his spell, he could hypnotise them into doing something useful, like walking the beat once in a while and actually investigating burglaries. ‘And, three, two, one, you’re back in the room!’

Look, I’m not trying to belittle the suffering of some women going through the menopause. But it’s not the job of the police to provide them with hypnotherapy.

My guess is that there was no concerted groundswell of demand for this service from female officers. More likely, it came out of a seminar organised by the plethora of superfluous jobsworths with useless degrees who attach themselves like leeches to our public services, enforcing endless guidelines about ‘safeguarding’ and ‘best practice’.

Once up and running, it will spread like wildfire. Soon every police station in the land will have its own resident hypnotherapist, maybe an acupuncturist, too.

Nottinghamshire Plod already has a special room where women officers can go and have a good cry. Call me old-fashioned, but didn’t that used to be called the ladies’ toilet? Surely, in the interests of equality, the police should also provide hair replacement treatments for male officers who are going bald.

And what about all those transgender coppers they are so keen to recruit these days? There’s already at least one officer in the Met who has two warrant cards because he identifies as both a man and a woman. Some days he calls himself Callum, on others he goes by the name Abi.

What happens if a male officer who says he’s a woman, even though he is in possession of a full set of wedding tackle, announces that he’s going through the menopause and demands the right to be hypnotised?

They could hardly turn him away. he could sue them for discrimination, one of the police’s favourite pursuits when they’re not trawling the interweb for ‘hate crime’.

ONLY last week we learned that a male chief inspector in the riot squad had won £870,000 compensation for sex discrimination against the Met’s former Deputy Assistant Commissioner Maxine De Brunner, who was on a mission to drive out the ‘macho culture’ in the force. Including legal costs, the case is reported to have cost taxpayers £2 million.

Miss de Brunner, 52, has since been allowed to retire on full pension after being prevented from wasting £10,000 sending specialist officers, including marksmen, mounted policemen and dog handlers, to her son’s school fete.

All this at a time when the police are constantly pleading poverty and recently announced they would no longer be accepting lost property reports from the public.

It would have been cheaper to send Miss De Brunner to a hypnotist.