SAUDIS PUT PM IN PICKLE

After I wrote about Saudi Arabia last week, Film4 re-ran Helen Mirren’s brilliant movie Eye in the Sky (right). It shows how politics really works.

A Reaper drone’s sights lock on to a Kenyan Al-Shabaab safe house, Hellfire missiles primed, where some of the world’s most wanted terrorists prepare two suicide vests.

But the order to fire must come from Whitehall.

Ministers dither because a cute little girl selling bread outside will surely be killed. The dilemma is sacrifice her, or see 80 innocents massacred by suicide bombers. One minister says Britain gets the blame if the girl dies but Al-Shabaab does if there’s mass slaughter.

Cynical and distasteful certainly, but politically spot on. It’s a similar pickle for Theresa May over Saudi arms sales.

Keep feeding weapons into the Yemen War and 400,000 children face death.

Stop, and 40,000 to 80,000 British jobs could go.

Yet threatening to sever arms shipments will help the US get the ceasefire it is demanding.

It’s the right thing to do. Our police forces have been hit with pension revaluations worth £165million.

This will cost Merseyside, for example, £11million over the next three years, equal to 300 police officers.

It comes on top of 23 per cent cuts to the budget since 2010.

No wonder Merseyside Crime Commissioner Jane Kennedy (above) says policing in the future “will be like playing football against a full-strength opposition with seven players”.