There’s a difference between a slobber and a kiss, Gazza

CheeRS resounded not just in the public gallery at Teesside Crown Court but around the nation as former england football hero Paul Gascoigne was cleared by a jury of sexually assaulting a woman on a train after ‘innocently’ kissing her to make her feel better.

In a world of #MeToo madness where any contact between a man and a woman is viewed as an act deserving of incarceration, I too thought ‘hurrah! Sanity at last’.

The next wannabe seeking her place in social media’s hall of fame by pressing charges of sexual assault, especially against a national treasure like Gazza after a friendly kiss, would surely think again.

Then, reading the court papers, I thought again. Gazza said he kissed the woman, who can’t be named, to boost her confidence after a passenger called her fat and ugly.

She claimed he was steaming drunk and drooling, that he tried to sit on her, then grabbed her by the cheeks and kissed her ‘ forcefully and sloppily’ for two to three seconds on the lips in full public view, though he had never met her.

even if we take his word for it that he wasn’t drunk — he explained that he was slurring and dribbling only because he didn’t have his dentures in — the kiss was an outrageous invasion of the poor woman’s privacy. And utterly disgusting.

As for his defence that he kissed people all the time through sheer exuberance, why should that make her feel any better?

his lawyers were bent on proving his kiss had no sexual intent. So what? She was publicly humiliated.

I’m not sure I go along with the howls from feminists who claim the verdict was a ‘green light for gropers’. And with rape case convictions down by 26 per cent in the past year, our courts clearly have more pressing issues of sexual abuse to deal with.

But I am sickened by those pictures of a gleeful Gazza leaving court, arms artfully draped around his attractive female manager as if he could never upset any woman. This is a man whose ex-wife Sheryl complained of years of mental and physical abuse and claimed he once headbutted her.

And I can’t help feeling that the poor woman who complained about his hideous attention on the train has been short-changed of justice.

What a woeful specimen Gazza is.