Put your trousers on, copper! It’s PC Porn Idol

HERE’S another one of those stories I don’t know whether to file under Mind How You Go or You Couldn’t Make It Up. Police officers have been warned not to take their clothes off when frequenting a popular gay bar in London.

Even if they are off-duty, they should keep their kit on at all times, according to an email from their inspector.

Otherwise, things could turn tricky if they have to attend the club to deal with any incident in their official capacity.

‘Oh, hello constable, I didn’t recognise you in your uniform. Is that a truncheon in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’

The email was sent to 190 PCs belonging to the ‘West End Proactive Partnership’ squad, reminding them of ‘the need to uphold standards while off duty’.

It followed a report to the Met’s licensing team about an incident at the Heaven nightclub in Charing Cross, believed to relate to the G-A-Y Porn Idol competition held every Thursday, in which contestants strip off in an attempt to win a £1,000 first prize.

The email warns that any officer participating in the contest could face disciplinary action. I don’t think this is what the Sweeney’s Inspector Jack Regan had in mind when he barked: ‘Put your trousers on, chummy, you’re nicked.’

(Somehow you can’t imagine Regan or DS George Carter taking part in a G-A-Y Porn Idol contest. Although there was that wonderful scene in the boozer at the end of the Sweeney 2 movie, which featured Bill the driver dropping his Daks and dancing around the snug in paisley-patterned Y-fronts.)

The only surprise here is that coppers are being told not to take part. I thought intimate engagement with the gay community was encouraged these days.

There’s a video doing the rounds on social media of a policeman getting up close and personal with a half-naked reveller at a recent Pride parade.

His fellow officers are cheering him on as he performs the kind of two-man hokey-cokey which would wow the judges on Strictly.

Scenes like this have become commonplace as the Old Bill have embraced ‘diversity’ at the expense of old- fashioned policing and political neutrality.

We have become accustomed to uniformed officers dancing during

Pride month, painting their patrol cars and even fingernails in the fashionable rainbow colours to demonstrate their solidarity with the LGBTQWERTY+ cause.

They skateboard with Extinction Rebellion protesters blocking roads and bridges, bringing London to a standstill. They take the knee in support of the Black

Lives Matter madness, an organisation which seeks to ‘defund’ the police, and turn a blind eye to vandals toppling statues.

So the notion that any officer stripping off for money in a well-known gay nightclub could face disciplinary action goes against the grain.

PERHAPS it is a welcome sign that the incoming Commissioner of the Met, Mark Rowley, intends to stamp out the rampant wokery that has been infesting the police for the past few years.

Rowley’s appointment comes at the same time that Stephen Watson takes over as Chief Constable of Greater Manchester. On Tuesday, I praised Watson for telling his officers to smarten up, scrap the showboating and concentrate on tackling crimes like house-breaking and robbery.

But both men have their work cut out if they are to reverse more than two decades of decline.

Across Britain, police forces — sorry ‘ services’ — are largely run by chief officers, brainwashed by the Left- wing freemasonry Common Purpose, who are engaged more in social engineering than keeping the peace.

While street violence soars and multiple crimes go unsolved, coppers devote their time to scouring the internet for ‘non-crime hate incidents’ on the instructions of the self-appointed College of Policing.

It’s not just the dereliction of duty when it comes to investigating burglaries. The priorities of the police have taken a seriously sinister turn in recent years.

I’ve been rewatching the film of Hampshire police arresting an Army veteran for retweeting a photo of Pride flags arranged in the shape of a swastika. Five officers — yes, five — raided his home. Tellingly, one of the cops, a WPC, was wearing a Pride badge.

The visibly distressed ex-soldier, who had served his country with courage and distinction, was handcuffed and told that his tweet had caused someone, somewhere, ‘offence’. So what? Causing offence is not an offence, contrary to what the College of Policing insists. Nor is it any business of the police.

But for the past 25 years, the police have increasingly taken it upon themselves to decide what is and what is not an offence, aided and abetted by a Crown Prosecution Service in thrall to the pernicious cult of yuman rites.

The politicisation of the police began after Tony Blair’s landslide in 1997. Under the hapless Met Commissioner Ian Blair (no relation), a social worker with scrambled egg on his hat, I described the police as the paramilitary wing of New Labour. During Ian Blair’s reign, police cars were spotted sporting Vote Labour stickers.

Coincidentally, when condemning the epidemic of enforced wokery now engulfing every outpost of alleged public service, Attorney General Suella Braverman described it in the Mail as ‘the long tail of Blairism’. She’s bang on.

Britain has been subjected to a creeping cultural revolution no one ever voted for.

Civil liberties and free speech are threatened — and in many cases actually proscribed. This malignant credo is ruthlessly enforced by the Left-wing Establishment’s shock troops in the police.

Some years ago, I noted half in jest that the Old Bill seemed to be taking their cue from a Monty Python courtroom sketch, in which a Superintendent played by Graham Chapman tells a defendant: ‘You are hereby charged . . . that you conspired to do things not normally considered illegal.’

Matters have now gone way beyond a joke.

What else is a ‘ non- crime hate incident’ if not something ‘ not normally considered illegal’?

The Ian Blair revolution was followed by the Hyphen-Howe terror, during which an obscure 13th-century statute was dusted off to persecute ( and indeed prosecute) civil servants and journalists for disseminating information the public had every right to know.

Hyphen-Howe and his successor, the now-discredited Dick of Dock Green, also presided over the disgraceful Operation Midland witch-hunt, which destroyed the lives and reputations of wholly innocent public figures.

And don’t get me started on the Jimmy Savile squad.

TO USE an expression often directed at the shambolic Home Office, Britain’s police are no longer fit for purpose. I’ve been making a good living lampooning this downward spiral for decades. Indeed, one of the first columns I wrote carried the headline: ‘Mr Plod has lost the plot.’

Since then, things have gone further downhill than anyone could have predicted.

To their shame, successive Tory governments have failed to reverse this descent into tyranny.

As a consequence, in a country that was once a beacon of liberty, blameless citizens like the former soldier mentioned earlier have come to fear an early morning knock on the door from our hyper-politicised police force, intent on handcuffing and arresting them for something ‘ not normally considered illegal’.

And if, a generation ago, I’d have written a column in which police officers had to be advised not to disrobe for money during Porn Idol nights at a gay disco, I’d have been accused of making it up.

Mind how you go.