True Blue

One would think that, of all the issues in the world, the public disorder in England's cities (or the UK riots as they're known in Scotland) would see the police and the Conservative Party warbling in happy head-cracking harmony from the same hymn sheet. Alas, the Not Particularly Bright Party's erstwhile colleagues in the News International Benevolent Society are sadly out of step with Daveybloke's plans to make senior police posts elective and to bring in an American private security contractor so that the streets of Birmingham may be made as safe as some of New York.

Accordingly, Daveybloke and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, have now caused further irritation by criticising the policing of the riots. They have also claimed credit for having put some backbone in the constabulary by coming back from holiday half-way through the trouble and gibbering a bit at meetings, although Daveybloke has done his best to grovel his way out of that one with an abject telephone call to the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club, that famously tactful organisation whose community policing activities - shooting somebody dead and then misleading the press about it without troubling to mislead the family first - sparked the whole thing off. Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, has gone so far as to describe the role of the Head Boy, his Matron and the London Haystack as "an irrelevance", and to pour cold water on various ejaculations by Daveybloke and others about water-cannon. Orde has even drawn a distinction between policing and politics, which is unlikely to go down well with a Cuddly Cabinet of overgrown school bullies who regard the country as their very own toy train set (a head-on collision with lots of gore? O how super!), and has dared to behave like a doctor or a teacher by contradicting Daveybloke's cast-iron pledge that budget cuts of up to a fifth (to say nothing of privatising the forensic service) will have no noticeable impact.

It is all very bizarre. Nobody in their right mind would expect great statesmanship from a government of adolescents, advertising men and Eric Pickles; but how much Machiavellian cunning does one really need in order to realise that, from a purely practical point of view, kicking the proles and the police at the same time might not be such an awfully spiffing idea?