Littlejohn And Another Foot In Mouth Howler

Once again, events have moved rather faster than the Daily Mail’s obscenely overpaid and tedious churnalist Richard Littlejohn: as he has lounged by the pool at his gated Florida compound, pontificating on the shortcomings of the Police and asserting that they are no longer part of the community they serve, one of their number has been shot dead.

Police, guv? They're all big feet, like the ones I shoot myself in, innit?!?

And what has made matters worse for Dick, the dead officer had intervened to protect a member of that community that the million pound hack claimed the Police no longer care about. Moreover, Littlejohn has opened mouth and inserted boot just so he can try and excuse someone not paying attention to his driving and therefore getting himself fined as a result.

In Dick’s blokish parallel universe, young men ogling women is fine, even if they take their eyes off the road ahead and crane themselves across the adjacent front passenger seat, which was what the subject of today’s Littlejohn column was doing. No mention is made of just how much distance a car travelling at no more than 30mph would cover in the time that there was no-one watching.

Dick then makes himself look even worse by chucking in a little forthright dishonesty, asking if “casting a fleeting backward glimpse constitutes dangerous driving”. It wasn’t fleeting, and he wasn’t being charged with dangerous driving: the fixed penalty was for careless driving, although had the car struck a pedestrian and killed them, he might have been done for dangerous then.

One has to wonder if Dick never saw what happened to the Dudley Moore character in 10 when he ogles Bo Derek rather than look where he is going, and stuffs his Roller as a result. But when Littlejohn is in fact selection mode, that thought is not allowed to enter. Instead, readers get “The Police have long since ceased to be our fellow citizens in uniform” and “No longer a trusted part of the local community”.

Perhaps Dick would like to expound his thoughts to the family and colleagues of PC Ian Dibell, who intervened in a neighbourhood dispute yesterday and died as a result. He was trying to keep the peace, as a “fellow citizen in uniform”, as he was clearly a “trusted part of the local community”. Or maybe Dick will carry on describing the Police as “behav[ing] like an occupying army”.

Still, Littlejohn has space left to put the boot into Labour MP Tom Watson, for having the temerity to write a Sunday newspaper column, on which subject Dick observes “Watson has convinced himself he’s a multi-talented media personality. This weekend he turned up as a guest columnist in a Sunday newspaper. It was a dull-as-ditchwater mix of badly written banality and statements of the bleedin’ obvious”.

And we all know whose job that is, eh? Dick, you’re a dick. No change there, then.