Better a fat blue line than posh police too thin on courage

It really is a considerable mercy — bearing in mind their levels of fitness — that a tiny minority still have the energy to beat up protesters on demos every so often.

Don’t forget, though, that our thieves and other assorted miscreants have got much fatter, too, over the years; these days, the typical police chase on foot takes place in slow motion, with the occasional rest period during which defibrillators may be used.

The police are still, then, an agreeable reflection of our criminal classes — basically the lower orders decked out in a nice uniform.

Winsor wants to stop all that. He doesn’t want the police simply to be thinner; he wants them to be posher too. I think he believes these two states are naturally coterminous.

His headline-catching suggestion is that officers should take a fitness test every year to ensure that they are acceptably mobile, capable of shifting their gargantuan backsides on the rare occasions that there is no paperwork to be completed.

Cutting their bureaucratic procedures would, of course, make the police more cost-efficient and probably also improve their levels of fitness. But nobody knows how to do that. There are too many officials, such as Winsor, insisting that forms have to be filled in, in triplicate.

Anyway, the benchmark for fitness he has identified is not a terribly onerous standard, once you break it down. It requires the police officer to be able to trot at about 5.5mph for three minutes. I think even Eric Pickles could manage that, and on a Friday evening just after dinner.

Winsor suggests that this less-than- stringent regulation might be raised a few years down the line. In the meantime, the rozzers will lose money if they fail their fitness tests — a drop in salary of £3,000 a year has been suggested — or perhaps, if they are really hulkingly grotesque, lose their jobs altogether.

I suspect that the Old Bill, reading Winsor’s various suggestions, might be tempted to stay fat and wave two fingers in his general direction. They will be losing money, anyway — Winsor has also suggested lowering the starting salary for officers by a staggering 20%. Some will be losing their jobs, too — Winsor suggests removing from the police their historic immunity to redundancy and “saving the taxpayer” £500m, more or less.

He also wishes for policing to become a middle-class profession, rather than one of the last dwindling redoubts of blue-collar labour. Officers should be, according to Winsor, professionals, a bit like people in the medical profession. What — does he mean consultants, or doctors? On the salaries he’s suggesting, more like hospital porters.

The police force surely does not require to be made bourgeois; it does not need more hand-wringing social workers or lawyers; what it requires is men and women of action and courage.

Indeed, the entire tenor of Winsor’s investigation and his recommendations has the distinct whiff of snobbery about it — the police are uneducated, fat chavs who get paid far too much, he seems to have concluded, and would be much improved by having nice middle-class people with degrees fast-tracked to whip them into line.

Thin middle-class people, of course.

Bin Laden’s marital blisters

Apparently, Osama Bin Laden’s wife Amal was a rampant slut who demanded sex with her husband 24 hours a day. The source for this vital information is one of Osama’s other wives, Khairiah.

The two women had to be separated when they started trying to claw out one another’s eyes while being held in a Pakistani prison. Amal, meanwhile, blames Khairiah for dobbing in the old boy to the Yanks.

The more I read about these women, the more I suspect it was Osama himself who alerted the Americans to his whereabouts, in the hope of the merciful release of death from these squabbling harridans. And the more I see their photographs, the more I understand why Osama retreated to his bedroom with a bottle of gin.

Doctors have a whine problem

I think it was the decision by Peter Wilkes to emblazon the words “Peter Wilkes” across his stock car that attracted the wrong sort of attention.

Wilkes was filmed pushing his heavy stock car up a ramp, racing it and contorting his body in all sorts of ways, climbing in and out of the car’s windows and so on.

It was a fabulously athletic display from a man who is in receipt of disability benefit because he “could not walk without excruciating pain”, or indeed “bend over”, and also needed help dressing himself.

The people doing the filming were from the Department for Work and Pensions. Wilkes has now been convicted of benefit fraud.

Would the court be so kind as to forward the film to the doctors who assessed him? It is a moot point as to who was more at fault.

Isn’t it time we held the quacks responsible for caving in to the whining of malingerers?

The eyes have it

Apparently if women stare at the floor and sweep their eyes from side to side when they first meet you, it means they are well up for it, so to speak. This is just one piece of advice from a new book by Ali Campbell, a behavioural expert. I always thought it meant they were overcome with nausea and surreptitiously looking for the nearest exit; just shows how wrong one can be.

I am absolutely certain Margaret Thatcher stared at the floor and did the sweepy eye thing when I met her in late 1990 at a Conservative party conference. She was past her best then, but any port in a storm, I suppose.

A very civil partnership

The extraordinary homoerotic love-in between David Cameron and Barack Obama continues. Among his other tributes, our prime minister commended the president for “pressing the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world”. Obama may, or may not, have replied by praising Cameron for “holding down the delete button on world evil, pressing the fast-forward button on human decency and always remembering the record button for Downton Abbey”. Later, Cameron — and I kid you not — compared Obama to Roosevelt. Presumably it was his strong and sinuous thighs and the way his eyes reflected the gentle, dappling afternoon light. It’s just a special relationship, Cardinal, nothing to get too worked up about.