The motto of the Canadian Mounties is that they always get their man. The motto of the British police is that they always get you. Frankly, it’s a lot easier:
The TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass has been warned by police for waving a knife at teenagers who were peering into a window of her house late at night.
Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.
Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal.
Klass’s spokesman, Jonathan Shalit, said the former Hear’Say singer was “utterly terrified” by the intruders and “aghast” at the police warning. “All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off,” he told the Sunday Telegraph.
Is screaming loudly still legal? Or is that in breach of Health & Safety regulations? Most of the citizenry is, consciously or not, resigned to the reality that the British constabulary are the most monumentally useless in the developed world. But Her Majesty’s coppers find new ways to torment them nonetheless. [UPDATE: For example . . .]