JAN MOIR: Spineless Sadiq Khan makes me yearn for Boris Johnson and his water cannon mentality
What kind of a world do we live in where an 87-year-old man is stabbed to death on his mobility scooter in broad daylight on a West London street?
Thomas O’Halloran was a well-known and much-loved character in his Greenford neighbourhood.
For some years, his life had been constrained by old age and infirmity, but he still used his time productively and selflessly — playing his accordion to raise money for victims of the war in Ukraine and encouraging everyone to donate into his ever-present collection box.
Mr O’Halloran was trapped in what amounts to a motorised wheelchair. He would have had no ability to fight back, or flee or give chase. He was as defenceless as a newborn, as threatening as a buttercup.
Yet still he was attacked with a knife by at least one person and he died of his injuries after begging for help from passers-by. It makes one despair for the future of humanity.
Sadiq Khan is apparently ‘devastated’ by Thomas O’Halloran’s murder – but he’s blamed the cost of living crisis for a rise in shootings and stabbings in the capital. As if that makes it OK
A man was caught on CCTV walking away from the crime scene; he was wearing white gloves stained with blood and carrying a knife. A suspect was arrested early yesterday morning.
Not so long ago, the entire country would have been shocked and convulsed with revulsion at such a death. Now? Only one major newspaper — this one — made Thomas O’Halloran’s fate its main front-page story.
This is the sixth killing in four days in the capital and many are wondering what London Mayor Sadiq Khan will do about it.
Apparently, Khan is ‘devastated’, but earlier this week he warned of a rise in shootings and stabbings in the city this summer — and he says the cost of living crisis is to blame.
As if that makes it OK. Money is too tight to mention for a great number of people, but that doesn’t make crime acceptable.
Videos on social media this week have shown gangs of young people steaming through central London shops stealing trainers. Elsewhere, others committed knifepoint Rolex robberies to top up their depleted wage packets.
But if the Leftist mayor can blame the Government for the increase in violence on his watch — instead of examining his own role in this terrible escalation — then he is not going to miss that opportunity.
Perhaps he’ll use his mayoral powers to charge Mr O’Halloran posthumously with obstructing a violent crime; I wouldn’t put it past him.
The incident is so tragic and so awful, it almost makes me long for the return of Mayor Boris and his water-cannon mentality.
For surely those with a thirst for violent crime should, if convicted, be swept off the streets, charged and jailed. Not excused and coddled, because interest rates have gone up and they can’t afford a cheeky Nando’s. Note that even before he was elected to City Hall in 2016, Khan had pledged to bring down the Metropolitan Police’s use of stop and search in the war against knife crime. He was against it because of racial tensions and what he saw as an infringement of human rights.
Then-Mayor Johnson (centre) and deputy mayor for young people Ray Lewis (left) are pictured visiting London Fire Brigade LIFE course students in Dagenham soon into the PM’s mayoralty
Khan has pursued this objective throughout his time in office; in one fell swoop hampering police efforts and driving up crime rates while aligning himself to modish liberal causes.
If black lives really did matter to him, he would not have presided over a huge increase in knife crime, while congratulating himself on embracing fashionable Left-wing ideology rather than the violent reality of the capital’s streets.
I’m not saying stop and search is the answer to London’s woes — but that and the subsequent four-year prison sentence for carrying a knife is surely the best and most practical deterrent to discourage the carrying of weapons.
It may at least make criminals think twice about leaving home tooled up with blades and axes.
Khan’s vacation of responsibility almost makes me miss Mayor Johnson (pictured stuck on a zipline in Stratford during the Olympics) and his water-cannon mentality
Somehow the fact that Mr O’Halloran was on a mobility scooter makes this crime so much worse. Whizzing along the pavements, these machines are a commonplace sight on British High Streets.
Yet we can only guess at the effort and courage it takes every single person who, imprisoned by the weakness of their own body, climbs aboard one of these scooters to go about their daily business. Just getting out the front door of a morning, puttering along to claim a last sliver of independence, can be an act of extraordinary bravery in itself.
That is another reason why Mr O’Halloran’s death on a sunny suburban afternoon is so very shocking. But is it also symptomatic of a deeper malaise in society — or just another dark day on the violent streets of London?
It is not the cost of living that Mayor Khan should be concerning himself with, but the terrible cost of dying.
Creepy Catherine is just a scream
Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia Addams? What joy. Who better than the raven-haired beauty to star in the Netflix reboot of The Addams Family television series? Catherine is creepy (not really) and kooky, mysterious and spooky and altogether ooky — making her perfect casting for the role of the matriarch of this family of freaks.
‘Hearts are wild creatures; that’s why our ribs are cages,’ says Morticia, only this time with a delicious Welsh accent.
I can hardly wait.
Catherine Zeta-Jones (pictured at the Emmys last autumn) will be a perfect Morticia Addams
‘Abbatars’ are Super Troupers
Abba Voyage must be the hit show of the summer. Since it opened in May, it has played to full and ecstatic houses for six performances a week — and it was rammed, sweaty and delirious when I went on Saturday. Much of the audience come along in Abba costumes, which only adds to the mad joy of the occasion.
The ‘Abbatars’ (Agnetha pictured) are so credible the whole experience was emotional
Having seen the Whitney Houston hologram tour I was sceptical — but trust those clever Swedes to take it to another level. The sound is amazing, the ten-piece live band adds a surge of urgency and the ‘Abbatars’ themselves are so credible that the whole experience was emotional.
Perhaps because they are still young while we have grown old, even though it is only a fabulous illusion? Who knows, but I was in tears by the time the Abba wraiths played Knowing Me, Knowing You and embraced each other at the end.
Knowing that they knew the best they could do wasn’t enough and they would all eventually get divorced. It’s more fabulous than you could ever imagine.
Spare us Sean’s suburban sex scene
Boring or thrilling? Everyone has been arguing about Marriage (BBC1), the four-part drama starring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker as Ian and Emma, a pair of crushed introverts who seemed incapable of saying what they really think.
The mini-series was a lo-fi, slo-mo consideration of a long-married everycouple who wore anoraks, had ants in the kitchen bin and bickered about everything from baked potatoes to slippers. They were beaten down by life, fractured by loss and, in the case of recently unemployed Ian, in need of some revitalising shower gel.
‘One with herbs or extracts that give you a bit of a boost in the morning,’ he told the shop assistant. ‘Anything to get you through the day without crying,’ was the response. Many viewers found it impossible to get through the four-hour moan-a-thon without crying from boredom, while critics lavished the drama with five-star praise.
Emma’s support and love for her broken husband Ian won me over. Any fool can get divorced, but to bond with your spouse, to persevere and overcome, has a beauty and divinity of its own
Me? Given Mr Bean’s recent remarks about working with on-set intimacy coaches — the old rogue finds they spoil the moment — I watched in holy terror of a sex scene developing between the lumpen couple. Ian and Emma thrashing around on the polycotton sheets, just to add another layer of mottled realism to the mundanity, would have been too much.
There were highlights among this fiesta of working-class fetishisation and, in the end, Emma’s support and love for her broken husband Ian won me over. Any fool can get divorced, but to bond with your spouse, to persevere and overcome with them, has a beauty and divinity all of its own.
Viewers who stayed the course were rewarded with the thought that love can conquer all, even in Hemel Hempstead. And, also, with the cheeringly unfashionable notion that keeping a stiff upper lip is maybe not such a bad thing after all.
It’s been quite a week for dishwashers. The dishwasher appeared so often in Marriage that it should have won an award as best supporting appliance. Di Swasher, as she is known in showbiz circles, featured in so many scenes I became quite fond of her square and obliging presence; a bit like Mrs Patmore in Downton Abbey, but without the mob cap. No doubt Ryan Giggs would have approved. Giving evidence in his domestic assault trial this week, the former Manchester United player said he got ‘wound up’ when the dishwasher was loaded incorrectly during lockdown. He would call family ‘team meetings’ and show everyone how to load the spoons and glasses correctly.
I am with him all the way on this, if nothing else.
SNP protesters made their presence felt outside the Concert Hall in Perth, where a large crowd had gathered to protest the Tory hustings. There were abusive banners, including one that read ‘Tory Scum Out’, and the attendees were heckled and spat upon.
Nicola Sturgeon condemned the actions of the activists who — we are always informed — are ‘a minority’. Yet anyone who dares to upset the touchy Nats — myself included — will tell you the intensity of the vitriol you receive for your troubles is so unhinged that it is pretty funny. Or it would be funny, were it not so tragic.
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