Sorry to sound like a wimpy little girl, but I didn’t think John Prescott hitting that bloke with the mullet during the last election campaign was very funny at all. I’ve never had a fight in my life - I came close once and it scared the shit out of me.

But on Saturday night, while courting the lowest common denominator again, the Prime Minister added to the canon of violence-related funnies by saying Prescott had “a mean right hook”.

(Actually, unless Blair has witnessed Prescott hitting somebody else since then, the Deputy Prime Minister has a mean left hook. After all, who can forget the Prime Minister having us rolling in the aisles the day after the brawl with the bon mot: “He has got very great strengths - not least in his left arm.”)

Oh, my aching sides. Mind you, in fairness, Tony takes a fairly dim view of petty violence in general - hence his fervour for ASBOs, the rocketing prison population and all that. But if it’s the Deputy Prime Minister lamping someone in broad daylight it’s all treated like it was a cartoon.

If it had been a policeman, a social worker, a teacher, or anybody else for that matter, chinning somebody on television, would we have heard praise for the assailant’s boxing style from the leader of the goverment?

No we fucking wouldn’t.

But what do you expect from somebody as fundamentally inarticulate as Prescott. Or, as Jeremy Hardy once memorably described him, the Minister for shafting the workers in their own accent?

There’s a story about the great American writers, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. They had a something of a rivalry over the years and Mailer once attacked Vidal at a party, knocking him to the floor.

“Words fail Norman Mailer yet again,” came Vidal’s reply.

UPDATE: Sports Minister, Richard Caborn castigates Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer after their on-pitch fight on Saturday:

In any other walk of life fighting at work would be a sackable offence.

No punchline required.

Posted on April 4th, 2005 at 1:42 pm

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