Was it only a week since Britain’s journal of the counter-Enlightenment crowed its victory over nonces and the ineptitude of the Home Office? Thanks to the benevolent marriage of public ignorance and an insatiable thirst for sales, the News of the World was able to boast that it had:

SHUNTED 60 child abusers out to less risky locations away from vulnerable youngsters

And we all slept better in our beds. Until…

Observer: Reid ‘has left abusers without supervision’
A Home Office source told The Observer that many of the 70 sex offenders moved out of 11 hostels near to schools and nurseries were now being housed either in voluntary hostels run by church groups or in bed and breakfast accommodation. ‘There’s little option because of a shortage of specialist accommodation units,’ the source said.

The Screws’ lead story today, under the headline “Monsters at Work“, is about a couple of nonces videoing kids in a park. “This highlights the scandal of predatory sex offenders released into the community in ill-supervised hostels,” it notes, not unreasonably. No doubt it was just a question of lack of space that prevented it from adding that, through a coupling of it chasing an agenda on which it has no expertise and the panicked thrashings of a rudderless Home Secretary reeling from one incompetence to the next and desperate to be seen doing something right even if he isn’t, the number of monsters at work may have just increased by up to 70. Can’t we send them to Algeria or something? And the nonces as well?

An idiot could have predicted this had the potential to end badly. Maybe it’s because “Dr” John Reid likes to think he isn’t an idiot that it didn’t occur to him. Clearly there’s nothing about dealing with nonces in the books of Gramsci or whichever intellectual figleaf Reid is using to mask his insecurity and parade his vanity this week.

Look at him performing his elaborate fan dance with a heavy edition of political philosophy in each hand. He twirls, sweating and huffing, the books a blur as they flit from posterior to pudenda, from breasts to brow. The tabloid editors throw fivers during the act but make thinly veiled threats of violence at the bar afterwards. John looks around in vain for his friends to come and rescue him. They, however, sit in the furthest corner, studiously examining their drinks, occasionally glancing up nervously out of the corners of their eyes. After all, to get involved is to invite trouble.