Is that not the beauty of deportation when the deportee is a
Is that not the beauty of deportation when the deportee is a rapist and a murderer and the country to which we return him is similarly inclined – that we expose him to the brutality of values he recognises as his own? Is that not just?Which brings me to John Prescott, or rather to John Prescott’s mistress Tracey Temple for whom I am invited on all sides to feel sympathy. Myself, I see something shapely in their having to fear back home (assuming that they in honesty fear anything) the very violence they inflicted on us. But he could be referring to our concern for the welfare of impenitent foreign criminals when we return them to the bosom of their culture. He is talking about Dorothea’s inability to enjoy anything she feels others are excluded from. And what has he done wrong anyway? Allowed a few criminals who shouldn’t be here to disappear into the community, when it was only a few weeks ago that we were accusing him of not allowing a few criminals who shouldn’t be here to disappear into the community.Did I read that one of the prisoners who has been let back into the community to re-offend was not sent home to Somalia because Somalia was not considered safe? Is that possible? Though I’m sorry for anyone who has to bear the burden of being a bloke, I am not so sorry for a Somalian thug that I think we have a moral obligation to protect him from his own.”I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” says Will Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
I know, I know, but there’s something about Clarke’s face that has always appealed to me – that look as of a very rare breed of sheep, conscious, as rare breeds are often conscious, of the burden of their rarity, and of course lonely because no other sheep anywhere looks like them. She had broken a metatarsal herself a few years earlier and knew that the best cure was rest. “But the nation wasn’t hanging on your fitness,” I reminded her She didn’t see the relevance of that. “Never mind the nation,” she said, “it’s the poor boy I’m sorry for.”Me too Poor Dott Poor Rooney Poor Charles Clarke even. She rang me the morning after the dot’s triumph to say she believed Rooney would be well advised to abandon all efforts to get fit for this World Cup and to conserve his strength for the next.
His name, his wan appearance, his fragile self-esteem, the way he barked like a seal before every pot, blowing chalk from his cue tip – my life was ebbing away and there I sat in the familiar telly snooker-stupor for hours on end, watching a dot Enough And then last week I got hooked on him again Don’t ask me why it’s him I’m sorry for He’s just become World Snooker Champion. The person I should be sorry for is me, staying up to will him on, counting every frame, the attention of my soul concentrated on a dot.And while I’m worrying for the dot my mother-in-law is fretting over Rooney’s metatarsal. It’s possible not every reader of this column knows who Dott is. Only some of us sat up until the early hours of Monday or was it Tuesday morning watching Dott grind out the World Snooker Championships Seems a lifetime ago now The year dot. And that’s why I am sorry for him, having the name Dott when a dot is exactly what he looks like. Wee Dott they call him in his native Scotland where all the snooker players come from who do not come from Wales, and he is truly the weest of men.
I gave up watching snooker on television four or five years ago precisely because of Dott.
A reluctant butcher, it has taken Mr Blair a long time to, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “learn how to carve the joint”. Yesterday’s changes were intended as a show of strength and defiance, to signal that he intends to go “on and on” – probably until 2008.
More from Andrew Grice. Been feeling very sorry for my sex again this week, what with one thing and another. Rooney, Prescott, Clarke, Dott, even Zacarias Moussaoui denied the satisfaction of being executed by his enemies and having to face his own angry company for the rest of his life instead It isn’t easy being a bloke
It was Dott who started me off. Mr Blair showed a ruthless streak that he has not displayed in his previous reshuffles, some of which were badly botched. “He looked like a man who knew he was doing his last reshuffle,” said one cabinet minister who went eyeball to eyeball with the Prime Minister when he unexpectedly found himself shuffled out of his post yesterday
The shake-up was much more wide-ranging than expected. It was Tony Blair’s last throw of the dice.