Gun fight at the PO corral

9 January 2009.

An early contender for pointless murder of the year has just come to fruition when the botched armed robbery of a post office in Worcestershire resulted in the shooting dead of the shopkeeper.

It is a terrible indictment of British society when criminals have to target the minimal rural amenities in existence for the minutiae of resources they have on offer. Now I think we all know the banks are carrying nothing in their vaults so there is clearly no point in holding the local branch of Barclays up, and the credit crunch means 99.9% of us are probably able to carry no more than a fiver on our belongings, but what happened to siphoning £50m off the back of a Securicor van?

Even mugging the few remaining bankers still earning over the odds departing their jobs each rush hour in Canary Wharf would yield greater rewards than the cash earned from selling stamps at the local post office.

The idiots, meanwhile, probably didn’t have the foresight to realise that their actions would mean there would be no child benefit for them to collect this week either. Having said that God help us if the triumvirate have ever conceived any children – on this basis their children would set light to the only school in a 36 mile radius leaving them, as well as everyone else, to pay extra on transporting them to the next nearest educational institution.

The computer geeks stealing everybody’s identities must be laughing their noggins off at these British amateurs. Ronnie Biggs will be tearing his hair out and mafia bosses must be shaking their heads in astonishment. It makes me wonder what, if anything, the Brits do with any kind of style or decorum anymore?

Aside from Prince William landing the taxpayer-funded royal helicopter in Kate Middleton’s back yard (no that’s not a euphemism), nothing notable springs to mind. Even the Olympic handover presentation at the end of the Beijing games last year stank of pretentious mediocrity.

Take the Ashes: In 2005, England regained the Ashes by the most miniscule of margins, winning one of the tests by 2 runs. The powers that be talk about that series as though it was an incredible performance (well seeing the Aussies beaten by England probably will be a once-in-a-lifetime achievement I suppose), despite the fact that Michael Vaughan employed about eight substitutes with superior fielding skills to claim the wickets his first eleven could not every time one of the original selection allegedly needed a piddle.

Yet, just two years later and England are comprehensively whitewashed by the same team and little is made of it. When England won a tight series, they over-celebrated an overdue success, while the Aussies took the defeat as a kick up the backside and worked harder than ever to extinguish the loss from their memories. When the boys from down under won, they did it in complete style, while England carried on with the same old boys’ club and policies and have picked up uninspiring results ever since.

It is the same as the brigade of commentators who continue to promulgate the England football world cup success of 1966 when questions about the English game are raised, even though 42 years of dismal underachievement has followed.

People in this country need to realise that Britain has become the joke of Europe: The Napoli football club president Aurelio De Laurentiis this week warned his players against coming to England because “the English live badly, eat badly and their women do not wash their genitalia. To them, a bidet is a mystery.” The only things this country excels at are leading the league tables for teenage pregnancies, STDs and the budget deficit.

Prince Harry’s well-documented night on the tiles in 2005 was newsworthy only owing to his donning of a Swastika-laden jacket (presumably to remind himself of the nation of his ancestry, although who knows what that actually is if his mother spent as much time on her back as she does now, as Paul Burrell and Mohamed Al Fayed would have you believe). Monaco’s former playboy prince must be turning in his grave.

But the debacle surrounding the England cricket leadership this week must top it all off. How is it that someone who is appointed to lead a team is allowed to issue an ultimatum to his own employers? The same inept bosses then decide after approximately 36 hours of discussions that they will regretfully have to let the coach go and persuade the captain to agree to his offer of a resignation. ECB chief Hugh Morris might as well pull his pants down and bend over the discussion tables for KP.

Such weak management would never be tolerated in America. Whether or not you agree with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or not, there is no denying that the approach of the United States was at least decisive. If the attacks of September 11 2001 had been on this country, Gordon and his cronies would still be sat pondering over some brandy today whether to retaliate. After all, it’s taken them years to decide whether or not to lay down another piece of cement at Heathrow or not.

So come on England, do something with style at least – send out a coordinated multi-force effort and bring these pension-stealing fleabags to justice (which in this country means being up for and subsequently granted parole in 18 months).