Like you, I suspect, I’m very relieved that there was no “systemic failure” within the Metropolitan police which led to Jean Charles de Menezes being shot dead. Thank the Lord: I was getting worried. If things didn’t go tickety-boo that day it was down to bad luck or acts of God, says Sir Ian Blair, the Met commissioner.

So he won’t be resigning, despite the criminal conviction of his force for having endangered public safety, a vote of no confidence in him by the London Assembly and an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report which catalogued 19 catastrophic errors.

You do wonder what it would take to make Blair relinquish his post. Being caught in a post office with a sawn-off shotgun and a stocking over his head, with Cressida Dick, deputy assistant commissioner, shovelling moolah into a sack?

What does “systemic” mean? The IPCC reported that there had been no contingency plan to deal with a suspect who was travelling on public transport. Call me a pedant, but isn’t that a “systemic” failure? And what about Dick, in charge of the fateful operation, who failed to attend a crucial briefing because she turned up at the wrong venue? Is that a “systemic” problem, or is it that Dick has butterscotch flavour Angel Delight between her ears? In which case, why promote her (which Blair did last year)?

You have to say Blair’s comments have a counter-intuitive ring to them – but then that’s not unusual. This is the chap who announced that crime was so low in the benighted London borough of Haringey that residents could leave their doors unlocked of a night. And who earlier confessed he couldn’t understand why everyone was getting so worked up about the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham. And who suggested that the Islamic terrorist threat to Britain was graver than the second world war or the cold war. But, at the same time, that the July 7 attacks upon London were “nothing to do with Islam”.

Blair clings to office because he has the support of both Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, and that walkin’, talkin’ “systemic failure” Ken Livingstone, the London mayor. And this is because he is the most politicised copper this country has ever seen; he owes his survival to his willingness to follow every politically correct obsession dreamt up by the Labour party: show him a “hate crime” and he’ll be there with his truncheon. Show him a burglary, however, and he’ll explain to you why it didn’t happen, or wasn't important, or is a vanishingly rare occurrence. He has also adopted new Labour’s technique of spewing out disinformation to the media.

All of which is irritating, of course, but one might put up with it were it not for the fact, established now beyond all reasonable doubt, that he is incompetent. Systemically or otherwise.

They just want it steamy again, Koo

Koo Stark, the actress, photographer and former consort of Prince Andrew, has been dropped by the producers of I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! because, apparently, she wouldn’t be “good telly”. This little nugget carries with it the implication that they think the rest of the cast – the usual rag-tag of failed singers, tuppenny bits of skirt, desperate and talentless little celeb wannabes and people one vaguely remembers having seen on TV 25 years ago and wanted to punch very hard in the throat – will provide a cornucopia of televisual delight.

I suspect Stark did that unwise thing of attempting to appear dignified and middle class during whatever ghastly auditioning process takes place. Dignified and middle class is not what they’re paying you all that money for, love. They want a reprise of that lesbian shower scene you did back in 1976, I would guess, except this time with witchetty grubs in attendance. And a few unguarded titbits about Andy.

I suppose there are still some people left watching this moronic, confected bilge. Mercifully, the “reality” genre seems to be on its last legs and we await, a-tremble with anticipation, for what the TV execs will come up with next. Do you suppose it will be an improvement?

Let’s pray he’s a pretty straight kind of Catholic

Tony Blair – come on, you remember him, pretty straight kind of guy, took the country to war more times than any other prime minister in the past 100 years – is apparently about to “come out” publicly as a member of the Roman Catholic church. Well, I suppose if you’re capable of believing that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then transubstantiation, papal infallibility and the virgin birth shouldn’t come as too much of a problem.

The Lord spoke to Tony fairly often, apparently, during his occupation of No 10. Not so much “No, don’t do that, you moron!” as quiet words of wisdom, whispered into his ear as he awoke each morning. Blair’s first full-length interview (for the BBC) since he left office will reveal how much he relied on direct religious guidance in day-to-day policymaking – and may chill those of us whose faith is less implacable. The term “messianic” has even been mentioned. To which we might paraphrase Monty Python’s Life of Brian: “There’s no Messiah in here. Just a mess.”

It is not so long ago that our coastguards were refused a lottery grant because they could not prove that the people they plucked from the sea were ethnically diverse. For the coastguards to be eligible for a subsidy, more black people have to drown or nearly drown.

This seems, to me, unfair on black people: we are going to have to force them into the water and well out of their depth if the coastguards are to receive the funding they require. Many may perish as a result.

This week I received a letter from a reader, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, an architectural historian who, while undertaking research in the British Library, was asked by some monitoring monkey to describe his race. Bemused and affronted, he wrote to the library’s administrators asking why he had been so accosted.

The letter came back: “changing audience profiles . . . social inclusion agenda . . . culturally diverse audience”. Plus, it seems, data on ethnic minorities gets reported to the London Development Agency as a condition of funding. “There is nothing useful they can do with this information, it’s unnatural and divisive to ask for it; it’s also unpleasant and impertinent to those of us who remember real racial abuse,” Brittain-Catlin says.

He is of mixed Asian-white race. He is as sick of this bizarre obsession as the rest of us.

The mother of a pupil at a school in Nottingham booked a “gorillagram” person to turn up to his classroom for a sixteenth birthday surprise. Unfortunately, due to what Sir Ian Blair might again call a systemic error, a very different type of treat arrived for the lad.

A woman dressed as a police officer marched in and ordered the boy onto all fours before walking him around the class on a lead while whipping his behind. She then stripped off and invited the startled young man to rub cream into her buttocks.

At this point the teacher decided that the event had exceeded the boundaries of the national curriculum and called a halt to the proceedings.

rod.liddle@sunday-times.co.uk

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