Arresting peaceful protestors is good, or bad, or...ooh, I dunno, work it out for yourself....

Here's Uncle Jimmy on the arrest of Brian Haw.

So let's get this straight. On the one hand, the arrest of a peaceful protestor against the Iraq war (sorry, an "eyesore who has polluted the green outside parliament") "made his day" and was much better than the "sanctimony" in Parliament about "civil rights, freedom, etc.". Then in the next breath he goes on to say, in his Simon Jenkins comment, "I expect Mr Jenkins will be the first to remind them that the Police never tried to move or arrest Haw when the Queen passed by before. Not in the previous NINE years he's been littering the place. NEVER."

Well, he's right that this is the first time they've moved him for the State Opening, but he's been arrested several times and, as he says back on his blog, "The law always came down on Haw's side. It surely will again." (Damn these pesky defence lawyers.)

But, er, if it's so great that he's been arrested why is NuLabour's failure to move him something to crow about? What? Tony Blair? Soft on terrorist sympathisers?

Jimmy reminds me of Glenda Slag, the spoof gossip columnist who used to appear in Private Eye. She would come out with some piece of obsequious nonsense about a public figure in one paragraph, then follow it immediately by totally rubbishing the same person.

So he's wrong: you could make it (and him) up. Private Eye made up someone as ludicrously inconsistent as him, and David Nobbs invented the original Uncle Jimmy. (I realised yesterday that P G Wodehouse invented an equally pompous cowardly neofascist idiot: Roderick Spode, in the Jeeves and Wooster stories.)

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

—P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster in The Code of the Woosters (1938)

I note that when posting a comment in the Guardian our fearless fascist campaigner picked yet another fake name, to wit "ThisStinks". To quote a famous religious extremist executed as a terrorist, "Thou sayest". (Matthew 27:11, AV)

I'll stick with "Uncle Jimmy" for our nameless Blair-loviing buffoon, though. I have no way of knowing what colour Jimmy's shorts are, though considering how terrified he is of wicked Mooslims taking over our country I can hazard a guess.

P.S. As Jimmy is a American he probably won't recognise the reference in my post title to a classic Kenneth Williams sketch from my youth. Here it is: