THE young men who harassed Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty in the street this week were branded “despicable thugs” by Boris Johnson. And now one of them has lost his job as an estate agent and been charged with assault.

I’m not sure this reaction is entirely fair.

If you live your life in the public eye, you have to expect attention when you’re on the street. Especially if you look like a human turtle.

I don’t look like a turtle, or a human.

FILMING THE FLAMES

But even so, if I walk past a building site, or a pub, I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll be surrounded almost immediately by a gang of young men shouting “One photo. One photo”. 

I could be on my way to a funeral. Or an important meeting. But it doesn’t matter.

They never take “no” for an answer and often, things turn mildly physical.

It’s not thuggery, though. It’s just a group of usually good-natured lads, who want a picture.

I was once accosted at a motorway service station urinal. 

A group of guys seemed very determined to take a photograph of my penis. 

And there’s no point using the cubicles instead because if they know you’re in there, camera phones will soon appear under the door and over the side of the stalls. 

The problem is that these guys, like pretty well everyone under the age of 30, live their lives on social media. The number of followers they have, and the “likes” they get, determines their standing. Put simply, if they could get a photograph of my man part, there’s a greater likelihood that theirs will be busy later on. The problem is everywhere.

At the recent riots in Belfast, two or three guys were throwing petrol bombs while the other 300 were standing around filming the flames on their mobile phones. Go on TikTok and every day, you’ll see one chap standing in the path of a police car while he’s filmed by all his mates.

These people see their life as a series of ten-second movies, and all of them are competing for an Oscar.

That’s why Chris Whitty was accosted as he tried to walk down the street.

I doubt they wanted to hurt him or humiliate him. They just wanted some footage which would make their Instagram account more interesting than Gaz’s and Shaz’s. And that doesn’t make them “despicable thugs”.

Certainly, I don’t see why someone should be sacked for being what? Young?

HUGE MAN 

Besides, it’s better than the treatment famous people get in Russia. I was once stopped on the street in Moscow by a huge man who leaped out of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes and ordered me not to move until he had gone home to get his camera.

To make sure I complied with his “request”, I was left on the street, in the freezing cold, with his even more enormous bodyguard.

It was nearly an hour before he returned to take the picture. And he never even said “thank you”. Now, that is despicable thuggery.

It’s not like watching Bra-zil

TONIGHT, England will face Ukraine and it’ll be no walk in the park. 

Those guys are big, and scary, and will instil fear when they’re on a charge.

But I urge our players to remember this.

Under his shirt, Artem Dovbyk – the striker whose goal knocked out Sweden – is wearing a bra.

Let the people decide

I’M now completely at a loss about Covid rules and regulations. 

I don’t know if I can go abroad and if I can, I don’t know where. I don’t know if I can go to the pub with three people or a thousand. And I don’t know who can come to my house.

It’s all so confusing. My daughter has had to postpone her wedding twice because having a couple of hundred people in a tent is not allowed. 

But there were 40,000 people at Wembley to watch England beat Germany and on Tuesday, nearly 10,000 were in the Centre Court at Wimbledon to see Andy Murray’s wife’s hair.

Happily, they also threw in a tennis match where a German lost. Again. And because it was such a long match, they had to close the roof. So then it was an indoor event – like a night at the theatre – but did they send some people home? Nope.

Perhaps we are still relying on track and trace to keep everyone safe. I hope not, because ten days ago, my girlfriend was told by an app on her phone to self-isolate. And even though we live in the same house, I still haven’t been told to do the same thing.

The time has come, then, to take the brakes off and let everyone do what they think is for the best.

DOES anyone else get the distinct impression that the AstraZeneca vaccine stops you from getting Covid in the same way that very weak beer gets you drunk? 

It does the job. Eventually. But only if you ingest a ton of it. 

Cross words

IN a recent edition of the Church of Scotland’s official magazine, the answer to one of the crossword clues was “leper”.

This prompted a reader to write in saying that the term “leper” is now considered offensive and that the correct term is “people affected by leprosy”.

Well yes, but that wouldn’t really fit in a crossword would it?

No fan of car flying

I RECEIVED a message from The Sun this week asking if I would like to go for a trip in the new flying car.

No.

I’m sorry, but the idea of taking to the skies in a machine that was hand- built in Slovakia does not fill me with much confidence.

Plus, I can’t see the point of a flying car because if it can take to the skies, why would you ever use it on the road?

To hop over a traffic jam? Right. I see. So you’re travelling down the M1, you see the traffic ahead is stationary so you deploy the wings and accelerate hard to reach your take-off speed of 180mph, whereupon you are stopped by the police who inform you that such speeds are not allowed.

TRANSPORT minister Baroness Vere told MPs this week that she had not seen the evidence for reinstating a hard shoulder on the M25.

Really? Well, why doesn’t she talk to the families of the 53 people who would still be alive today if there’d been a safe refuge for their broken-down cars and vans.

A COUPLE of years ago, my local police station was closed down, and now our thin blue line operates from a broom cupboard at the fire station. 

I wish I was joking, but I’m not. Happily, the three remaining officers were given a Mitsubishi L200 to cover their big and very rural patch. But now it’s being taken away and replaced with a Vauxhall Corsa. Just what you need to catch people out hare coursing.

Game, sett & match

A ROAD in Lincolnshire has been subjected to stop/go traffic control for 18 months because badgers have made a home under it. 

And it’s against the law to move them.

Most read in Opinion

Obviously, a badger enthusiast such as Brian May would think this is perfectly acceptable. 

So why doesn’t he go and stand there with a red and green lollipop until the annoying hedgehog-munchers move out?

If he doesn’t fancy it, don’t worry – I know a man who could solve the problem in about ten minutes flat . . . 

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