Bah! String him up, I say. Throw away the key! String him up AND throw away the key!
I have just been reading the latest attempts of poor little rich boy, Charlie Gilmour, to get his sentence reduced for his part in the student fees riots in December last year.
The latest defensive argument appears to run along the lines of, “Yes, M’Lud, my client did indeed act like an utter arse. He admits that he took LSD, valium and whisky and proceeded to play Tarzan from the Cenotaph. However, being a country boy, the son of a multimillionaire rock star with no access to a TV, he did not know what a cenotaph is. More to the point, he is so insulated from reality that he does not know what a war memorial is, much less the Cenotaph.
“And please don’t bang him up for bunging a bin at a car containing the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, because frankly, he cannot recall doing that because he was out of his head on alcohol and drugs and if he can’t remember doing it, he can’t have done it. QED.”
The argument rather boils down to the supposition that Charlie Gilmour, with the mental prowess of a vacuum cleaner (who somehow overcame this mental handicap to become a history student at Cambridge University) and completely out of that small working portion of his brain on various intoxicants is actually a deprived child because he never had access to a television and therefore it is not his fault that he reacted badly.
Also, and the logic of this is irrefutable, a short, sharp, shock would be more of a punishment and a greater deterrent than banging him up in choky for a nominal 16 months of which he will serve a maximum of eight.
Well that’s all right then.
By the way, help with the legal fees by buying the entirety of his Dad’s band’s re-released back catalogue, if you’d be so good.
I hope the judge is a Genesis fan.