There is something touching in that blunt assessment: Pc Newman had no liking whatsoever for BE, but he was concerned with proper policing, and conscious of the need to behave correctly. Harwood, in contrast, was a policing disaster waiting to happen on an even bigger scale. The Met now admits that "detailed information regarding the officer's misconduct history was not shared at key points" and "we got that wrong". He should not even have been present on that fateful day when Mr Tomlinson was making his unsteady way home.
There is, broadly, a bond of trust between the British police and the public, which the Pc Newmans of this world seek to strengthen. We should be grateful for it: many countries do not have it at all. Even at university, I disliked those middle-class students who paraded fashionably anti-police views. I knew that if they were burgled or mugged they would be straight on the phone to the so-called "pigs". Yet every time a member of the public has a bad experience at the hands of a police officer like Pc Harwood, it not only damages that trust, but also makes things twice as hard for his fellow officers.
In many other countries, the sight of a slow-moving man being batoned by police would not raise an eyebrow. We should be glad that, in Britain, it does. We should be gladder still, however, if those who show a propensity to break that faith were stopped a little earlier in their tracks.
The dark side of the silver screen
One of the poignant details of the devastating incident in Aurora, Denver, in which 24-year-old James Holmes shot 70 people, killing 12, at a midnight screening of the new Batman film, is that at first the audience thought the attack was part of the film. Seconds later, it became clear that a masked gunman was walking through Film Theatre 9, casually shooting people, including children, as he went.
Who knows why a murderer targets defenceless people? In this case, it is not the fault of the film, of course, but of the killer. But there has been a peculiarly unpleasant air of hysteria around the opening of The Dark Knight Rises. Critics who disliked the film have received death threats from overzealous "fanboys". Now a masked murderer has targeted film-goers at a movie about a masked murderer wreaking civic destruction. It is reported that Holmes cast himself as the Joker character from the previous Batman film: such "shooters" tend to have an acute, if warped, sense of their own drama.
The Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan have been feted for their realistic depiction of terror, but last week demonstrated yet again that the reality of terror is quite different. In life, unlike the movies, the perpetrators tend simply to be unhinged introverts, and the plight of the victims is so intensely sad that, having seen it once, you would never, ever want to watch it again.
One more time, with a little less feeling
Madonna's Hyde Park concert last week has triggered snippy comments about how, at 53, she is too old to be flashing her fishnetted bottom. Yet the performer is still in fine shape, and I suspect she simply has a dancer's practical attitude towards revealing her body, coupled with a showgirl's exhibitionist streak.
Still, her show should move on, simply because the routine itself is tired. Madonna herself invented the stage role of the dominatrix surrounded by young musclemen, and many other female singers since have copied it, from Rihanna to Lady Gaga. What once seemed avant-garde is now overly familiar: the swearing, the crotch-grabbing, and the underwear as outerwear no longer raise eyebrows, but a sense of déjà vu.
Two things seem valued above all in America: hard work and being seen as "hot", which is generally interpreted as looking young, fit and sexually attractive. Madonna has relentlessly applied the former to the latter, but it's a game with diminishing returns. She should relax, and reinvent herself in the European tradition of the faintly naughty grande dame: after all, she's been famous long enough to know that stars generate their own heat.
