Crime of the Century

It was one of those cases that baffle the police force and force them to hold informal discussions in front of the coffee machine. Not only that a maverick female officer – who some thought promoted beyond her abilities in the name of political correctness – had to confront a junior officer in the male toilets. She also had to act in direct contravention of her superior’s orders to make an arrest of what turned out to be the least-likely suspect.

Anyway, after one of the longest stake-outs in UK police history the squad were able to track down the perpetrator. As one police officer said, ‘We had to sit there for hours in front of Twitter, just waiting for someone to say something even slightly disparaging. Someone did call the leader of the Opposition a gormless twat at some point. But the CPS said we would never get a conviction on something as factually accurate as that.’

In the end, though, police formally charged a middle-aged woman from Manchester with calling someone from Huddersfield a ‘soft southern poof’ with malice aforethought in a Facebook encounter over the relative merits of Coronation Street versus Eastenders. The Manchester woman was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security prison for the heinous offence of ‘Having an On-Line Strop’. An offence under legislation brought in by the current government in a frantic attempt to appear relevant and to address the grievances of the easily-offended.

However, this attempt to court popular opinion has made absolutely no difference to the government’s poll ratings. In fact, it caused a massive drop in the already negative approval rating of the government when the UK population discovered it is now illegal to call the government ‘a bunch of useless incompetent wankers.’