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LAUREL AND HARDY: Take your pick which is which between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt

LADIES AND gentlemen, it’s fun time, like Gregory Isaacs used to announce from the stage.

Those of us who were lucky enough to see ‘the cool ruler’ live and direct will remember the segment in his shows that he described as ‘fun time’.

It would be the point in proceedings where he would take you through a medley of tunes peppered with a couple of covers. “Now, if my good friend Dennis Brown was here,” the Lonely Lover would say, “he would sing...”

Ain’t that loving you for more reasons than one DB, the crown prince, would return the big-ups on his own live show by singing, “If my good friend Gregory Isaacs was here, he would sing...”

Now who’s gonna hold and squeeze me tight
Now that she’s gone out of my life
Who’s gonna make me feel the way she used to do, yeah
Now that my love is overdue Now that my love is overdue

Here in Britain, fun time is back again. Where it should be. At Number 10. Where one half of the Laurel and Hardy combo that has entertained the nation in the Tory leadership race has now taken residency.

We better enjoy it while we can. With this new joker in Downing Street we’ll be laughing when there ain’t no joke. I guess that’s better than crying.

Hold up, hold up, hold up. Hear wot, my wife has literally just come through the door and told me of a horrific racist incident she suffered on the train last night when she was coming back from a gig in Derby. I am raging. Seriously, I can barely type these words as I sit here writing this.

I wanted to talk about the Laurel and Hardy show of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt and wanted you to decide who was who and whether we have now got Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy at Number 10, and which was the least worse choice for prime minister – whether (depending on which one of them you see as Stan and which one you see as Ollie) it was the one who was in a fine mess or the one who was going to see what an even ner mess he can get us in than we are already in.

That was the joke I was going to give you today. But what my wife has just told me has made me apoplectic. She was sitting in First Class, which is where any sensible person who can afford it goes to get away from the riff-raff that now frequent our communal transport.

LIMOUSINE

Standard Class is where you usually find me, but Ms Queen of Lovers Rock doesn’t have to sit with me because promoters who book her ensure she travels First Class all the way, whether that’s by train or plane or limousine.

So there she is, settling into what should have been a relaxing journey home, when a group of ruffians between the ages of 13 and 16 barge into the carriage and plonk themselves threateningly around her - in the seats in front, behind, across the aisle. And they start making noise deliberately to annoy her.

When she asks them to pipe down they start... yes, you’ve guessed it, reverting to their ape man days with the kind of monkey business that they’ve seen their role models grunt at black football players all last season. They also start to racially abuse her calling her a “black b*st*rd” etc.

If I had been there, I would have advised them they were picking on the wrong single black female travelling alone.

I would have warned them that Ms Queen of Lovers Rock ain’t going to just sit there and take it. And that if they loved their lives they had better sit down and keep quiet or move to another carriage. But I wasn’t there. So Ms Queen of Lovers Rock told them herself. That she was about to shove her heavy suitcase in the ringleader’s face if he didn’t take his bunch of idiot friends elsewhere.

The fact that nobody of the several people in the carriage sitting further down the carriage came to her aid emboldened these yobs. The ringleader threatened to spit in her face. How pathetic.

As any road man knows, you don’t tell someone you’re about to do them something, you just do it and suffer the consequences. But here’s a posse or rather ‘pussy’ of bullies picking on a lone travelling black woman and they think they are hard.

Like I told you, they picked on the wrong black woman. One from the old days, who was going to take one of them out of this life with her if it came to that. None of them wanted to die and the last thing my peace-loving wife wants to do is be the person who brings about the demise of another woman’s child. Yet still, none of the others in the carriage were coming to her assistance.

She caught one man’s eye and shouted at him that somebody better call one of the guards because she would not be responsible for her actions and that, before the kingdom comes somebody better call a guard.

Meanwhile, ever the peace-maker, she resorted to the woman of reason tactic. “Aren’t you lot ashamed of yourselves, behaving like this?” she asked. “Aren’t you embarrassed? You lot know that you’re better than this. But you’re behaving like you’re not.”

For a moment the louts didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to handle this new twist they weren’t expecting. Even I wasn’t expecting it and I wasn’t even there. The ‘you-lot-are-idiots’ card is not one I am familiar with. A man has only got a ‘are- you-lot-mad’ card in a situation like this.

‘Have you lot lost your f-ing minds?’ I wouldn’t care how long it is since I saw a Bruce Lee lm, it would all come flooding back to me: “You have dishonoured my wife and my family. Now you must feel my fists of fury.”

THROWN

Anyway, by this time the guard had come in to intervene and the boys who, of course didn’t have tickets for the train, let alone tickets for First Class, were ushered out of the carriage and thrown off at the next stop.

That does not make my rage any less as I sit here writing this. My wife asks me if it is a sign of the times. And whether Laurel or is it Hardy that you have decided the new PM is, and their joke ting, will give these racist bullies permission to keep harassing our women when they travel on their own.

To be honest, I don’t care whether our new PM is Laurel or Hardy. I don’t care if they or the joker-in-chief in the White House and his “go back to where you came from” punch-line has given racist hoodlums permission to punch.

All I know is that if they attack women, just because they can, dem haffe get a beating.
If not from me, from the Queen of Lovers Rock.

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