Like the monsters in horror films, Ali Dizaei and John Prescott keep coming back

At the end of the 1978 horror movie, Halloween, the detective played by Donald Pleasance shoots the monster, Michael Myers, who proceeds to crash through an upper floor window onto the suburban lawn below. When Pleasance reaches the window to check that his bullets and a particularly violent defenestration have had the desired effect, he discovers that the lawn is empty. The Monster Has Escaped Death.

I couldn’t help being reminded of Halloween when I read a few minutes ago that a court has found former Commander Ali Dizaei of the Metropolitan Police guilty of corruption. Again. For the same crime he was found guilty of in 2010, and for which he served 15 months in jail before his conviction was quashed. And he’s been sentenced to three years in prison. Again.

Er…

No, I didn’t even want to know this ridiculous system works, but I expect I’ll be reading the headlines about him being released, retried, re-sentenced, re-imprisoned and re-released before too long. Because, like so many people in national life these days, Ali Dizaei is proving indestructible.

A similar case is that of Baron Prescott, of Kingston upon Hull in the County of East Yorkshire, our extremely distinguished former Deputy Prime Minister. Now, this revolting thug wasn’t tried for corruption (although I’m sure charges of extreme stupidity or cosmic incompetence would have stuck), but, having shamed himself by having an affair with his “diary secretary” (whatever that is), and by playing croquet on the lawn of a stately home just like one of them lah-de-dah toffs he professes to hate, and by screwing up this country’s transport system, and by wasting everyone’s time trying to introduce yet another layer of local government (we all said “No thanks, Fatso – and, please, put your chipolata away”), and by knocking down perfectly viable terraced housing in Liverpool in order to replace it with massively expensive, jerry-built modern rubbish that no one wanted to live in… well, thanks to all these triumphs, the ugly old moron departed front-line politics when Gordon Brown became PM (my God, what a pairing they’d have made!), and I’m sure many of us thought - or at least hoped - that that was that.

But, no, the BBC had to give the repulsive chancre a TV series about class divisions, and he still kept popping up on the Today Programme to make other uneducated, inarticulate people with single-figure IQs feel better about themselves, on the “he can it do if, could so I!” principle, and then there were all those revelations that he “suffered” from bulimia (i.e. he was a fat, greedy pig who habitually stuffed his great pudding of a face  ‘til he puked). 

And, now, for God’s sake, he’s just announced he intends standing for the job of Police Commissioner in some place evidently called Ool (I think it’s in the North). The BBC tried to make it sound as if the decision was something to do with public service, but as this interview in the Independent makes clear, he just hates the police.

There’s a very good reason why, when prominent Britons fall from grace (although that’s not a word one would readily associate with "Lord" Prescott), we should all gather round and give them a right good kicking so they’ll never forget how completely and utterly we despise them. Otherwise, their ridiculous egos will simply re-inflate with methane, and they’ll return to haunt us: I'm sure that, when the glory days have ended, they can't sit quietly in a room without realising just how bloody awful they are.

The same goes for criminals like Ali Dizaei and “popular” entertainers like Lenny Henry.