Why did they have to shoot?

10:55am Friday 16th May 2008

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I DON'T want to sound like a lentil-eating, Guardian-reading, yoghurt-knitting Leftie, but was it really necessary for Metropolitan Police marksmen to shoot dead Mark Saunders, the troubled young lawyer who started taking pot shots at no one in particular from his £2 million Chelsea flat?

Now, if he'd been a dangerous terrorist, or even a Brazilian electrician, you can understand why they might want to pump five bullets into him as soon as possible. But he was an alcoholic suffering depression who spent five hours under siege while he blasted away at passing pigeons with a 12-bore.

I don't know if you've ever tried to kill anyone with a shotgun, but it's not as easy as it looks in the movies. You would really want to be within ten yards - preferably five - before being confident of inflicting serious damage.

I know, I've peppered several beaters on shoots in my time. They just brush the pellets out of their grizzled beards and look forward to the extra £50 blood money that they know will be winging their way at the end of the day.

So there was no need for the police to ever come within that lethal range. They've got all sorts of devastating weaponry that can pick people off from up to half a mile away, so why couldn't they just sit tight and wait him out? Why was it deemed necessary to storm the flat and engineer a fatal confrontation?

IT'S back to Crimewatch corner, where we name and shame the desperados dragging our society into the gutter.

Step up to the stocks if you will, Desert Rat veteran Lenny Woodward. Now Lenny didn't stab anyone to death or keep his children in a cellar for 30 years, but in the view of the Powers That Be, his crime is no less serious.

You see, Woodward committed the heinous offence of "Putting an Empty Tomato Sauce Bottle in the Wrong Bin", contrary to the Recycle Or Be Shot Act 2008.

There is no excuse: Woodward had been issued with the full complement of blue wheelie bin for cans and cardboard, a green box for glass and a black bin for other waste. Regardless of this, he blithely threw the ketchup bottle into the blue bin when - as eny fule no - they should have gone into the green box.

Now I don't want to hear that Woodward is 95 years old and possibly confused, or even that he is almost blind and could hardly read the council's orders; indeed, if he'd read the "yellow card" the binmen left him and apologised on his knees on the steps of Norwich Town Hall, he wouldn't have received the "red card" that denied him any further collections.

But rules is rules. Any man who can find his way across the war-torn deserts of North Africa while fighting for our freedom must surely be able to understand a simple, 12-page, small-print, council directive. Officer, take him down!

AT LEAST the criminal Woodward managed to put his rubbish into a bin. Keith Hirst didn't even bother trying, allegedly discarding an apple core on the public pavement. The 54-year-old plumber, who has had heart surgery, then has the temerity to complain when he's surrounded by five police officers, is arrested, has his fingerprints and DNA taken, is locked up in a cell for 18 hours and marched to court in handcuffs. Honestly, some people.

WITH the notable exception of the saintly Dr John Sentamu, when did you actually see a bishop? You know, a proper one - big fella, pointy hat, lots of purple velvet? No, I thought not.

Admittedly one of them made the news a couple of years ago when he spent too long at a reception and subsequently climbed into the back of a stranger's car, threw his children's toys out and roared out that he was a bishop ("That's what I do!") But apart from that, you don't see much of them, do you?

There's some chap who wants to adopt a legal system whereby shoplifters get their hands chopped off (not altogether a bad thing) but would also have gays hung from lampposts (probably not a good thing). He also thinks that there should be a salary cap on the rich, which is a bit rich coming from a bloke who costs the Church of England almost £1,000,000 a year.

Yes, that's right, the 44 CoE bishops, their palaces, offices and support staff - including cooks, gardeners and chauffeurs - cost the church just under £20 million last year, double what they cost in 1997.

Now, that's an awful lot of money, especially when you think that whenever I roll up at my own village church (Christmas Eve, weddings and funerals if I'm honest) I'm blackmailed into coughing up a few quid for the leaking roof or the disintegrating windows. And it's not as if our vicar is coining it; he's never seen so much of his parishioners since we all got frightened by the credit crunch and fled Waitrose to join him at Netto.

So forgive me if I cross to the other side of the road the next time the CoE pleads poverty, because it's clearly not poor - it's just spending its money in a profligate and perverse manner.