NOW here's a funny thing which is to say, one that's not funny at all.

A year ago, the Metropolitan Police shot dead a Brazilian man while he was travelling on the Underground in Stockwell, south London. It quickly transpired that Jean Charles de Menezes was an innocent man, who had done nothing wrong other than to arouse police suspicions.

As the anniversary of that lethal mistake by the police arrives, we now learn that no individual police officers will face criminal charges over the death.

Instead, the Met itself could face trial on health and safety issues. Now this is funny, but only in a grimly rum sense.

Perhaps in future, a new poster will appear at police stations in the capital, and possibly elsewhere. Alongside all the advice about bending your knees when picking up heavy objects/suspects, and how to guard against repetitive strain injury from typing up reports/surfing saucy websites, there could now be a new warning poster.

This could perhaps illustrate the health and safety issues surrounding shooting an innocent man in the head, maybe showing the best posture to adopt when pulling the trigger so as to avoid accidental injury to the officer in question, possibly a severely strained finger.

You never know, there may even be a bit of advice about not rushing in with both size-12s until you know for sure that the suspect in question isn't merely a passing innocent man from Brazil.

I am, it is true, being a little flippant here, but sometimes breezy disrespect is the only way to respond to certain events.

Now, I also accept that temperatures were running high and anxious last July, following the terrorist atrocities in London, and that an anti-terrorist officer only has a split second to decide whether or not someone is carrying a bomb.

Yet it is still shocking that an innocent man could be summarily executed by the police for the generalised offence of "looking a bit foreign", without any officer later being punished.

To reduce such a fatal mistake to a health and safety issue is surely an insult and that's certainly how I would feel if I were one of the poor man's relatives.

Maybe Sir Ian Blair, the embattled Metropolitan Police commissioner, could end up being forced to resign. But don't hold your weary breath, because people called Blair do like to cling on so.

Here's another unfunny funny thing about the police. The same force which accidentally executed an innocent man is also investigating the cash-for-coronets affair, sparked by suspicions that donations to the Labour Party led to the more generous donors being offered peerages.

Perhaps it's just me it often is but this seems to be a strange use of police resources.

How heartening to learn that there is so little crime in London that senior officers can afford to spend time investigating a political row.

The sponsor-a-peerage scandal strikes me as one of those issues that are important in theory, and can even bring about the end of a political leader yet it is not, for all that, of much concern to ordinary people.

The Labour Party is not shown in a good light by this affair, and Tony Blair could even be fatally tainted by it but neither are the Tories, who are equally secretive and would like the rules changed to suit themselves and screw up Labour.

The trouble for Labour is that the toxic cloud always clings more to governments than oppositions, which is fair enough.

One side-effect of this affair is the likely further alienation of ordinary voters, who will see politicians falling out over mega amounts of money what do they spend it all on? and wearily conclude that this democracy lark is not for them. Which is a scary sort of decision to make. But when politicians carry on as they do, is it any wonder?