Does anyone think Boris has handled this well?

I don’t know what’s happened to our football hooligans. The modern malaise, I suppose. A gradual descent into ineffectuality. Back in the day, Harry the Dog of Millwall would take an entire away stand by himself and do a few coppers on the way. He would surely turn in his grave looking at today’s lot. We were warned about their arrival in London last weekend. Told they would be tooled up and ready for action, turning on each other. And what happened? Nobody opened up like a tin of peaches by ‘my little friend, Stanley’; just a few skirmishes here and there. Handbags, as the football commentators would put it.

Compare that with the entirely peaceful demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and their allies. Some 27 police officers injured, some hospitalised, and loads of stuff wrecked. And that was BLM being peaceful. That’s the way to do it, surely, you louts? Bob Streicher, a spokesman for the National Association of Thugs, was quick to defend his members, but sounded unconvincing. ‘It’s not fair to blame the lads. We have evidence that our demonstration was infiltrated by people who are not in any way genuine thugs, but just wished to defend some statues. Some of them didn’t even support a football team. I met one bloke who said he preferred rugby. Wrong ’uns.’

He may have half a point, I suppose. If you or I turned up to defend a statue — perhaps that one of Gandhi, for example — the media would identify us immediately as an extreme right-wing football hooligan there to do battle with the gentle democrats of Black Lives Matter, who merely wish to make the world a better place by throwing statues into rivers. And yet I would guess you would not have proper thug credentials.