Policing minister’s purse stolen at conference about theft

Sir Keir’s Labour government may be determined to deprive daily life of all fun, but there’s still a little humour left in politics yet. Now it transpires that when the government’s policing minister, Dame Diana Johnson, attended a meeting of senior police officers earlier this week, she, er, had her very own purse stolen. You couldn’t make it up…

The rather curious crime occurred on the very same day that the Labour government released prisoners early in a bid to get on top of overcrowding in jails – intensified by the sentences dished out to rioters that took to the streets last month. Addressing the policing conference on Tuesday, Johnson rather ironically lectured attendees about how the UK has been ‘gripped by an epidemic of anti-social behaviour, theft and shoplifting’. Doesn’t she know it!

The unwitting victim’s speech was also accompanied by that of Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, who lamented the ‘chronic underinvestment’ in the police before adding that forces were ‘operating on a shoestring’.