The law applies to Damian Green, too

Great news — grooming is now a criminal offence. I’ve always had problems with it, frankly. When about to go out somewhere special for the evening my personal grooming consists of hacking at my face with the blunt Bic razor my wife keeps by the side of the bath for when the waxing business hasn’t quite done the trick, and three strategic squirts of Lynx ‘Africa’ deodorant (a procedure known colloquially as a ‘Glasgow Shower’). I end up at functions heavily bandaged and smelling of Dr Milton Obote, but nobody seems to mind. Grooming, I always thought, was overrated. How nice that the police agree.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, was recently picked up by the filth for ‘grooming’, and has objected strenuously about the fact. It was the word he objected to, primarily, a word which these days means something very different to what it once meant. It is one of those words which has been appropriated by authoritarian institutions, such as the police, and loaded with associative meaning by them.