You know, if that daft copper hadn’t flaunted his top secret dossier I would have been able to get to the Shah Qila last night for my kebab. I was really looking forward to it as well. As it was, the terraces behind Cheetham Hill Road seemed to be pretty well cordoned off.
A man described as Manchester’s Top Terror Cop has called for calm, and I’m here to tell you he got it. From what I heard it was a pretty clean extraction, about as unobtrusive as carloads of heavily armed men clad in Kevlar can get. The gossip was just that this thing happened in the neighbourhood and the local kids seemed more impressed than anything else. Cops! With machine guns! Dressed in black! That’s the way you get the kids on your side: out-cool the bad guys. Then they vanished as mysteriously as they came. There was nothing to see today except a bunch of SOCOs going in and out of houses with bin liners.
Of course, if Ian Blair had been running this, entry to the suspects houses would have been effected with a small thermonuclear device while the band of the Brigade of Guards marched up and down Cheetham Hill Road playing the 1812 Overture and the Red Arrows staged a flypast. But the Raymond Gubbay of counter-terrorism is no longer with us and we can all sleep sound in our beds.That stuff about targeting the Trafford Centre appears to be bollocks, by the way.
I have to say, I suspect the lack of a coherent smear campaign directed at Tomlinson is due to the lack of Sir Ian Blair.
Posted by: Alex | April 10, 2009 at 02:18 PM