When I first read that a homeless man had been found dead in a subway next to the Houses of Parliament, I thought to myself: bet he’s an Albanian alcoholic or an itinerant Romanian pickpocket.
As it happens, I wasn’t too far wide of the mark. It turns out the deceased was an Angolan child-molester.
You couldn’t make it up.
Not only that, but Marcos Amaral Gourgel had already been deported twice from Britain after being jailed for sex crimes. So he wasn’t just living on the streets by choice, he was living here illegally.
Flowers and tributes were left at Westminster Underground station in central London
Quite how he managed to sneak back into Britain hasn’t been explained. But since he had a Portuguese passport, it wouldn’t have been that difficult.
While we remain members of the European Union, it’s virtually impossible to prevent anyone with a passport from any EU country coming and going as they please.
And it was revealed this week that some civil servants are refusing to co-operate with Home Office inspectors attempting to establish the immigration status of foreign nationals.
Staff at ministries including HM Revenue and Customs, the Department of Work and Pensions and the Foreign Office are routinely failing to comply with requests for information from the Home Office’s Status Review Unit, which was set up to track down illegal immigrants.
So why the hell haven’t they been sacked for insubordination? They work for us, their salaries and pensions paid for out of our taxes. But it does give you some idea of the scale of the problem when it comes to enforcing border controls.
Britain is open house for migrants from all over the world. Marcos Amaral Gourgel may have had a Portuguese passport, but he doesn’t seem to have had a single living relative in Portugal.
Corbyn himself came over all Dionne Warwick, leaving a note which read: ‘This should never have happened. As a country we must stop walking by. Rest in peace.’
From what the government in Lisbon has been able to discern, his family all live in Angola, a former Portuguese colony.
Still, getting hold of a Portuguese passport seems to be a piece of pickle. How many of the estimated 200,000 Brazilians now living in Britain came here on EU passports issued by Portugal? No one seems to know, nor could care less.
So how did a convicted Angolan child sex abuser, who had twice been deported from Britain, end up stone dead in an underpass by the Mother of Parliaments?
You’d think this is the kind of question MPs and concerned commentators would be asking, as a basis for negotiation. You’d be wrong.
Instead of demanding an urgent inquiry, the hand-wringing elements of the political class and the Left-wing commentariat went into outrage overdrive, exploiting this man’s death for their own purposes. If I’d known what the reaction would be, I’d have rushed down to Westminster with a few Pray 4 Muamba-style PortaShrines from the lock-up, and started knocking out teddy bears and petrol-station flower arrangements.
Jeremy Corbyn’s staff laid floral tributes in the underpass. Corbyn himself came over all Dionne Warwick, leaving a note which read: ‘This should never have happened. As a country we must stop walking by. Rest in peace.’
If I see you sleeping in the street, and I start to cry . . .
Inevitably, the Left immediately blamed Gourgel’s death on the heartless Tories. Labour MP Neil Coyle said: ‘When a homeless man dies on the government’s doorstep, ministers must stop ignoring the problem and commit to end rough sleeping.’
Flowers and card from the staff of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, left by a member of his team at the underpass of exit three at Westminster Underground station near to the entrance to Parliament
A dopey bird in the Observer — aka The Guardian on Sunday — wrote a posturing column under the headline: ‘Behind one death lies a broader picture of despair and deprivation.’
Warming to her theme, she declared: ‘It’s an indictment of modern Britain that this man could die so close to power. And of course, it is vital that homeless people are humanised.’
Noting that Gourgel was a sometime model, she drew the conclusion that ‘this person had dreams, potential, just like anyone’. He can’t have done much modelling recently, unless Millets had hired him to model sleeping bags.
Funny, though, how she managed to draw attention to his modelling dreams, yet somehow left out the bit about him being a convicted child sex abuser. She certainly can’t plead ignorance, since that fact was in the public domain on Saturday morning, the day before her column was published.
Maybe revealing that he was a convicted nonce might have ‘humanised’ him a little too much for some people’s taste.
None of those crying crocodile tears had the slightest interest in his immigration status or his criminal record. He was simply seized upon as a convenient vehicle for signalling their own compassion and giving the hated Conservatives a gratuitous kicking.
If Corbyn cared that much, then instead of walking past the vagrants cluttering up the underpass on his way to work each day, perhaps he could have invited a few of them home for a kale pesto pasta and a good night’s kip.
Maybe Pixie Balls-Cooper could have offered Gourgel a warm bed in one of her two beautiful houses, provided they aren’t already packed to the rafters with Syrian refugees. When Remainiacs extol the virtues of freedom of movement and unhindered mass immigration, they speak of nurses, doctors and other NHS staff.
Unless I’ve missed something, I don’t recall any of them explaining why we should grant an automatic right to Portuguese paedophiles of Angolan extraction to set up home in an underpass next to the Commons.
The Portuguese Prime Minister piled in, too, lamenting ‘the death in inhumane circumstances of our fellow countryman’. Fair enough, but why the hell does he think accommodating convicted Portuguese paedos should be our problem?
The figures probably don’t exist, but I’d be curious to know how many of the ‘homeless’ on our streets are foreign nationals.
Further investigation reveals that Gourgel didn’t have to sleep in the subway, darling. He had been staying in a nearby homeless shelter provided by a church charity, where he enjoyed singing and attending yoga classes.
I don’t suppose any of these irrefutable facts matter to the moralising shroud-waving Lefties manipulating his death to score political points and make the rest of us feel guilty.
They are so far beyond shame that they are even prepared to use the corpse of a convicted child-molester to bolster their self-image.
No international sporting festival would be complete without the statutory drugs scandal.
Some athletes will always resort to banned substances to help them lift heavier weights, run further and faster, jump higher.
So it would be naive to expect the Winter Olympics in Korea to pass without someone failing a doping test. The first to be caught out was a Japanese speed skater. He denied using drugs ‘intentionally’ but was suspended from the Games.
No international sporting festival would be complete without the statutory drugs scandal
One can understand a speed skater being tempted to take something that would give him an extra spilt second. But the next athlete to fail a test was a real turn up for the book.
A member of the Russian curling team failed a drugs test shortly after winning a bronze medal. His sample was found to contain a banned steroid.
Why would anyone competing in curling need body-building steroids? How much strength do you need to push a broom? That’s not sport, it’s housework.
I’m sure that if they tested the British curling team, they’d find little more than traces of porridge and a rather fine single malt.
The FA Cup is still the best knock-out competition in the world, despite the worst efforts of so-called elite football clubs to relegate it out of existence.
The 2-2 draw between Rochdale, bottom of what we used to call the Third Division, and Tottenham Hotspur — who played the Italian champions Juventus off the park in Turin last Tuesday — was edge-of-the-seat breathtaking, especially the last-minute-of-added-time equaliser.
Rochdale, until now famous only for Gracie Fields and novelty northern nonce Cyril Smith, thoroughly deserve their day at Wembley, Tottenham’s temporary home, in the replay.
As a Spurs season ticket holder, I was horrified by my own team’s ineptitude. As a football fan, I absolutely loved it.
At last, a lifestyle plan I can follow. According to scientists at the University of California, the best way to live to a ripe old age is to pile on a few pounds and drink wine every day.
Modest alcohol consumption and a bit of excess timber is a surefire recipe for living beyond the age of 90, based on a study of 1,700 nonagenerians.
I’m not so sure about the ‘modest’ bit, but it’s a formula I’ve been following for years, so I’m delighted to learn that it now has the official stamp of approval.
Trebles all round and a bacon banjo. I can do that, gissa job!