Boris Johnson is a loose cannon, but why don’t we let police use the hoses instead?

POLITICIANS, especially those with a blue hue, like to tell us that our hard- earned money is safe in their hands. But it isn’t.

Boris Johnson, for example, decided that he would like to build some cycle lanes in London so that adults could ride around the capital on their children’s toys.

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He was told the scheme would cost £900million and instead of saying: “Don’t be ridiculous, that’s ten times more than it cost to do the same thing in Chicago,” he said: “Sounds reasonable.” And the idiotic project got the green light.

Then you have the council in Oxford that thought it was perfectly sensible to spend £10million shrinking two roundabouts.

And their opposite numbers in Cambridge who blew half a million on a so-called “ghost round-about” which should have cost two grand tops.

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And now comes news that when he was Mayor of London, Boris — yup, him again — bought three water cannons at £28,000 a pop, even though it’s illegal for the authorities to actually use machines like this.

Then, after they were delivered, someone suggested that it would be a good idea to fit them with CD players and big sound systems.

Well yes, it would, because as we know from Apocalypse Now, if you play music loud when you go into battle with the enemy, “it scares the hell out of them”.

But no. The music would only be played in the cab.

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So even though the occupants would have better things to do in the middle of a riot than to sit there listening to a collection of Barry Manilow ballads, Boris decided that it’d be £3,000 well spent.

Then, nearly two hundred grand was somehow spent on maintaining these three glorified vans. Which is fairly astonishing given that they haven’t actually been used.

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The total bill so far for these vehicles has been £320,000 which, as my son — who’s working as a waiter at the moment — has worked out, equates to every penny he’ll pay in tax for the next 100 years.

This week it’s been announced that they are to be sold, possibly for scrap, and that at best, they’ll fetch £6,000.

I have a better idea, though. Why not let the police use them.

At present, when those weird-beard halfwits lie down on the runway at an airport or in the middle lane of the M4, Plod has to sit around filling in forms until the protesters get bored. Or the weed wears off.

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And when there’s a proper riot it’s even worse, because the police get helmets and a shield and have to just stand there while everyone throws rocks at them.

The safety and health diddums brigade say that being sprayed with a jet of water is very horrid and that a protester may fall over.

To which I say “and . . . ?”

I’ve actually been hit by a water cannon — it was for a television thing, I wasn’t actually putting some turf on Winston Churchill’s statue at the time — and it’s not nice, I admit.

You do fall over and it’s very cold. But it’s a very effective way of bringing people to heel without actually breaking bones or filling them full of holes.

Plus, we already have the damn things in a garage so it’d cost us nothing.

Most importantly though, riots and stupid protests could be ended before they've really begun.

RAF has noses on the run

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I’VE spent the past year or so imagining that the Royal Air Force role in Iraq and Syria is to provide the tea and brass band music, while the Americans and Russians do all the actual flying stuff.

However, at the always excellent Millies this week, below, I learned our boys have dropped four times more bombs over there than they did in the entire Afghanistan campaign.

Our planes and our drones and our tankers are flying round the clock, providing air cover for whoever happens to be our allies on the ground at the time.

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I was amazed. And then I was even more amazed to learn that our smart weapons are so clever that pilots can choose which part of a fast-moving pick-up truck they’d like to hit.

They can take out the weapon on the back or the engine, which won’t kill the people in the cab.

Or they can steer the missile through the driver’s window and up his left nostril.

Which will.

This kiss is not so real

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APPARENTLY, there’s a show on television called Real Housewives – and this week, one of its stars went to some red carpet party in half a dress and stopped in front of all the photographers to kiss her pretty, 18-year-old daughter on the lips.

And she’s a real housewife, is she?

Grieving got me thinking

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MY closest friend died last weekend after a horribly brief bout of extremely brutal cancer, and straight away his family was plunged into a world no one is ever properly prepared for.

What happens to his bank account? How many death certificates do you need? How do you sell his car? Is it legal to keep his shotguns in the house? How are his pension schemes activated? The list goes on and on.

And it made me wonder. If you are an old lady, living in a council flat in some Godforsaken hellhole and your husband dies, what do you do?

You don’t have an accountant or a financial adviser. You don’t have a computer or Google.

You don’t have an army of friends. It’s just you, in a jungle of bureaucracy and red tape and rules.

So you have to get on a bus, grieving, and go into town to the Citizens Advice Bureau, which is almost always shut, then trudge home again to an empty flat which is filling up with forms you don’t understand. And Christmas is just a week away.

It breaks my heart if I’m honest, so for the first time ever I’m going to make a New Year’s resolution.

You go ahead and give up smoking or drinking or eating fat to try to prolong your life.

But me? I’m going to sort out what happens when it ends.

Prince Harry has a girlfriend

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PRINCE HARRY, who is a young, heterosexual man, has a girlfriend, who is a young, heterosexual woman.

Not sure I can add any more to this.

BAFTAs to only give awards to films with minority groups

BAFTA announced this week that it will no longer give awards to films which don’t feature people from minority groups.

Yup. If you want to win a gong for making an outstanding British film, or on your debut as a writer or director, you’d better make sure your movie is about slavery or Aids. Or preferably both. This means Gone With The Wind or Brief Encounter would be excluded. Naturally, this has caused all sorts of normal people to roll their eyes and sag their shoulders and point out that Soviet behaviour like this should have ended when the Berlin Wall came down. But I’ll let you into a little secret. Bafta has been using its liberal views to choose winners for years. The difference is that now, they’ve owned up to it.