Suddenly everyone wants an iron bar under their bed

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘Where did you get an iron bar?’ she wanted to know, and I told her I’d salvaged it from a towel rail. I think it was that little act of ingenuity which impressed her the most. It’s terrible, really, the hopelessness of the urban middle classes. It’s wonder we still know how to feed.

She’d taken to sleeping with a screwdriver. What was she going to do with a screwdriver, I wondered. ‘What are you going to do with an iron bar?’ she retorted. Swing it, I said. Because there’s a democracy in cudgelling, isn’t there? Whereas stabbing, that’s an art. Somebody breaks into your house, my hunch is he’s going to be better at it than you are. Mind you, now I think of it, somebody once did try to stab me with a screwdriver while mugging me in an Edinburgh underpass, and I didn’t even realise until the police told me about it after they’d had a confession. So maybe these people have narrower skill-sets than one would suppose.

I’ve had that iron bar down there for years. Couldn’t tell you why, really. I wouldn’t have mentioned it before. I’d have been a little embarrassed. Even if my wife had spotted it, I’d have probably have made up some lie about storage. Suddenly, though, everybody wants an iron bar under their bed. Or something like one. In the immediate aftermath of London’s dirty long weekend, sales of baseball bats were up 5,000 per cent on Amazon. I know there have long been parts of the country where baseball bats have suspiciously outsold baseballs (Glasgow being an obvious one) but I wasn’t previously aware I lived in one of them.

Ask around. Do it quickly, before people grow too ashamed. Everybody has a story. The Duncan Fearnley cricket bat which moved from the hall cupboard to the bedroom closet. The axe which… oh, isn’t it in the shed anymore? Did I leave it in the hall? The hammer which normally lives in the toolkit, but has lately been residing on a bedside table. No, darling, no special reason, why, don’t be silly. Just thought I might put those pictures up. Any day now. Leave it! Leave it.

Through the suburbs of London, soft-handed middle-class weaklings like me have been quietly, privately and perhaps a little bashfully trying to harness their inner silverback. Imagine the grimaces in mirrors, the heroic daydreams, the practice swings. Imagine the dents in walls and broken ornaments. I’m told that even the editor of the New Statesman now sleeps beside a police truncheon, which is such a striking image that it could almost be a metaphor for something. And my colleague Toby Young, I gather, spent a night guarding his home not only wielding a baseball bat but wearing a baseball cap, too, so as to look especially scary. ‘Cripes!’ any marauding hoodie would have thought. ‘Toby Young is actually going to play baseball!’ Imagine how frightened they’d have been if he’d also worn a glove.

It’s not actually funny though, all this. London should not be a city of low-tech potential Tony Martins. Live alone in the middle of nowhere, and you’ve reason enough to be scared of the odd bump in the night, even if responding to one by using an illegal shotgun to shoot an unarmed teenager in the back is, in every respect, overkill. But in London? A city with over 30,000 policemen, no widespread culture of armed burglary and CCTV on every third lamppost? This is a place where we should be ashamed of the fear, where the prospect of home invasion should be so remote as to render the man with the iron bar a laughing stock.

Yet right now, I’m not one. And it makes me think that no matter how many shopfronts we rebuild, or opportunistic dimwits we jail, London won’t really be over the events of mid-August until the axes go back to the sheds, the baseball bats go back to the cupboard and the hammers go back to the toolkits. And I think that might be a while.

Sally Bercow again. I know you haven’t been watching the new Channel 5 Celebrity Big Brother, because even I haven’t, and that’s saying something. But you’ll know, probably, that the Speaker’s wife is on it and this, I suspect, will have made you sad. I’m sad too.

Nobody in British public life has really behaved like Mrs Bercow before. The best parallels, probably, are Christine Hamilton and Sarah, Duchess of York. I interviewed the former once. She was clever and funny; altogether good company. It was a bit creepy, I’ll grant you, the way that Neil sat behind me the whole time and kept finishing her sentences, but I came away thinking better of both of them than I had before.

They, like the Duchess, had suffered well-deserved disgrace. Where the Duchess had options, though, they had none. Clearly, they’d come to the judgment that they were destined to be sneered at and despised whatever they did, so they might as well profit from it. Fair enough, once you’re in that situation. There’s almost a nobility to it.
Bercow isn’t in that boat. There’s no great shameful history; no reason why her role should be limited to that of laughing stock. Yet that’s what she seems to want. Disgrace, rather than being a limitation, seems to be her ambition. It’s weird. I hope she’s OK.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.