Shared Opinion | 7 February 2009

I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon

Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever happened next, is my point, at least he didn’t have to hop. At least he didn’t have a clammy sock.

I do not yet know the name of the 27-year-old man who lobbed a shoe at Wen Jiabao on Monday, but I do know, from the pictures, that he only threw the one. And, more pertinently, he was in Cambridge. It can’t have been nice in Cambridge on Monday. It wasn’t nice anywhere on Monday. Did he bring a spare shoe? Was he expecting the Chinese Premier to throw his shoe back? I don’t think so. It seems to me that he hadn’t properly thought his actions through.

And yet I’m a convert to shoe-throwing. There’s a power to it. For one thing, you do always, at first, have a shoe. That’s not something you could say about every informal projectile. Your rotten fruit, your elderly cabbage, both require a degree of furtiveness on the way in. You’ve got to smuggle. With your keys, the aerodynamics will be hard to predict. Coins are expensive, and a bit football terrace. Mobile phones, a bit Naomi Campbell. The shoe is the way to go.

They’ll ban shoes pretty soon. Not everywhere, obviously. That would be absurd. Just at public gatherings, when the mighty descend. That’ll be pretty bleak, won’t it? Lots of sock stories in diary columns. But everybody has shoes. Everybody can throw shoes.