I think that it is now a political given that there is no situation that cannot be made worse by the intervention of Iain Duncan Smith. The Quiet Man, Iain Duncan Thing as he was once so accurately skewered by a parliamentary sketch writer. Now the Brexiting chump has waded into the frightening story that is knife crime by calling for a “London tsar” to co-ordinate a response.
While not doubting his sincerity for a minute, I’m troubled with his use of the catch-all word tsar. We have variously had or have a “games tsar”, “school behaviour tsar”, “transport tsar” and “mental health tsar”. And yet, unless I wasn’t paying attention in my history lessons, tsars were not always a benign force. In one of Ivan the Terrible’s purges, it is estimated that 4,500 people were murdered. He once said: “We are free to admire our slaves and we are free to execute them.” Perhaps it would be better for all concerned if this lazily applied term were, like Ivan the Terrible, consigned to the history books, though I fear that it could be replaced by commissar and look what a force for good they turned out to be.
Elsewhere, until now I had thought that the best nickname was given to a former chief reporter on another national newspaper. A dear friend, he was reddish haired, short of stature and even shorter of temper, given to Vesuvian outbursts of temper and bile, who was so accurately christened the “angry inch”. But recently, Mark Durden-Smith, the presenter of Channel 5’s rugby highlights show, introduced his co-presenter David Flatman, a former Bath, Saracens and England prop and a man with such a good natured, humour-filled and twinkly face and sporting a certain girth as befits his previous calling on the field, as the “human jelly bean”. Perfect.
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
