Paul Gascoigne: Charging him with racial abuse for a joke is a wilful act of cruelty toward a struggling alcoholic

In what surreal madhouse is an offensive joke automatically conflated with a criminal offence?

Paul Gascoigne on BT Sport (BT Sport)

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? The question, as venerable readers will recall, was posed almost half a century ago in a Times editorial ridiculing the prosecution of two Rolling Stones for a trivial drugs possession offence.

The question this time, so far as a legendarily troubled soul struggling with a more lethal drug than those found on Mick and Keef in 1967, is: who takes a legal sledgehammer to crack a nut?

Paul Gascoigne’s addiction to alcohol is familiar to all after years of the tabloids chronicling his public struggle with drink. In December, he apparently put away six bottles of gin in five days. In March, he was pictured with a badly bruised face after a drunken fall. A fortnight ago, police and paramedics rushed to his home. At times, he has reportedly been on the verge of death.

This ailing Gazza now has a date with the justice system. The Crown Prosecution service has finally charged him with racially aggravated abuse after a November appearance at Wolverhampton Civic Centre in which he told a joke (or, should that be, “joke”). It allegedly concerned the black bouncer who was present, ironically enough, to keep him out of trouble.

A local newspaper reports that the aperçu came when, spotting the guy in an unlit corner of the room, he said he couldn’t tell “if he is smiling or not”. That sounds wrong. More likely, if he did tell the joke, he said something about not being able to see the man until he smiled – a variant on an ancient northern club comic witticism relying on the notion that a black person camouflaged by darkness is only visible by the illumination of their dazzlingly white teeth.

The joke wasn’t funny when it was a standard weapon in Bernard Manning’s Wildean arsenal, and it isn’t remotely funny now. It is as screamingly unhilarious, in fact, as Boris Johnson’s reference to “picaninnies ... with watermelon smiles”. When in 2008 Boris semi-apologised for that gem, as shared with Daily Telegraph readers six years previously, he added the rider that it was “sad” that people had been offended.

The really sad thing was how Boris (who has yet to be charged over that) pretended ignorance of the history of “watermelon smiles” as a method of dehumanising black people in the American South. Boris is an intellectually gifted man, after all, with an enviable talent for using the English language.

Gazza is not. He is, as Bobby Robson recognised, as daft as a brush. His intelligence was narrowly confined to the football pitch. Away from it, he was once a happy clown, modelling the latest line in comedy breasts handed over by a fan; today he is as tragic a buffoon as any known to our celebrity culture.

Whether it is ethically right to prosecute anybody for allegedly expressing an unpleasant thought is a more finely balanced question than whether a sledgehammer should be taken to crack this particular nut.

Personally, I think the infringement of the criminal law into matters of taste is clumsy and generally counterproductive, and that the sanctity of freedom of speech outweighs the need to protect people from being offended. But this is a difficult issue for another day.

The issue of the Crown Prosecuition Service charging Gazza, who is fabled for his lack of malice, with a hate crime is easier. It is idiocy on a higher level than any that even he himself has ever scaled. Worse, it is a wilful act of cruelty to put this lost and pitiable man through such an ordeal.

His court appearance is scheduled for 17 June – 20 years and two days since he marked his finest goal for England, against Scotland in Euro 96, with the “dentist’s chair” celebration in which he mimed throwing drink after drink down his neck. If his reliance on alcohol wasn’t fully known then, it is now.

Yet one instance of foolishness is poised to give Wolverhampton its first starring role on the racial stage since the year before WIlliam Rees Mogg wrote that Times leader. In 1967, Enoch Powell, the city’s Tory MP, made the "rivers of blood" speech that remains the most infamous and incendiary piece of oratory in modern political history.

Powell, who was at least as clever as Boris, knew exactly what he was doing. Before giving it, he told the editor of the local paper mentioned above that his speech would “go up fizz, fizz, fizz like a rocket”. However sincere his concerns, he was cynically race-baiting.

Gazza, on the other hand, can have had no idea of the impact of his joke on his audience. Upsetting or belittling anyone will have been absolutely his last intention.

Nothing excuses racial stereotyping. I need not check my privilege to know that it is no business of a white person to blithely discount offence caused to black people by an archaic reference to the luminosity of their teeth. But in what surreal madhouse is an offensive joke automatically conflated with a criminal offence?

Here we find the quality of mercy strained to destruction. A word of warning to him, and a public apology from him – along the lines of that Boris apology, if less grudging and belated – would suffice. Who in their right mind takes a sledgehammer to crack a fragile, desperate and long since broken alcoholic nut?