Hug a hoodie? Or kill a bike thief??
By Sam Leith
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 26/07/2008
Some of our motoring section's more flinty-hearted readers may have felt differently. But me, I felt sorry for him. Standing there in his ridiculous little shorts, with his socks pulled up, his rucksack heaped sadly at his feet and his mobile phone clamped despondently to his ear. He looked stranded, wrecked, lost, at sea.
Lordy, I thought, as I contemplated yesterday's grainy shot of David Cameron on Portobello Road after having his bike stolen. Forget the Glasgow East by-election.
This is the real political pivot. I looked at him and I knew exactly how he felt. Twenty-thousand Londoners a year know exactly how he felt.
Having your bike nicked is no small thing. You are immobile. You are astonished. Embarrassment and shame surges to your face - and continues to surge as, flustered, you make an idiotic spectacle of yourself flagging down passers-by asking if they saw anything.
Your bicycle is among the possessions with which you form the most intimate relationship. You feel sick at heart.
And, if you have lost your bicycle in a particularly stupid way, you feel humiliated. Like the old friend of mine who - idiot! - locked her bike to a railing by its quick-release front wheel.
Like Mr Cameron, reported to have chained his bicycle to a two-foot bollard - a schoolboy error, as any cyclist knows: the hateful Portobello Road toe-rags who helped themselves to it needed only lift bike - lock and all - up and over and off.
First comes despair, and then comes black, black rage.
The man or woman whose bicycle is stolen is afflicted, in my experience, by a unique anger. Bicycle theft feels not just like an offence against property, but an offence in the first place against the person, and in the second against civilisation itself. Empty my pocket, and earn my anger. Steal my bicycle, and earn my hate.
The view attributed to H G Wells - "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race" - seems to me to go to the heart of it. A cyclist is an object instance of the human being at his noblest: vulnerable; somewhat absurd to look upon; modest in his consumption of energy and space and his output of noise; self-powered; independent.
This is, perversely, why so many cyclists act so obnoxiously. The feeling of righteousness, once established, is too little policed by the unruly ego and causes the prideful cyclist to fall into error - running red lights, terrorising pedestrians, or lecturing fellow citizens on the need to be green while all the while having your briefcase ferried behind you in a chauffeur-driven limo.
But it is also why cycle thieves fall into a special category of funt-stinking, fug-ugly, bunghole-chewing motherless fatherless fistula-featured all-enraging hatefulness.
Every one of the 20,000 cycles stolen annually in London - as anyone who has lost a bicycle themselves knows - was stolen by someone for whom Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever" would be insufficient requital.
We cyclists fantasise about anti-theft devices that will impale them, maim them, blow them up, afflict them with galloping impetigo and wobbly teeth, with impotence and halitosis, with decapitation and athlete's foot. We want them extirpated, hung from cranes.
Those who steal bicycles, you see, do not steal them out of economic need, or social deprivation, or any of that old cobblers. They steal them out of sheer malice. They are the brick through the window, the coin down the bodywork, the car aerial unthinkingly bent off for no better reason than it protrudes.
Bicycle thieves are not hard-up. They are evil. They steal our bicycles - be they rattling antiques carbuncled with home-applied gloss paint or carbon-fibre, Shimano-geared rockets - for the simple pleasure of imagining our impotent rage at their loss. They resell them only so they can have the fun of stealing them again, like a trout fisherman keeping his lake well stocked.
I once had the saddle stolen from a locked bike. What larks! On another occasion, someone took the trouble to remove and throw away the single nut that holds the front wheel on.
Worthless. But how they must have laughed as they imagined me climb aboard and push off confidently, only to fall flat on my face as my front wheel sailed off into the traffic by itself. Like Zippo's Circus, see?
Har-de-har!
And that is why those of this paper's readers who think the Conservative leader is still too liberal - some of whom may have been less than sympathetic to his plight - will come to look back on this, with gratitude, as a real turning point.
Unless I miss my mark, the sniggering booby of a passer-by who sneaked that mobile phone shot of Mr Cameron in his distress has captured something historic. That was the moment hug-a-hoodie became kill-a-bike-thief. The moment the liberal was mugged.
The moment at which, whether he knows it yet or not, the iron entered Mr Cameron's soul.
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