The invasion of Iraq by the US and the UK in 2003 was in breach of the United Nations Charter and international law.  More than that, as the Nuremburg Tribunal of 1946 put it: “…to initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”  A minimum of 150,000 people died as a direct result of the Iraq War.

Therefore the people who made the decision to invade Iraq in the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair, his cabinet, his ministers and the 412 Labour and Tory MPs who supported it in the Commons vote, are not just any old criminals, they are the worst criminals currently walking this planet.  Among them was Alun Michael, Minister of State for Rural Affairs in the Blair government.

It is beyond parody that this “Christian Socialist” is now Police Commissioner for the South Wales Police manor. An analogy is hardly needed, but if I had to summon one up let’s say it’s as ridiculously inappropriate as a known predatory paedophile running a hospital full of vulnerable children – as if that could ever happen…

In comparison, our new commandant’s wrongly-claimed £19,000 worth of expenses when an MP can be written off as a minor misdemeanour – and anyway, as he explained at the time, it was all down to “clerical error” (his clerks should go on a training course; as late as 2011 they were found to be still contravening MP’s expenses’ rules).

Let us hope Obergruppenführer Michael will be as forgiving and as understanding of other human’s frailties as he is of his own when he produces his “police and crime plan” in the coming months. There’s no rush: it’s about all he will have to do for his £100k a year (plus expenses).

In the STAR Centre polling booth, with the Police Commissioner ballot paper in front of me and that stingy stubby pencil on the end of a string in my hand, I paused a moment to consider my options before writing diagonally across the names of the four candidates:  NOT ALUN MICHAEL!

I regret it now: yet again I had used an exclamation mark where it wasn’t really needed!