Published: Thursday, 18th June, 2009 8:00am

Shopping drug dealers is fine, what about the rest?

by Maurice O'Brien

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Maurice O'Brien

DEFINITELY an inside job instead of something devised by a high-powered advertising agency and costing millions, but as police campaigns go it"s really rather poetic.

Far removed from the days when a wink from George Dixon reassured a nation, and Regan and Carter would probably have been sniggering in their beer, but you"ve got to admit that "Too much bling? - give us a ring" does have a certain je ne sais quoi.

The slogan"s been adopted by the Thames Valley"s finest over there in Oxfordshire. And I can"t help wondering if the responsibility for that lilting rhyme lies with county commander Chief Superintendent Brendan O"Dowda, who shares a name with a renowned Irish-born tenor much admired by my late Dad for his interpretation of the melodic wit of immortal composer Percy French.

Either way, "Too Much Bling? - give us a ring" helped launch a campaign to mark National Tackling Drugs Week which, in contrast, is a bit of a mouthful altogether.

But while the message is aimed at getting us to turn in drug dealers and other scum from the criminal fraternity, I fear the phone lines will be white hot if we"re expected to shop everyone 'living a life of luxury' without any visible means of support.

We"ll all be grassing up chat show hosts, radio presenters, football agents, England cricketers, reality TV "stars", Turner Prize winners, BBC governors, the FA Council, bankers and half the people in the so-called entertainment industry. And what about our trough-crazed MPs?

"Our haloes all slipped - when our mortgages flipped."

* TALKING of which, the promised clean-up of British politics hasn"t exactly made a glorious start.

The centrepiece is surely a Gulf War inquiry so transparent that its eventual findings will be invisible.

Meanwhile Lord Mandy Of All He Surveys has built his Whitehall stable up to a strength of 11 ministers - six of them unelected, sitting in the House of Lords and answerable to no-one other than their Supreme Puppet Master.

For decades we fretted about Reds-under-the-bed coups, yet Crocodile Chops took just weeks to transform Old Prudence into a badly stuffed ventriloquist"s dummy.

But what hope of disinfecting the Commons when the favourite for the Speaker"s chair, mischievously touted by Labour because fellow Tories can"t stand him, is a sawn-off twerp who only repaid the £6,500 capital gains on his second homes once he"d been rumbled?

And Boy Dave probably thinks we haven"t noticed his lot never used the R-word and "promise" in the same sentence during their Pyrrhic European election victory.

Like his hero Blair he"s praying events elsewhere will render a referendum unnecessary.

Maybe someone should remind him his party"s share of that pitiful 34% Euro turnout was a mere 28%.