Pete jacks back on smack, gets a Vicky attack

Oddly, Victoria Newton's cameraphone footage of Pete Doherty doing heroin "last Friday" got pushed down the Bizarre pecking order this morning; so far down, in fact, that we only just spotted it was there.

Handily, the paper provides a transcript:

The grim video — shot on a mobile phone and lasting 1min 14secs — shows Doherty crouched on the floor, holding a needle in his mouth.

He stares into the camera, “cooks up” the heroin on a spoon, and fills the syringe.

His head slumps forward as he injects it into his tattooed right arm.

Of course, The Sun has always got a bit uppity in the past when the BBC has shown people shooting up in news and drama, because it's seen as providing some sort of e-learning course. The Sun, though, has only good motives for publishing the film:

The Sun is well aware of the sickening nature of the images — and prints them only to show Doherty is not cured and is a terrible role model.

Yes. You need a one minute fourteen second video of Doherty on his knees with a head full of junk to discover that he's a terrible role model. Without that, he'd have been a shoo-in to be Chief Scout when Peter Duncan steps down.

It's not just the Pete's let the courts down, of course. It's not that he's let his friends down. More importantly, he's let Victoria Newton down:

I commended him for his lengthy stint in rehab and for his latest album, which is actually quite good.

Like others I genuinely believed, or rather hoped, that after six weeks off smack he could continue to stay on the straight and narrow.

But he had us all fooled. He is still a cliched old junkie.

You can hear her trying to undelete the obituary column she wrote, can't you?

And unless he gets serious help soon, I wonder if he will be around to provide us with another album — or whether we’ll be talking about another young talent lost.

We're not quite sure how Doherty can be a young talent but an old junkie. We're also not sure if a "young talent" would produce an "actually quite good" album, come to that.