George Michael arrested in a toilet

No, no, not that time; this all took place on Friday night, when Michael accepted a caution for possession of Class A and Class C drugs following an arrest in a public toilet on Hampstead Heath.

Tony McNulty was forced to take vital time out of swimming through Labour Party plots to answer questions of a "hang about, aren't you lot meant to be hard on Class A drugs and didn't Michael accept a caution not long ago for another offence and doesn't that mean he's kind of got off lightly?" nature:

Mr McNulty told the BBC: "The biggest message is that drugs are wrong and people will be punished, but it must be right that there is flexiblity in the law."

But the government has the balance "about right" between being tough when it needs to be and providing treatment for individuals "to get off that horrible spiral of drug dependancy and crime", he added.

Aha. So he's afraid that if Michael had been prosecuted, he might have wound up living on the streets, then. (To be fair to McNulty, he did stress he didn't know the details of the case and couldn't really comment on the decision taken at that point and so was giving a general, waffling answer.)

The precise location of Michael's arrest means the suspicion has to be that Michael was given a ticking off rather than taken to court because the cops weren't there to catch drug users, but involved in some other sort of operation. It's almost as if the Met don't want to have to troop their cottaging cops out into the harsh public glare of a celebrity trial for some reason.