Hardy Times
We may only ever know the identity of Sylvia Hardy’s shadowy benefactor if the now freed pensioner uses the Freedom of Information Act, as she did last year when at the 11th hour, and with the prison gates beckoning, another mystery donor paid her arrears.
If Sylvia does not go down the same path its likely well never know whose largesse forced the principled OAP to cut-short her week away in sheltered accommodation after just 36 hours.
And she was getting on just fine in choky. The Mail says inmates on A-wing at HMP Eastwood Park clapped and cheered her arrival with shouts of Good old Sylvia.
Like Noel Cowards character in the Italian Job, we imagine Sylvia emerging from her cell, looking immaculate and very much in control, to milk the adulation of her fellow lags.
But all this celebrity was ended when her debt was settled. And we now urge her to unmask this person immediately.
Protest is in a pretty parlous state in this country if a woman who chooses to go to prison rather than kowtow to a law she sees as unjust is not even allowed to do that.
But while we wonder who could have coughed up the necessaries to get Sylvia freed – beginning by looking at they who had most to lose from an elderly woman being in jail at the time of the Labour Party conference – the Mail spots another Briton making a stand for what they believe in.
Or make that a sit, because if Guy Harrison were to stand up, so high is he that we fear a gust of wind would knock him from his lofty perch atop a buttress on the roof of Westminster Hall.
What he was demonstrating about, we will get to in a moment, for first we want to tell you that Harrison says the protest was a birthday present for his seven-year-old daughter.
Unusual, indeed. Most girls of that age want jewellery a pony or more crisps.
But Mr Harrison has not seen his daughter for four years, and, though not dressed as Dick Dastardly or Bananaman his protest was in the name of Fathers 4 Justice. Its easy to forgive him for being a little out of touch.
And hes got form. Last May, Harrison was fined £600 for throwing a flour bomb from the gallery above the Westminster debating chamber down onto the MPs.
Undaunted by that, and perhaps even encouraged by the publicity it gained, to say nothing of the thrill, Harrison has now reiterated his point about dads having the same rights as mums.
Posing as a visitor to the Houses of Parliament, Harrison climbed through a window, shinned down a drainpipe, raced across a grassy areas and using scaffolding and a ladder gained access to the roof.
And he did all that without a superhero outfit and with a banner under his arm, which once unfurled read: Does Blair care? For fawkes sake change family law.
Yes fawkes, as in Guy Fawkes, the terrorist who would have blown up Parliament all those moon ago.
Considering that, perhaps we should be happy this modern day Guy just chose to make his point by sitting down and talking…’
Posted: 28th, September 2005 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
