Pamela Somerville Was Assaulted By Police But Unlike Ian Tomlinson She Is Middle Class

PAMELA Somerville fell asleep in her car. The car had broken down. The Mail says she has degree is microbiology. This might be the most spurious fact ever. We shall see. She is 59. She is 5ft 2in. She is in Melksham, Wiltshire. She is not wearing a Millwall football shirt. She does not smoke. She is not Ian Tomlinson, who died after being assaulted by police at the G20 protest..

The facts keep coming.

Captured on film, a burly police sergeant flings an innocent 5ft 2in woman on to a concrete floor, knocking her unconscious.

Me is Mark Andrews, He is 6ft 3in. He is a former soldier Mark Andrews. He is stood before the Beak at Oxford Magistrates’ Court.

The Mail tells its readers:

The incident… will inevitably stoke debate about the deteriorating relationship between the public and the police following the death of newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson, pushed to the ground by a police officer during last year’s G20 protests.

Oh, yes, Mr Ian Tomlinson, who at the time of his death was sleeping in a shelter near Smithfield market. He had no degree in microbiology.

What did the Mail have to say on him? Stephen Glover offered us:

We don’t yet know how drifter and alcoholic Ian Tomlinson provoked a policeman to attack him minutes before he collapsed and died of heart failure.

Not if. How. But that is mild compared to the treatment dished out by the Mail’s Amanda Platell:

However, there is a second aspect of this story, which, I fear, gives another unpleasant insight into modern Britain and it concerns the way Ian Tomlinson’s grieving family relished the media spotlight.

A man died. He was not wearing a suit when he died.

Of course, I am not suggesting that the family are not grieving, but the facts of Ian Tomlinson’s recent life must lead one to question the depth of their grief.

Lest that stick in the craw and make you sick – Platell says she felt “queasy” by the display of grief at a man’s death and unsettled at any compensation heading to his family – let’s hear more from Stephen Glover:

Without doubt it was a nasty, and apparently unprovoked, assault. Yet Mr Tomlinson was quickly back on his feet, only to collapse a few minutes later as a result of a heart attack. Most people would have dusted themselves off without much ado. Mr Tomlinson was unlucky. He may have had a peculiar susceptibility, possibly as a result of being a heavy drinker.

Ian Tomlinson died. Pamela Somerville did not. She got her day in court. Says she:

“I am just an ordinary, middle-aged, middle-class Miss Goody Two-Shoes. I had done absolutely nothing wrong. What happened to me was extraordinary, terrifying, and no one should ever be treated in the same way again, no matter what they are said to have done. It’s the kind of thing that might go on in a tin-pot dictatorship in Latin America, maybe, but not in rural Wiltshire.”

The Mail then delivers more facts. It says Ms Somerville was “privately educated”. And again we learn that “Ms Somerville…has a degree in microbiology from Warwick University”.

Feeling “stressed” she went to drive to her daughter’s house in London. In the car she decides it is best not to drive any further. She stops for the night.

Instead she wound down the windows, listened to a Van Morrison CD and rang some friends, eventually draining the phone’s battery.

Her car is a “Mercedes estate”.

Police arrive. They suspects she has been drinking. They arrest her.

Ms Somerville admits she became angry and abusive when the two officers repeatedly refused to explain why they wanted to take her to a police station.

“I came out with a few choice expletives when they kept telling me to shut up, and the male officer used the F-word again when I told him he was making a mistake.”

And so to Melksham police station, where Sgt Andrews worked.

Around an hour later, Ms Somerville was visited by a police doctor. “I was relieved to see him when he introduced himself because I thought he’d have more intelligence than the officers who’d been dealing with me,” she said.

“I told him, ‘Thank God, at last I can speak to someone with a brain and get this nightmare sorted out.’

“But when he started putting on a pair of disposable gloves and said he couldn’t tell me anything, I thought he was going to strip search me, so I walked past him and out of the cell.”

Ms Somerville, who is eight stone, encountered Andrews outside. She recalls “being lifted up under the arms like a doll by Sgt Andrews and thrown headfirst back into the cell”.

He then slammed the door shut and left her unconscious on the floor.

Sgt Andrews will be sentenced on Tuesday. He faces a jail term.

No policeman has been convicted of hurting Ian Tomlinson…

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