Three cheers for the court victory of our Sam, the battler with the boots of gold. Ever since the spooky tale of Kerr’s kidnapping by a ‘dodgy f—ing taxi driver’ as she memorably put it, it’s been hard not to think of that other kidnapping of Aunt Edna Everage by dodgy filmmakers in London in Bruce Beresford’s classic, The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie.

Like Bazza, Sam is fond of beautiful sheilas and was out with her gorgeous girlfriend, Kristi Mewis, celebrating Sam sinking the boot into the pommies with a hat trick against Liverpool.

The evening took a turn for the worse however when Sam got into a London taxi and started ‘spit-vomiting’ out the window on the way home. It brings back memories of that glorious evening in 1965 when Barry Humphries sang, ‘When I swallowed the last prawn, I had a technicolor yawn and I chundered in the old Pacific Sea.’

It’s been a while since the subject of spew has been central to a court case and one hesitates to bring this up (so to speak), but the range of regurgitation stretches from ‘Shooting a pavement pizza’ to ‘Calling for Ralph’, ‘Revisiting one’s lunch’, Having a liquid laugh’, ‘Talking to the toilet’, ‘Driving the porcelain bus’, ‘Blowing the groceries’ or ‘Doing the big spit’ with Kerr coming in at lowest level, ‘Doing a small spit’, and not even in the cab but out the window.

Unfortunately, the driver, an ‘oriental’ as Humphries would have put it or, in the language of the police, an ‘Asian’ seems, at the sight of said spit, to have turned into a demon, raising the window while Sam’s head was resting on it, locking the doors, and shrieking like a banshee as he drove erratically for 15 to 20 minutes eventually arriving at Twickenham police station. Even then, he didn’t release his captives, who rang emergency services in desperation.

You may say that this is only Sam’s side of the story, but we don’t have the taxi driver’s version because Constable Lovell flatly refused to interview the ‘Asian’ taxi driver. When his colleague asked if the driver would be arrested, the bodycam records that Lovell screwed up his face and said, ‘He’s not going to get nicked.’

The prosecution said this proved Lovell was the very model of a PC PC which is another way of saying he’d rather turn a blind eye to industrial-scale pedophile rape than risk being called a racist for interrogating an ‘Asian’. To paraphrase Eliza Dolittle, ‘In Rochdale, Rotherham, and Oxford, arrests of ‘Asians’ are rare’.

Transport for London warns passengers to be vigilant in cabs and report criminal behaviour to police who should take statements from the complainant and the driver and review CCTV footage, dashcams, or street footage.

Not Lovell. He made an ‘informed’ decision not to investigate Kerr’s allegation of false imprisonment because he said it didn’t amount to a crime. There’s a Berkeleyan logic to this; a crime only exists if it is perceived to have occurred (esse est percipi). In two-tier Britain, it means a crime is investigated based on an algorithm involving an inverse relationship between the ethnicity of the perpetrator and the gravity of the offence.

That Mewis, also a professional footballer, kicked out the back window of the cab and Kerr cut her hands crawling over broken glass to escape the taxi-cum-prison and open the door to free her beloved was not seen by Lovell as evidence that the lovers were terrified. What the jury thought of this great escape we don’t know because Lovell only turned on his bodycam at moments that were convenient to his case.

He dismissed the weeping Mewis saying, ‘Do you think a taxi driver that was going to rape and kill you would drive you to a police station’ – missing the point that by their account, the driver, incoherent with rage, didn’t say where he was going.

When Kerr said she rang the police and they hung up, Lovell implied she was lying, saying primly, ‘The police wouldn’t do that’, and there was no record of the call. In fact, the police log showed Kerr had rung and the police had hung up.

It was this that made Kerr decide Lovell was not Mensa material and was not treating her fairly because he was racist, leading her to utter the fatal words that Lovell was ‘f—ing stupid and white’ just in time to be recorded by Lovell who finally turned on his bodycam and charged Kerr with committing the crime of hurting his feelings. He said he was ‘shocked, upset and humiliated’ although in the recording he sounds prissy and petulant telling Kerr to ‘Calm down, young missy’, a pejorative more likely to wind a woman up, but which he said he used to ‘get his point across’. What point was that? Seemingly, that he was going to ignore her allegations, treat her as a liar, and she could do nothing about it. Kerr said his comments showed ‘he had no idea about the power and privilege he had’, but Lovell proved he knew only too well that he had the power to make her life a misery by dragging her into court.

Kerr gave up, went home, and returned later the same day. She stood by her allegation but apologised for her language. Asked if her comments could be perceived as racist she replied, with a wisdom beyond her years, ‘I am aware that anything can be perceived as racist’ and gave the police 900 pounds for the driver to put an end to the affair. No such luck. Lovell told the court that he was determined to get Kerr prosecuted. That he had in fact said stupid things and was indisputably white did not deter him. When the Crown Prosecutor dismissed the case, Lovell submitted a second report, 11 months later, about his hurt feelings, persuading the Crown to prosecute.

Taxpayers might think this a stupid waste of money, but they had no say in the matter so Lovell and Kerr turned up for the sequel to The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie. For those who missed the original, Bazza was arrested after ‘lubricating’ his tonsils, told by the police that in England ‘we expect a certain decorum’ and ripped off by a cabbie who charged him for an extra passenger, use of luggage rack, hire of ashtrays, over the five-mile limit, afternoon driving tax, compensation surcharge, and windscreen wiper depreciation. ‘Stone the crows,’ he said. ‘That’s bloody highway robbery!’

Happily, in The Adventures of Sam Kerr the jury was not persuaded Kerr, engaged to marry a fair-skinned blonde, was an anti-white racist and found her innocent. But even for luckless Lovell, it’s a love story of sorts. In a city where knife crime is soaring and homicide rising, it’s heart-warming to know that the police put the hurt feelings of a constable first.