Son caught in high spirits, Blair blushes

Son caught in high spirits, Blair blushes
ANJALI MODY

LONDON, JULY 6: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has called for the police to be given powers to fine drunken louts, suffered an embarrassing setback when the police arrested his teenage son for being ``drunk and incapable''. Sixteen year-old Euan Blair was arrested late on Wednesday night, when a policeman found him vomiting in central London.

The teenager, eldest of Blair's four children, was celebrating end of his GCSE (Class 10) exams. He was found by a police patrol car at Leicester Square, a favourite hangout of young tourists and under-age teenagers not allowed into pubs, bars and clubs.

He was taken to nearby Charing Cross police station where, like any street smart teenager certain of trouble at home if he is found out, Euan claimed he was 18 and that his name was Euan John and gave an old address as his place of residence. The police searched him and found documents which established his true identity.

He was released without charge and driven home to Downing Street in early on Thursday morning. The Blairs will have to return to the police station with their son at a later date when, in keeping with police procedure, he will face a formal warning or be cautioned. This afternoon Downing Street issued a statement saying Euan was ``very sorry''.

But he cannot be as sorry as his father who only last week announced a proposal for police to be given powers to slap on-the-spot fines of 100 pounds on drunks who misbehaved in public places.

Speaking shortly after drunken England football fans went on the rampage in Belgian towns during Euro 2000, Tony Blair had said, ``There is a very real issue with young louts causing mayhem up and down the country...A thug might think twice about kicking your gate, throwing traffic cones around your street or hurling abuse into the night sky if he thought he might get picked up by the police, taken to a cashpoint (ATM) and asked to pay an on-the-spot fine of, for example, 100 pounds.''

Blair's proposal was criticised by civil rights activists who said it was `Orwellian' and would infringe on the people's basic rights. The proposal was written off as a `gimmick' by the opposition Conservative Party and senior police officers declared it unworkable, saying that at the minimum it would only increase opportunities for corruption.

Euan Blair's arrest underlines the problems with his father's characteristically populist proposal to deal with a social problem that has less to do with policing than with a country's popular culture. Drunkenness is a fact of everyday street life in Britain where social life revolves around pubs and adulthood is marked by a legal right to consume alcohol. In a majority of other European countries drink-related public disorder is practically unheard of and the consumption of alcohol is regulated less by law than by social convention.