Cycling Mikey may well be right. But as you learn in school: No one likes a sneak

I GET where Cycling Mikey is coming from.

This is the social media warrior who decided, after his father was killed by a drunk driver, that he’d pedal round the streets of London filming motorists who were using their telephones or making a cheeky right turn.

I’m not entirely sure how this will stop drink-driving but let’s gloss over that and move on.

Mikey — real name Mike van Erp — has been astonishingly successful.

Since he began, he has reported more than 1,700 drivers — among them Chris Eubank and Guy Ritchie. It has resulted in a total of 2,500 penalty points being handed out, and the courts have taken a whopping £150,000 in fines.

So this unpaid volunteer, who even turns up at court to offer himself as a witness, is doing what the police these days will not do. Enforcing the law.

He’s Charles Bronson with bicycle clips. The Equaliser, with saddle sores.

So why, then, do I think Mr Mikey is the most dreadful man in Britain today?

It’s not because he has an awful more-in-sorrow-than-anger attitude, remaining stupidly calm while those he’s filmed use every insult in the book to lambast him.

Nor is it because of his squeaky voice. I don’t even mind that he’s a lefty. It’s entirely predictable that a middle-aged “carer” on a bicycle wants to kick out the Tories. He does a lot of reposting on Twitter about this. Of course he does.

Polyfilla in locks

So what’s my beef? Well, first of all, most of the people he catches using the phone are stuck in a traffic jam.

And while it’s technically illegal to use a hand-held communication device while stationary, we all know using a phone in a car that’s not moving is as dangerous as knitting. And then there are the people who briefly pop on to the wrong side of the road to turn right. It’s not exactly Waco, is it? Even shoplifting is a worse crime. Dropping litter definitely is.

 So if Mr Mikey wants to make the world a better place, why doesn’t Mr Mikey go around catching people doing that?

I’m inclined to think the main reason is . . . people in cars tend to have money, which is always irksome to a leftist.

But what annoys me most about Mr Mikey is that he’s a sneak. I didn’t learn much at school. I don’t know how to do long division, I can’t quote from Shakespeare and I spent most of my time in chemistry lessons trying to melt the badge off my blazer with acid.

But I did learn this. You never, under any circumstances, shop any of your classmates to the teachers.

There was one time when someone spent an entire night putting Polyfilla in every single one of the school’s locks, which meant the next day there could be no lessons.

Everyone knew it was me but when the whole school was brought together and told that there’d be no games and no television until the culprit was found, no one shopped me.

That’s how it should be.

 If it’s a proper crime which results in someone suffering, you’re allowed to tell tales. If it isn’t, you aren’t.

Oh, for heifer’s sake, just stay on the footpaths

WE are told the British countryside is now home to rampaging hordes of killer cows.

Pressure groups tell us that between 2018 and 2022, 32 people were killed by these bovine bullies and thousands were injured. Luckily, however, there’s a solution.

 Britain has more than 140,000 miles of public footpaths and if you stick to those, you should be fine. If, on the other hand, you choose to wander into a field full of leather-clad, half-ton, horned monsters, especially if they have calves, you can’t really moan if they decide to engage in a spot of light headbutting.

TikTok is okay by me

UNLIKE half of the country’s social media snobs, I will freely admit to liking TikTok.

At the very least, it makes a trip to the lavatory fun. But I’ve never thought of it as being particularly useful.

At some point this week, though, it must have been listening when I spoke to a friend who’s trying to get sober.

And as a result, I am being bombarded with videos from people in the same boat.

They don’t lip-sync to a song or dance while in a tractor. They just sit there and explain what they’re going through and how they’re coping.

It’s extremely uplifting and, I should imagine, extremely useful for people who are just taking their first steps into sobriety.

It’s a hard road and you’ll certainly need a spine. But if you want a helping hand, download the TikTok app.

IN a poll of 2,000 drivers, a hardly believable 89 per cent said today’s car head-lights are too bright.

They say that when they drive at night, they are dazzled.

I admit this might cause the occasional accident.

But if we go back to the days when car headlights were like candles in jam jars, I suspect there’d be an awful lot more.

Balls to him

A TEACHER who took a holiday in Croatia without permission by claiming to have Covid was sacked.

Fair enough, you might well think.

But no. Instead of admitting he was bang to rights, he decided the dismissal was unfair because over the years he’d been subjected to . . . sexual harassment.

He claimed his female headmistress had once described him as “fit”.

Oh, the horror. However did he cope?

You’d imagine his case would be thrown out, but this is Britain in 2024 so he’s trousered more than nine grand in compensation.

I hope he spends it on a pair of balls.

 E.Coli? What a mess

THAMES Water may soon go bust.

Its previous owners, an Australian finance firm, extracted most of the money for its shareholders, spent bugger all on infrastructure and now the new owners are in the red to the tune of £18.3billion.

 Which means they won’t be investing in new kit either.

It’s why our rivers are all full of turds and the Oxford-Cambridge boat race turned the country into a joke when, according to Dark Blues captain Lenny Jenkins, his crew succumbed to E. coli.

Now, a lot of people are saying the only solution is to renationalise the entire water industry because private enterprise can’t be trusted. Yes, but it was Ofwat, a government watchdog, that watched the companies slither into ruin. And never did anything to stop it.

Private enterprise can be a disaster. That’s a fact. But government control is always going to be worse.

See the NHS for details.

It's all a bit of a vault farce

LADY gymnasts in New Zealand are going to be allowed to compete in shorts.

This is not so the judges can’t see what sort of genitals they have.

 It’s because the girls say the traditional garb can be quite revealing.

I’m sure that’s right but they’re going to have to go back to the old ways on the international stage because the governing body still insists that they must wear a “correct and non-transparent unitard or leotard which must be of an elegant design”.

That seems daft.

Because if a girl is able to boing around on a vault horse then land without falling over, does it really matter what she’s wearing?

One of these days, I’m going to start a ban-the-dress-code movement. No more fancy dress. No more black tie.

And if someone wants to play professional snooker in a scuba suit or a pair of arseless chaps, that’s fine.