When an innocent man can’t have a quiet pint in a pub without the Plod feeling his collar we are heading for a Police State

The innocent man was enjoying a pint with a friend at his local when in walked two policemen.

Politely, they asked Alastair Hilton if he would mind stepping outside with them, and he did. Then they began to quiz him on his social media posts.

Hilton, a photographer, feared he was about to be arrested. Why? Because he had tweeted his displeasure at the actions of a Green Party councillor.

The officers had not come to arrest him. They happily accepted he was not guilty of the offence they would not charge him with.

But he wasn’t getting off that lightly. In lieu of arrest, they gave him a stern lecture on how close he had come to committing the crime he did not commit. He was that close.

One thing that perturbed them was that Hilton had “described” the councillor’s address. This was verging on harassment, they said. It almost crossed the line. Almost.

One even read out the relevant section of the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which they claimed he nearly breached, but didn’t.

Hilton was furious. Two weeks earlier, he says, suspected burglars had broken a window on his daughter’s houseboat as she slept two feet away.

Terrified, she called police but they refused to turn up. “There’s nothing we can do,” they told her.

But to Hilton’s annoyance, they found the time to track him down to the Bell and Crown, one of three Thames-side pubs in that part of Chiswick, West London, to warn him – threaten is the word he used – about his future online conduct.

“This is modern Britain,” Hilton said. “This is the police state. I’m fuming.”

Hilton filmed the whole sorry episode and it went viral. It has now been viewed more than eight million times. One of the officers seemed exasperated by his refusal to take his ticking-off like a man.

“I was hoping for a handshake and a walk-off,” he told Hilton.

“That’s not going to happen,” Hilton replied.

James May, the Top Gear presenter, who lives in Chiswick, saw the video and tweeted: “I’m genuinely interested to know if you’ve woken up in the Gulag. Bang on the pipes if you need us to batter the door down with a pub bench.”

Hilton’s right, this is modern Britain. Do you think the two jobsworth bobbies sent out to put the frighteners on a blameless citizen realise how out of touch they are with the people they claim to serve and protect?

Do they understand the right to free speech; or have they got it all muddled up with the antisemitic chants of pro-Palestinian demonstrators?

Like our Armed Forces and local councils, the police are short of manpower, funding and resources. As there is no jail space for anyone they do catch, you can add rock-bottom morale to the other shortcomings.

So they do what all organisations do when they can’t fix problems: they take the line of least resistance. They don’t waste too much time with the difficult stuff but concentrate instead on the little “victories” that can go down in the credit column.

Somewhere in their mazy bureaucracy there must be a box marked “Hassle an innocent citizen in case he is thinking of committing a crime”.

Our pair of hapless coppers can now tick that box for their superiors and move on.

I don’t know Alastair Hilton but I know the Bell and Crown and the other two nearby pubs, the City Barge and the Bull’s Head. I have drunk occasionally in all three.

This entire fiasco started when recently-elected Greens councillor Rick Rowe questioned whether seating outside the pubs was licensed and if it was obstructing pedestrians. Hounslow council ordered the three pubs to remove their chairs and tables. They had the right; perhaps even the duty.

But at the height of summer, when business is as brisk as it gets all year? At a time when all pubs are being ground down by crippling rates demands, soaring energy costs and new taxes on staff – National Insurance and a higher minimum wage?

Are the council as deluded as the coppers?

Customers have been sitting outside those pubs admiring the lovely river view for many years, decades even. Council enforcement officers told the landlords they were obliged to act after a single complaint about the seating.

They were forced to backtrack and allow the tables and chairs to remain after a campaign by Alastair Hilton and others in the local community.

Hilton claimed on social media that the lone complaint came from Rick Rowe. Rowe says he meant no harm to the pubs but the tweets about him are certainly the reason police collared Hilton.

A free and ordered society needs rules but perhaps the most important one is a rule of thumb: live and let live.

This controversy comes as a Government-backed review of policing concludes that officers should stay out of woke culture wars and just catch criminals.

The commission, set up by the College of Policing, insists that police should not take sides but focus “entirely on the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime”.

The divisive row could have been avoided if the police and council had not behaved like officious busybodies. No one was being harmed and nothing has changed.

That houseboat burglar is still on the loose, though.

*****

The news dropped just before 2.15pm yesterday: Prince Harry had lost his privacy case against the Daily Mail.

I punched the air in delight, as if Harry Kane had just completed a hat-trick against Norway.

I followed the case as it was reported in the newspapers. And not once did I see a shred of evidence, from Harry or his celebrity co-claimants, of phone hacking or “blagging” (collecting confidential information by deception) by the Mail.

Harry’s case, delivered with the impregnable confidence of a high-born Old Etonian, amounted to a conviction that none of his friends would blab to a newspaper. His social circle, he said, was not “leaky” and what’s more, the tabloids had made his wife Meghan’s life “a misery”.

His co-claimants, who included Elton John, Liz Hurley and Baroness (Doreen) Lawrence, whose son Stephen was murdered by racists, wept, grumbled or got tetchy at the questions they were asked. But they couldn’t point to a smoking gun – because there wasn’t one.

There was a terrible whiff of entitlement running through their evidence. Hanging on the end of every sentence were the unspoken words: “Do you know who I am?”

The £50 million case absolves the Daily Mail’s editor at the time of the alleged invasions of privacy, Paul Dacre. You might not agree with Dacre’s view of the world, or his unabashed Right-wing politics, but he is an editor of absolute integrity.

I cannot believe he would have sanctioned illegal news gathering and at the first sign of phone hacking, he would have come down on the culprit like a ton of writs.

He edited the Mail for 26 years before being summarily booted upstairs to make way for Geordie Greig. Lately, he spent much of his time preparing the ground for the Prince Harry case.

Dacre gave evidence himself in the case. Speaking in a low voice, almost a whisper, he said he utterly refuted the claimants’ allegations, which he called “preposterous”.

The case was heard by Mr Justice Nicklin at the High Court, without a jury present, which was perhaps fortunate for the Daily Mail. Whatever the evidence, it is extremely difficult to convince a modern jury that a newspaper has not resorted to skulduggery.

I hope this costly defeat finally signals the end of the Duke of Sussex’s obsessive and spiteful vendetta against the British Press.

*****

The United States of America was 250 years old on Saturday and I’ve had the abacus out.

America gave us many gifts. These, don’t forget, include our freedom; but for America, I might be writing this in German.

But it offered cultural treasures too: Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Mamet, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Bob Dylan, B. B. King, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep.

Those are my choices but someone else might come up with an entirely different list of preposterously talented people, and every bit as valid.

Right, that’s the plus column. But does it cancel out slavery, or the later brutal repression of America’s black people; the cruel and often criminal Vietnam War; the invasion of Iraq, which was presented as a pre-emptive attack against Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction but was actually about oil?

So far my abacus makes it a close-run contest. But here’s the thing. This significant anniversary comes during the second presidential term of Donald Trump. Nothing can cancel him out.

His time on earth and in office has been marked by abuse of women, abuse of power, avarice, bullying of friends and enemies alike, arrogance, manipulation of America’s institutions, contempt for its constitution and justice system and destruction of its traditional sense of fairness and charity.

It is as though someone upset a bottle of red wine on the tablecloth of history. Trump will forever be a stain on those 250 years.

*****

And while we’re on the subject, Trump’s lickspittles are sticking their noses into our business, suggesting it would be a “mistake” for Andy Burnham to make Ed Miliband his Chancellor.

Why? Because Miliband is opposed to drilling for new oil wells in the North Sea. Trump believes his opposition is ideological and the tax raised from new drilling could fund defence spending.

Net zero is bonkers and so is Miliband’s obsession with it. But it is not as mad as Trump’s notion that we are the 51st state of the union and he can order our Prime Minister to choose a Cabinet that suits America’s interests.

*****

A tale of two Englands at the weekend. The football team triumphed over Mexico and its rowdy fans to reach the quarter-finals of the World Cup. It was a magnificent display, especially as they were playing with 10 men for the last half-hour.

But our rugby players were steam-rollered by South Africa. They went 17-nil down within 12 minutes and employed baffling tactics that don’t suit the team, eventually losing 45-21.

The difference is the bosses. Head coach Thomas Tuchel has instilled belief and team spirit in his Three Lions side while encouraging them to play with freedom. Steve Borthwick, by contrast, has confused a talented bunch of rugby players with a rigid and leaden game plan that even he must see isn’t working.

I know which one I fancy to bring home some silverware.

RICHARD DISMORE

8 July 2026