Is it because I is black?

15st 6lb, 4.7 units. Yesterday brought the shock revelation that I am married to a black woman. I can’t says as I’d noticed, as Police Constable Savage famously claimed in that classic Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch; the one where he was asked whether skin colour might possibly have had any bearing at all on his repeated arrests, on completely ludicrous charges, of a Mr Winston Kodogo of Mercer Road.

You probably haven’t noticed, either, if you have glanced at the photographs of Mrs H that have appeared intermittently in this journal since she overcame her initial shyness and stopped ticking the box for “no publicity”. She agreed to that to help me become a published writing sensation. Not one of her better decisions, then, but I suppose it pales into insignificance compared with agreeing to marry me.

Nevertheless, Mrs H clearly IS black. Because she is Iranian. Well, technically, she is nothing of the sort. She was born in Manchester, which makes her as British as I am. But both her parents come from Iran, and she holds an Iranian passport as well as a British one, because that was the only way she could get into Iran to visit her remaining relatives there. So there is a very definite connection. And the bent copper Ali Dizaei, whose sorry story was plastered all over yesterday’s papers, is also Iranian and apparently very black indeed. He is a past president of the Black Police Association, for f***’s sake, and you would think that they should know.

Yet oddly enough he does not look the least bit black. In fact, he doesn’t even look grey. No reasonable person could surely ever have looked at him, in his role as a leading representative of the black community, without thinking “Hang on, you’re not black at all, you manipulative bastard.”

It’s as much of a mystery as the widespread acceptance as a black man of Ali G. And in Ali D’s case, the pussyfooting terror of being branded “racist” has left him over-promoted, overpaid and cost us, I read, some £8 million during the years in which he was profitably suspended and the various allegations against him were being minutely investigated.

For the record, Black Police Association, Iranians are more Aryan than the British are; Iran means “land of the Aryans”. And, in my experience, they are right up there with old-fashioned upper-crust English people and the Chinese in their sense of superiority over other nations. I cannot think of any less plausible candidate than an Iranian for the role of a member of a persecuted ethnic minority.

Ali D is a truly appalling chancer who has probably done more damage to the image of Iran in this country than even President I’madinnerjacket with his mad schemes for nuclear missiles and his penchant for bumping off dissidents. I just hope he has as much fun in prison as bent policemen usually do. Though given his strange conviction about his race, at least he presumably won’t be harbouring the traditional white man’s fear about what might happen to him if he should be so unfortunate as to drop the soap in the showers.