No sooner did we point out that David Clews of the far-right Unity News Network could reasonably expect to have his collar felt for incitement during the riots than he dropped out of sight.

There was much speculation that he’d fled abroad but then his name turned up on publicity material for an anti-Nato rally in Glasgow where he would be sharing a platform with a representative of George Galloway’s Workers Party. Later publicity omitted mention of him.

Clews is, as we have written before, close to Patriotic Alternative whose conference platform he adorned last year. During the riots he was one of those who broadcast the false, Arabic sounding name of the alleged killer of three young girls in Southport, and then, again falsely, suggested the killer was a Muslim. A

nd now he’s surfaced, it appears, in eastern Poland, filming himself on the banks of the Bug River which marks the border with Belarus. Curiously, he remarks that ‘Freedom beckons’ and asks if he should get a dinghy across.

Well, if your notion of freedom is that shared by Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s Last Dictator, in office effectively for life courtesy of rigged elections, where protests are regularly beaten down by riot police (no two-tier policing here) and protestors tortured, which has the worst human rights record in Europe and where corruption is endemic, which still has the death penalty, and which kidnapped an oppositional journalist from a Ryanair flight in 2021, never to be seen again…then yes, Mr Clews, off you hop.

And enjoy yourself…