What appears to be a case of daytime jogging gone wrong unsettled U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s security detail on Monday. Cameron was leaving a meeting in Leeds, and heading for his car, when a man came careening around the corner, straight through the prime minister’s security detail, and collided with Cameron.
The jogger—who identified himself as Dean Farley—was quickly taken down by Cameron’s bodyguards. Despite early reports that the jogger was staging a political protest, Farley told the BBC he was just on his afternoon jog, and apparently pretty deep in the zone:
Dean Farley said he was only aware that he had collided with Mr Cameron an hour after he had been arrested by police. He insisted he was “not particularly political” and was just going out on his daily lunchtime jog to the gym when he ran into a “bunch of men in suits…” The 28-year old said he was on the way to his local gym for a session with his personal trainer when he crossed the road outside the council building. “All I saw were a group of men in suits who came out of the Civic Hall.” He added: “It begs the question - how good is Cameron’s security if I managed to run between it before they stopped me?”
Local police determined there was “nothing sinister” about the encounter and Farley was “just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the Guardian reports. Whether you want to call it a shove, a bump, or just poor pedestrian communication, Farley does make a good point: What does the incident say about the prime minister’s security? Cameron, for his part, took the whole thing in stride, while the Metropolitan police service, which is in charge of the prime minister’s security, promised a review of joggergate.
The BBC points out the incident “comes less than a week after a man threw a bag of marbles at the glass screen which separates the public from MPs in the House of Commons” during Prime Minister’s Questions. Although the Beeb didn’t go so far as to link the two—totally separate—incidents in an attempt to make the case Brits are having trouble with their marbles, I’m speculating they really, really wanted to.
