Paul Gascoigne Says Raoul Moat Saga Is The Biggest Regret Of His Life

ByMF Jones

The legendary Paul Gascoigne AKA Gazza has revealed that his cocaine and alcohol-fueled attempt to befriend killer Raoul Moat is the ‘biggest regret’ of his life.

For the uninitiated, Raoul Moat was a guy who had been released from prison back in 2010 and immediately hunted down and shot his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, and killed her new partner, Chris Brown, in Gateshead. The next night, Moat shot police officer David Rathband in his patrol car and left him permanently blinded (Rathband later took his own life).

This triggered one of the biggest police manhunts in UK history as Moat went on the run in the Northumberland countryside, with police deploying specialist teams, helicopters, and armored vehicles to find him.

Eventually, Moat was cornered by police in Rothbury, Northumberland, where he held a shotgun to his head. As police negotiated with him in a tense standoff, Gazza decided to show up wearing a dressing gown and holding a fishing rod, roast chicken, and a few cans of lager, insisting that he could talk Raoul Moat into surrendering.

I guess we’ll never know if that might have worked, because police turned Gazza away and Moat ended up blasting himself in the head with a shotgun, ending the six-hour standoff.

Well, 15 years later, Gazza has told LBC that the incident remains his ‘biggest regret’, adding that he hasn’t touched cocaine since, which I guess is something we’re just going to have to take his word for.

Gazza explained: “I went psychotic. It was quite scary to be fair.

“Luckily enough, my dad sectioned me for 11 days. I went cold turkey and thought ‘oof, never again’.”

Gazza had been watching coverage of the Raoul Moat manhunt on TV and somehow convinced himself that the killer was his half-brother, and then he got really excited when he saw that Moat was hiding out in nearby Rothbury, a remote village in Northumberland.

Gazza said: “I didn’t know a couple of days beforehand he had shot a cop in the face.

“Eventually, after a couple more lines, I was like, ‘oh yeah, he’s, my half-brother. I think he needs help.

“Because I’d been to rehab a few times, I thought I was a good therapist. Obviously backfired a little bit. It wasn’t until the next morning I thought ‘what did I do yesterday?’ I couldn’t remember nothing.”

It was only when he turned on the TV the next day that he realised what he had done.

“‘Oh f**k,’ Gazza said, before finding that he had around “three hundred missed calls.”

One of those was from his dad, who called police to pick him up and take him “straight to the nuthouse”, which Gazza said did him a “favour”.

Look, there’s no denying it – everyone thought it was absolutely hilarious at the time when Gazza turned up with a fishing rod and roast chicken and thought police would allow him to assist in negotiating with a shotgun-wielding killer on the run, but obviously it’s also completely tragic and sad and goes to show what cocaine addiction can do to a man.

The fact he couldn’t remember anything about it the next day is terrifying! No wonder he quit cocaine that same day, or so he says anyway.

Gazza is still on the booze and says he has no plans on giving that up. Not ideal but a lot better than being on the booze and charlie, I suppose. At least he’s been behaving himself for the last few years though eh?

Well, aside from when he sexually assaulted a woman on the train and claimed he was just ‘trying to boost her confidence.’ Not great.

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