Each of his speeches has hailed a need to reform the region's most rigid police state in the wake of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.
Nevertheless, the story based on Frank Miller and Alan Moore's cult classic graphic novel is as pertinent as ever, though the evil dictators who engineered Britain's rigid police state were far more competent than America's current regime.
Mercantilism, then the prevailing school of economic thought, held that the way to secure a nation's wealth was by implementing rigid protectionist polices.
The concern among British athletes and coaches is that too few countries are as rigid in their policing.
Never far from the surface of these concerns, of course, is the memory of Russia's seven decades as a rigid and ruthless police state.
But what is significant about its use this week is that it is now apparently being applied in a rigid, inflexible way - policing as video-game.
Men's violence against women is sustained in part by rigid gender codes, the policing of manhood and rigid constructions of a gender binary between masculinity and femininity, men and women, and male and female.
We have had well-organised, ineffective institutions – hidebound bureaucracies, corruption-riddled basket-case police states, rigid military units that are cut to ribbons by nimble guerrillas.
"The officers say that the police have rigid orders from higher authorities that they must work resolutely to thwart celebratory activities to mark this event," he said in a cellphone interview, having briefly stepped away from the agents to take a call.
