But he was probably less shaken by the yobbish reception than by his much reduced majority over a first-time DUP challenger.Anti-Trimble Ulster Unionists are divided on how to proceed.
In a new book*, Robert Stevens, an academic who has run colleges in both America and Britain, writes of "an alcoholic yobbish culture" among students, for whom university is principally "a rite of passage", like national service in the army, rather than an education.
They had been so ever since, as a yobbish teenager eating fish and chips in the street with his mates, he had looked up to see the German airship Hindenburg and a Handley Page biplane flying at the same moment over Canterbury Cathedral.
It is symptomatic, of course, of a broader increase in snarling, confrontational, yobbish behaviour in public – the kind of blight on society it would be heartening to think the new Lib-Con government might start to eradicate.
Resolve those core problems and Sacha Baron Cohen's pursuit of yobbish stereotypes on the coast will hurt them no more than Made in Chelsea can dent property prices in SW3.
And then there are the ditzy Marshmallow Girls in their frou-frou frocks and the cheerfully yobbish Gobstoppers in their bike jackets and shining crash-helmets.
When he returned home he sent an email at 9.52pm to his MP, the then deputy chief whip John Randall, in which he said he was disgusted to hear Mitchell use "gutter language" and show "yobbish and loutish behaviour" towards police officers.
Even four years ago, at the last World Cup, the flag had yobbish baggage; now it has been embraced by everyone.
New Brigade, the debut LP by four photogenic Copenhagen teenagers calling themselves Iceage, had found its way to the wider world, and it was nigh-on perfect: 24 minutes of gothic hardcore and surly bromance, like a yobbish Joy Division.
But then we see the stomach-turning crime-scene images of the corpses he has left behind, and there is a missing link - a link that Kahn invites us to imagine for ourselves - between the yobbish, fast-talking pickup artist and the psychotic killer who cares nothing for the consequences of his actions.
Where Joel Grey, in the movie version, was impish and sinister, Cumming is brutish, jack-booted, playing the part with a yobbish licentiousness that highlights just how close the satirist and the satirised come to looking to each other in the end.
