Paul Gascoigne explains infamous attempt to 'save' killer Raoul Moat 10 years ago
“I just remember that I was in a taxi, I had a fishing rod, some chicken, four cans of lager and a fishing jacket,” he said. “I thought that I could take Raoul Moat fishing because he was near a river. I told the taxi driver ‘head for the airport’ and then when we got to Newcastle airport I said ‘head for Rothbury’. The taxi driver said ‘you are not going where I think you are going?’ And I said ‘yes I am’.”
He added: “I was telling the taxi driver I could save him. I told him: Listen, I have been through so much, I am the best therapist in the world, I can save him’. I think that I genuinely believed that.”
When he got out, the driver did not ask for the fare and Gazza headed straight for the police cordon where Moat was surrounded in a field in the Northumberland village of Rothbury. “I said ‘Where’s Moaty?’,” he recalled, in an exclusive interview near his Bournemouth home. “Someone said to me ‘Do you know him? and I said ‘No don’t’.”
Unaware that his arrival was breaking live on TV news, Gazza’s appearance at the scene triggered rumours about how he knew Moat. “People were saying he was my friend, and then my cousin,” he added. In reality, they had never met. “I walked into a local B&B, saw myself on TV thought ‘oh shit,” he said. “I went to the house where I was staying, got half way up the lamp post and fell off.”
