While Joey Barton plays up to middle-class prejudices he remains a prisoner of his own violent nature For this nasty assault Barton served 74 days of a six-month sentence. His charge sheet is long and varied. It includes jabbing a lighted cigar into the face of a Manchester City trainee at a club Christmas party in 2004 and a training-ground brawl with City's Ousmane Dabo three years later. For that altercation Barton was banned for 12 games, six of them suspended. He has continued to exhibit malevolence on Twitter and on the field for QPR. The educated middle-classes have derived much fun analysing the autodidactic strivings of a working-class lad from Merseyside who often sounds as if he has swallowed a Penguin book of quotations. He manages to be patronised and held up as some kind of exemplar all at once. Only the other day the football correspondent of the Daily Mail was dropped from Newsnight at the last minute because Barton had indicated his willingness to come on the show. The Times cleared space on its opinion and editorial pages for him to extol the virtues of Twitter, which, he argued, cut out the need for unreliable journalists and allowed him to communicate directly with his flock. So many have suggestible people have fallen for this shtick. Barton himself must be laughing at them all. The slick modern communicator is routinely abusive, as he was yesterday to Shearer and Lineker, and peppers his dispatches with a kind of menace. Before you know it, he is quoting Morrissey again to project himself as a misunderstand truth-teller: "For there are brighter sides to life, and I should know, because I've seen them, but not very often." The song from which this line is drawn is called Still Ill and features the question: "Does the body rule the mind, Or does the mind rule the body?" True to his enigmatic spirit, Morrissey answers: "I don't know ..." Nor does Barton. But he is skilled at tricking us into watching him veer between the extremes of thinker and thug. Either this is a repudiation of societal hypocrisy or, more likely, indicative of a sociopathic tendency. There is a strong persecution complex in there too. Barton's beef with the referee on Sunday was that he had been sent off for responding to an initial foul by Carlos Tévez. From there, all the constraints were off. First he screwed his face into attack mode for the attack on Agüero (from behind, mark you), then he half attempted to butt Vincent Kompany as the City captain came over to remonstrate. From there he had to be dragged off by City's Micah Richards, who excelled himself in the role of peacekeeper. You knew what would follow. Self-justification. An apology followed by an instruction to the world to stuff it if sorry was not good enough. Then the really spiteful jabs at Shearer and Lineker, or "Mr Squeaky Clean." A friend who knows a lot about Barton and his problems swears his main problem is shame. He thinks he is mortified by his past and feels the world looks down on him. For a while, he can get Jeremy Paxman to invite him on Newsnight and display his learning on Twitter. People from more privileged backgrounds talk about him at dinner parties and hold him up as the antidote to the modern monosyllabic footballer. Barton, of course, is free to play up to all these prejudices. Like the Monocled Mutineer in the Alan Bleasdale play, he is free to be whoever he wants to be. But he remains a prisoner of his violent nature, a recidivist. He is dangerous.