All those mornings spent thinking about doing a few crunches.

All that time imagining which fist he would use if someone tried to mug him.

That afternoon he looked up prices for a Krav Maga class online before growing distracted.

It all finally paid off for Iain Dale, managing director of the UK’s Biteback Publishing and hero to mall ninjas everywhere.

When faced with a clear and present danger—an anti-nuke protestor waving a sign behind his author in a live interview— Dale did what any self-respecting publisher would do.

“I did what any self-respecting publisher would do, got out of the car, ran across, got him in an arm-lock and pulled him out of the shot.

He started resisting and we ended up in an unseemly tumble on the ground.”

Yes, things would have been entirely seemly, I’m sure, if protestor Stuart Holmes and his dog (also, wonderfully, named Stuart) had only had the sense to not resist being grappled by the absolutely-confident-in-what-an-arm-lock-is-or-does publisher and author.

Holmes, if he had had any sense, would have seen the tightly reigned coat-grabbing fury that lay within Dale from meters away. No doubt there was even a window in which he might have backed down. Instead, he found himself on the receiving end of one of the most efficient and surgical half-scuffle clothes mussings I may ever see. The London Evening Standard has footage of the whole event, but I don’t recommend it for the weak of stomach.

Dale—blogger, radio personality, and himself the editor of a bunch of books of Thatcher hagiography, Boris Johnsoniana, and this nightmare—was at the interview with Damian McBride, former Gordon Brown operative and author of a new Labour-smearing tell-all with Backbite.

Both the release of McBride’s book and the details it recounts sound sordid in the extreme. It was fortunate, then, that someone like Dale was on hand, a gentleman who exuded calm, control, and professionalism as he wrestled a man half his height to the pavement. In the hands of anyone with less precision and restraint—someone, say, not sufficiently trained in the Bourgeois Wombat school of Hypothetical Gung Fu, as Dale clearly is—it could have been an embarrassing event indeed.

Dale has since been cautioned by the police and has had the good grace to sound chagrined on his blog: chagrined that anyone saw his incredible, top secret, techniques, that is.