Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp has stepped up his efforts to prove himself intellectually incapable of tax fraud by turning up to court wearing dungarees and a spinning-top baseball cap.

Popularised by The Muppets mainstay Fozzie Bear, the cap comes complete with a small propeller designed to sit atop the crown as if to imply that the wearer could at any moment give it a twirl and attempt to take off into the air only to crash into a pile of cardboard boxes a few feet away, an impression which Redknapp sees as being key to dissuading the jury that he’s a crafty Cockernee wheeler-dealer who’d trade in his dear old mum for a fresh shipment of DVD players half-inched off the back of a lorry.

When asked if he could point to Milan Mandaric in the courtroom, Redknapp stood up, scratched his head and said: “Duuuuhhhh, which way did he go?”

He continued: “I’m well too bleedin’ thick to do a tax fraud and whatnot, guv. If I tried to open an offshore bank account in Texaco under my dog’s name for the purposes of receiving illicit payments off the back of multi-million pound transfers of top footballers, I’d probably end up starting a forest fire out of sheer incompetence.

“Why, just the other day I tried to sign Zaha and ended up with Saha. Ask the missus, I don’t know whether I’m comin’ or goin’”

When asked if he was using his suspiciously frequent bathroom breaks during Tuesday’s session to conduct last-minute transfers, Redknapp paused for a moment before saying: “Duuuhhh, what’s a transfer?”

According to witnesses, the Spurs boss then said “this is me, right” and proceeded to stumble around the courtroom flailing his arms and emitting a series of noises including “doi”, “fnur” and “blblblblbl”.

One witness said: “It was pretty offensive, actually.”