the brilliantly leaping gazelle

One of the main problems which exists in our democracy is a recent one. Not even two years old, it  was all too clearly revealed to be the problem that it is by the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election (G&D) last week. It was also also present in the Caerphilly by-election last year and it’ll  no doubt be present in Mays local council elections. 

One of my most frequent gripes following any parliamentary election is the turnout; the total amount of eligible voters who actually did so. I’m aware of the logical inconsistency of this argument, because if it means anything all, democracy means being able to choose not to take part in it. Be that as it may, it nonetheless annoys me no end that so many people choose to exercise this anti-democratic version of democracy so often, so blithely and so self-destructively. 

The prevailing narrative about the G&D result is that the Greens delivered a stunning victory. That notion the of there being such a thing as ‘a safe seat’ has gone. And along with it, so to has the old political duopoly; the one that saw either a Labour or Conservative government’s in Westminster, for most of my lifetime.

Or that by focusing too much on one threat – from Reform – Labour exposed themselves to another one – from the Greens – and that they quickly need to find ways to overcome both. That the Greens offered hope, unity and inclusiveness. From the way the the press told it, the Greens were nothing short of the political equivalent of Heineken. One might even believe that the Greens getting 40.7% of the votes was evidence of this.

Until, that is, one realises only 47.5% of the electorate actually bothered to vote. Meaning that less than half of all voters actually voted and of those, less than half of them voted Green. And even that becomes even less impressive when one glances at the results data from which one can only conclude that the increase in the Greens share of the vote from the 2024 general election – together with that of Reforms – corresponds almost entirely with the collapse of the Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dem vote. 

So probably it is less of a sudden enthusiasm for what the Greens were offering and more to do with tactical voting. A belief, endlessly reinforced by the media, was that only the Greens that had the only realistic chance of defeating Reform. It is almost awe-inspiring then, that only 47.4% bothered to vote. The electorate can hardly claim ignorance of it happening. The media reported on it until I suspect that even they were bored of it by the end, and didn’t much care who won, just as long as it was over.

If this all seems worryingly familiar – the seemingly impressive victory, the not so impressive turnout in spite of blanket media coverage and tactical voting leading to a political implosion for the three ‘main’ parties – thats because it is. Pretty much the exact same thing happened in Caerphilly, except it was Plaid Cymru and not the Greens who benefitted    

In Caerphilly only 50.4% of the electorate voted. The winning candidate, the Plaid Cymru one, got an a similarly impressive sounding 47.45 of the vote until one realises that once again, thats essentially less than half of a half. And much like in G&D, the political see-saw effect was clearly visible; for something to go up – Plaid Cymru’s and Reforms share of the vote from the 2024 general election – something had to come down – the Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems share of the vote.

This bothers me. Not just because it is so blatantly obvious from the data which means that the media aren’t picking up on it, or more likely that they are, but it doesn’t fit into the narrative. Not just because it means that some of the people who always vote are not voting because of traditional ideological reasons, but more because of newer ideological reasons. Which boil down to thwarting the other people who always vote, but feel that they can no longer vote who they previously did, and will vote for someone new. 

And its not just that if this scenario is played out across the country in May at the local elections or whenever the next general election is, we’ll get candidates winning because of negative votes. Because of more people wanting someone to lose than wanted someone else to win.

But is the fact that its just taken as a given that more than a quarter of the population who could vote don’t. More than a quarter of them didn’t vote in the 2016 referendum. This isn’t healthy. If a significant minority of people can be reliably assumed not to vote, it effectively grants greater power to those who do and who might be persuaded to switch allegiances.  Which will only encourage political parties to make their offerings more attractive to the potential switchers. Which will only causes that significant minority to remain a significant minority, which in turn will keep the status quo broadly the status quo.

If they weren’t as depressingly predictable as they were tragically avoidable, the contrasting reactions to the differing fates of John Davidson and Valdo Calocane might be ironic. But instead, they prove only that the modern obsession to view everything through the reductive lens of race leads not only to hypocrisy, but also to murder.

We all know who John Davidson is and why he’s been in the news of late. But in case you’ve been living in a box of late and have no idea who he is, he’s is the man who shouted the ’N’ word at the BAFTA’ awards ceremony the other night. All things being equal, the pretty instant condemnation and vilification of him would be fully justified. But he has Tourette’s Syndrome, and a particularly challenging and rare variant of it at that. The involuntary tics most commonly associated with Tourette’s normally involve facial movements, clicking, or blurting out inoffensive words. His doesn’t. He has coprolalia. Which means he swears, but not merely normal swearing. Coprolalia has the also has the added effect of the brain sometimes selecting the most inappropriate thing to say at the most inappropriate of times

In 2019, he was given an MBE in recognition of his campaigning work to raise awareness of Tourettes. When the Queen – the proper one, not the ex-mistress – gave it to him, he said ‘Fuck the Queen.’ But she knew who he was, why he was being honoured and knew he wasn’t always in control of what he said so she simply said “Congratulations, Mr Davidson, ’I believe you’ve done lots of television appearances trying to improve people’s knowledge of Tourette’s.”

Clearly, that work has a long way to go, if the reaction to his outburst was anything to go by. The fact that a bunch of actors who immediately rushed to condemn him was instructive, For these are the one group of people who, above all other groups in society, one would expect to have unlimited sympathy for a man who is neurodivergent.  A disabled man, a man who because society was unable to recognise his disability, had been bullied, stigmatised marginalised by it for most of his life. This group who collectively have no problem whatsoever putting their names to condemnatory letters denouncing someone for doing something or else to urge a government to do more of something else or to demand that something they don’t like ceases immediately.  

They feel perfectly entitled to berate lesser mortals – everyone else – who are not imbued with the same moral probity that they are, to check their privilege, be mindful of others and to not reinforce intoloerance. To never punch downwards, to never victim-shame or to never…well act as they did on Sunday night. Davidson was clearly guilty. He knew what he was doing and was using his Tourettes as a convenient get out. That basically was the reaction in the morally duplicitous and opportunistically hypocritical world of show-business. His use of the ’N’ word effectively reduced everything else to an inconsequential detail. 

Jamie Foxx best exemplifies this selective offence taking. He quickly took to Instagram. “Out of all the words you could’ve said Tourette’s makes you say that. Nah he meant that shit. Unacceptable.’ This would be the same Jamie Foxx who was quite happy to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film ‘Django Unchained’. I saw it once, years ago now, so can’t swear to it(!), but I’m confident that it, like all of the other Tarantino films I’ve seen, was liberally peppered with the ’N’ word. Quite possibly Foxx himself even said it.

Or maybe there’s another Jamie Foxx? This one who appeared on Kayne Wests ‘Gold Digger’ track in 2005. That featured multiple uses of the ’N’ word. So does a word become more or less offensive depending on who it is thats using it, to whom and in what context? Because if that is so, then a man with a neurological condition over which he has no control, deserves no criticism from someone who uses the very same word for money.    

Now consider Valdo Calacone. An inquiry this week into the circumstances that led to him murdering three people and attempting to murder a further three, was told that a decision not to section him following a violent psychotic episode was racially motivated. Inasmuch as someone had seen research suggesting that there was an ‘over-representation of young black males in detention’. Instead he was given an ‘at-home’ treatment plan in May 2020 and which was such a tremendous success that he was subsequently sectioned four times. 

Despite him having being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, despite him repeatedly failing to take his proscribed psychosis medication and despite repeated concerns about him being raised by his family with the various agencies responsible for his care, nothing of any meaningful import was done. 

One doesn’t have to be an expert to in the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia to consider that a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violence and who has previously been sectioned four times, possibly, just possibly, might be a danger to the public. Especially one who, prior to the murders in June 2023, watched videos of mass shootings in America and also researched the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand, where 51 people died, and the 1996 Dunblane primary school massacre, in which 16 pupils and one teacher were killed.

So yes, the signs were there, and whilst some of them – his internet history – were only discovered after the murders, enough of them were present to enable a rational person to assess the risk to the public as high.

But not if that leaves you open of charges of racism. In the Britain of 2026 that is one of the worst thing to be called. This is the topsy-turvy world of moral absolutism, a Britain in which one instance of actual racism, and one instance of imagined racism are inverted, the better to allow people to feel morally superior, ethically blameless or virtuously enlightened. In much the same way that the Mirror Of Erased in ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, showed the viewer what they most desired, if one views everything through race coloured spectacles, that is precisely what you’ll see. You won’t see someone with a disability, uncontrollably shouting an obscenity. You’ll just hear the obscenity. And you also won’t see violent paranoid schizophrenic. You’ll see some research. 

Now I’m no expert in paranoid schizophrenia just as much as Jamie Foxx isn’t an expert in Tourettes but I know which of the two men I’d rather be trapped in a lift with. 

It seems that there is no end to the utterly trivial nonsense the media imagine the public are eager to read about the Prince formerly known as Prince. Yesterday ‘The Guardian’ ran a story which managed be simultaneously breathtakingly self-serving and brazenly hypocritical. No doubt other news websites will willingly pick up the gauntlet that ‘The Guardian’ has thrown down. The public will reward them. 

The story was entitled ‘The photos that have kept former Prince Andrew in the public eye.’ That in itself was a pretty large clue about not only what the article contained – which was essentially an excuse to reprint the ‘photos – but also to position itself as a neutral arbiter in all of this. That rather than pursuing a selectively moral but financially lucrative campaign against him, they, in association with every other news website, seek to promote the idea that they are only acting in the public interest.

That whilst it causes them no end of distress to print such stories, the public has a right to know and that they’d be derelict in their duties if they didn’t duty not to publish. And so, with a heavy heart and with much regret…it’s time to peel that giant fucking onion.

The only reason these photos have kept him in the public eye is because the press keep on using them. No story about the billionaire pedophile misses a chance to mention Andrew, which in turn gives them an excuse  to print the phots. So a story about how it is the photos that’ve kept Andrew in the public eye is disingenuous to write the least. That isn’t to suggest that Andrew is blameless; he’s made profound errors of judgement, no doubt he consorted with some unsavoury characters and  maintained some friendships long after they should’ve ended.

But then who hasn’t? Who amongst us  – well the ‘us’ who were teenagers up until the advent of the internet, social media and smartphones ruined being young – led lives of the highest moral virtue? Not me for one. And certainly not the politicians, journalists and pundits who quite happily denounce Andrew for doing things many years earlier which today, if viewed in a pejorative light, are damning.

One of the photos is the one they always use, of Andrew with his arm around Virginia Giuffre as Ghislaine Maxwell smiles in the background. They are all smiling, smiling with their eyes and if one stumbled across it in album of family Christmas snaps, it wouldn’t look out of place. It is only because the press have always captioned it with variations on it being chilling, because of her being unaware of her fate, while he wears a smile that suggests he’s looking forward to it, that we are conditioned to think of it in these terms.

Same with the the one of him chatting with the billionaire pedophile as they walk somewhere. Thats it. Two men chatting. In any other context one might only think that it was a poorly taken photo. But because it is those two men, again we have been conditioned to think the worst.

One of them is a recent one, of him slouching in the back of a car as he’s driven away from a police station. He looks exhausted, as one might expect anyone to be after a long day of police questioning. But he also has ‘red eye’, that photographic quirk in which people who are drunk look wrong, otherworldly and vaguely sinister. The exhaustion explains it. But the captions that will no doubt be attached to this photo for years to come will make no mention of this.

I can’t help but recollect a front page of ‘The Sun’ a few decades ago. I tried to find it online and couldn’t, but trust me, it was real. It was around the time of the Jamie Bulger hysteria created by the media. The two boys accused of his murder were deemed evil incarnate. ‘The Sun’ got hold of a photo of one of the boys as a young baby and in it, as young babies do, both of his hands were tightly clenched. But for ‘The Sun’ that was a front page, claiming that even as baby the boy was evil. 

Writing it down now long after the hysteria has ebbed away, it seems ridiculous. But it happened. It really did. I wonder if they’ll come a similar time for Andrew. If people will be aghast at how easily manipulated they were.  But somehow I doubt it. 

Yesterdays news that the Prince formerly known as Prince had been arrested on charges relating to misconduct in public office was shocking. Not just that he was arrested on his birthday. Not just that the decision to do so can only have been a calculated move by the police. Not just that the timing of the arrest was incredibly convenient for the early afternoon news programmes. Not just because the speed at which articles appeared on news websites almost immediately suggests the media – unlike the King – was given prior warning. Not just because all of the press coverage about him over recent years has been so uniformly hostile, it seems impossible that if any trial did eventually happen, an unbiased jury could be found. 

Nor is to do with the power of public opinion – well that segment of the population who quite happily share their opinion on social media – and who have neatly demonstrated just how ingrained the desire for a sacrificial victim is in our collective psyche. Neither is it to do with fact he may well be innocent of everything he’s alleged to have done; a minor detail that has been lost amid all of the fevered speculation, innuendo and hearsay

But simply because there are far more deserving candidates than him to be charged with misconduct in public office. The fact that these people have never been arrested, let alone charged makes a mockery of the very existence of such a law in the first place. Quite possibly Andrew is guilty only of poor judgement, behaviour others might find distasteful and profound sense of entitlement. Compare that to the very senior public officials who were in power whilst the rape gang scandal was happening, and did nothing to prevent it, and one realises everything that is happening to Andrew is one big deflection. It suits Emu who is facing an already difficult set of local elections in May. The last thing he needs is anyone focusing on the criminal negligence of predominantly Labour controlled authorities. Especially if it harms Labour chances with the Muslim population, of whom the Greens are targeting ruthlessly. 

At least 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham and more than 1,000 children in Telford. The rape gangs targeted mainly working class girls. Often they were known to social services, less often they were actually in local authority care. The gangs themselves were made up of predominantly East Asian men. The gangs were also active in Newcastle, Bristol, Derby, Oxford and Halifax. The profiles of the victims and the methods employed by the gangs were disturbingly similar. The crimes involved so many perpetrators and in so many locations, that it beggars belief that rumours didn’t begin circulating in these locations, and that these rumours didn’t reach the press. 

It has been alleged that as most most of the towns where these gangs operated were run by Labour councils, that this was a factor in explaining the abject lack of action taken. No serving or former public official has ever been made to account for, let alone be charged with, any impropriety with regard to the rape gangs. No local authority head of children’s services in any of the places where the abuse happened has had their name, livelihood or family life ruined. The national press hasn’t demanded to know why all the various safeguarding teams, usually so officious in discharging their duties, failed so many, so often and so catastrophically. 

That is, by my understanding, what should constitute misconduct in public office. Not if a word or two was uttered in someones ear to help soften someone up, not if some financial or other inducement was used in the furtherance some deals, or even if blackmail was used. Who cares, who in the real world is actually any the worse off, because of what Andrew is alleged to have done, insofar as the charges presently before him relate? Shareholders, investors and other lickspittles. Thats who. But when either through ineptness, corruption or some other failing, thousands of young children suffer unimaginably horrific abuse, abuse that was entirely preventable by people whose job it was to prevent it, then that is misconduct in public office.  

2026 hadn’t even been halfway through its first day before ‘The Guardian’ went time travelling into the past. It published an article that whilst ostensibly referring to an event that happened in 2025, could just as easily be referring to the general election of 2024. 

First off, the article.

“‘They misjudged Caerphilly’: how the Reform juggernaut backfired in Welsh byelection.” Its not really much of a shock anymore that ‘The Guardian’ is implacably opposed to all things Farrago. After all, they’ve flogged the dead horse that are allegations about his schooldays so much so that resultant glue has lost any stick. So why should Reform be treated any less differently?

‘It was assumed that Reform would sweep all before it – but locals rejected the party’s campaign of ‘lies and hate’’

Did they though? The numbers suggest otherwise. And according to the numbers, what the locals rejected more than anything was being expected to take part. Despite widespread media coverage, endless political punditry and the fevered conjecture that it engendered, the actual turnout was 50.43% It gets better. Or worse.

The winning candidate, the Plaid Cymru one, got 47.4%. Which meant that only half of the electorate bothered to vote, and of those that did, less than half of those bothered to vote for him. It gets better. Or worse. 

Because as far as I can make out, the winner won not because there was a sudden surge in Welsh nationalism, but because of tactical voting. Whilst this is aggressively discouraged by the national leaderships of all the main political parties, the voters in Caerphilly thought otherwise. Well, half of a half of all of them did anyway.

The Conservative share of the vote collapsed, but nowhere near as badly as it did for Labour. This explains not only why Plaid’s vote share increased so that it won, but also why Reform came from nowhere to come second. A resounding victory it most certainly was not, 

It isn’t hard to work out. The numbers don’t lie. They’re not confusing. And if I can do it, then why can’t ‘The Guardian.’?

I think they can, are all too aware that Caerphilly result was far from the comprehensive repudiation of Reform they’d been hoping for. That far from delivering a electoral defeat for Reform, it proved the very opposite. That only tactical voting, which is very unlikely to happen in the general election, avoided a Reform win. 

No, I think ‘The Guardian knew all this and because it didn’t booster their prevailing narrative, they simply ignored it and hoped their readers would too. Well I write readers, but they could more accurately be described as cash cows. And boy, are they milked! I’ve written about this mutually beneficial relationship before. 

The more that ‘The Guardian’ promotes narrative in which Farrago is basically fascist in a double breasted jacket, that Reform is far-right party and that therefore anyone who supports it is morally questionable, the more money it is that they hand over. It’s certainly lucrative and getting even moreso. Up from £88m in 2023/2024 to £107m in the year to the end of March 2025. 

Why on earth would they stop doing what they’re doing in 2026?

Additionally, ’The Guardians’ cynical support of democracy reminds me of the middle-class attitude towards cocaine. Its fine when the right sort of people are doing it. But when the wrong sort of people do it, then it becomes a problem. The Guardian, more than any other newspaper, makes a great show of its principles. Had it had any, it would’ve accepted the Brexit vote, making the point repeatedly that whilst it didn’t like the result, nonetheless it was the democratic will of the people, That had Brexit been properly implemented and had not the government been beset with constant legal, judicial and parliamentary attempts to thwart them doing so, then Farrago would’ve quietly faded into the background. 

If anything, ‘The Guardian’ are partly responsible for Reform. After all, they helped create the conditions whereby a anger felt by the millions voted for, and then get what they get, Brexit. They enthusiastically promoted the idea that that it was as a result of foreign interference, manipulation of bigoted views into deeply xenophobic and racist ones and other bogeymen that explained the ‘Leave’ vote. They weren’t alone in this, most of the UK media did the same.

And there we have it. Create a monster. Induce the fear and the panic. Stoke the dread. Ramp up the anxiety. Then sell the pitchforks. Brilliant.

The best kind of capitalism. The kind that doesn’t look like it.