the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Watching the Oscars ceremony the other night, it suddenly struck me just how similar to the Oscars the Green Party are. 

The big winner on Sunday night was ‘One Battle After Another’ which won 6 awards including two of the big ones, Best Director and Best Picture. Whilst the Academy loved it, the same cannot be said of the cinema going public.  The people who put their bums on seats and therefore make a make a business out of the show? They largely gave it a wide berth. So depending on whose numbers you believe, it either lost money or lost a lot of money. Because an accepted truth in modern Hollywood is that on order for a film to break even – not make a profit, just to recoup its production budget and global marketing costs – a film has to make double what it cost to make. ‘One Battle’ cost between $130 – $175 millions to make. It made $209 millions. 

But the people that hand out awards know better than Joe and Janet Shmoe. In addition to its 6 Oscars, it had already won 4 Golden Globes  – including Best Picture – and 6 BAFTA’s – including Best Film. They thought it was the best film and they know about film. ‘Coda’ is perhaps the most stark example of this disconnect to have happened in recent years. ‘Coda’?  You can’t have forgotten about ‘Coda’ already? The film that won the Best Picture Oscar in 2022? That following its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, provoked a bidding war there which resulted in Apple TV buying up the distribution rights for $25 millions. Not bad for a film that only cost $10 millions to make. Shame then, that it only made $2.2 millions at the box office. 

The Greens are like like the Oscars. They seem to take a peverse  pride in promoting policies, which although popular with some in the media, are not popular in the wider population. Often these policies don’t hold up to scrutiny, especially not when considered alongside with other Green policies. Their policies on migration, open borders and the economy are but three examples.

The Greens have made much of their support for migrants, presenting themselves as moral exemplars. They wholeheartedly believe that everyone who wants to come here should be able to. To this end, they also believe in open borders. Or to put it another way, none at all.

There are so many problems with these ideas that to even call them ideas in the first place suggests that some thought went into them. The most glaringly obvious one is that the more attractive we make it for migrants to come here, then they surely will. If the choice is between staying where you are or coming here is already not much of a choice to begin with, then making it less of one isn’t in the UK’s interests. 

If where you are is somewhere war-torn and lawless, somewhere with no functioning infrastructure or another somewhere where you’re just another victim-in-waiting –  you’d leave. Its an entirely rational thing to do, especially if you knew you were going to be treated far better when you got here than some of the people who had actually been born here.

Because if the Greens do have a policy to help get the UK’s homeless population off the streets and into secure housing, they don’t promote it with anything near the energy they reserve for their policies for migrants. And then once migrants are housed, they become eligible for benefits, for NHS treatment, and other numerous good things. Of course the barely functioning infrastructure they were fleeing may soon be no better than the barely functioning infrastructure the Greens would be creating

When does enough become no more? When the benefits bill becomes unsustainable? When increasing demands on the NHS bring it to the brink of collapse? Because those are but two of the inevitable consequences of a free-for all migration policy and open borders. Another problem with the idea of open borders is tax. Who will pay it? Where will the all money come from to pay for the increased benefits bill and the increasing demands on the NHS and other public services?

Oh hang on! They’ve thought of that. Unfortunately in much the same way as they thought of their migration and open borders policies. The plan – such as it is – is simple. Essentially to tax the rich and to print more money. Thats it. There’s no question of reducing what we spend, but to pay for the ever increasing bill it causes by using a combination of delusion and magical thinking. 

If Repulsion and his band of merry pronouns imagine that the rich are going to stay here and get clobbered with an even bigger tax bill, then it proves just how unfit for office they are. Open borders work both ways; just as people are free to come here, so to would they be free to leave. And anyway, if they’re really that rich then they’ll already have moved their money to a tax haven. 

Which in turn creates an even bigger problem. Printing more money to make up the shortfall. A shortfall that wouldn’t be short for very long. The pressures on infrastructure I mentioned earlier? Come on down! Had previous governments taken the tough choices when they weren’t so tough some then such nonsenses as the Greens espouse would not be needed. But we are where we are and where we are is the Britain of 2026. One in a political party which has inexplicably garnered support such that it is a viable contender to be a  majority coalition partner after the general election in 2029.   

Naturally the media love them. They know better. They just do. The Greens policies have thus far never been subjected to the same levels of sustained scrutiny or hostility that has been visited upon Reforms. Repulsion is rarely given a hard time by the press, which is all they seem to give Emu. They love him because they have private health insurance. They have well paid jobs. Their children will have had a private education. Who’ll get an inheritance, and not debts when their parents die.  And they’ll only ever meet a migrant when they’re being driven in an Uber, having their Deliveroo order delivered or else been given them a ‘happy ending’ at a massage parlour.

Only when one is so insulted by their wealth, position and privilege from the consequences of actions they expect others to live by, can one afford such luxury beliefs. Thats why the Greens are the political equivalent of ‘Coda’. Feted and lauded over by the same kind of people whose luxury beliefs delude them into thinking that they know best in any given situation.

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There are many things I hold in high regard. But opinion polls are not one of them. On numerous occasions I’ve written not just scathingly about them, but also the way in which they’re always used to justify some utterly sensational ‘news’. Yes, the headline might well be true, but that’s only as it applies to the results of the survey. Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. 

Elections can be usually relied upon to provide examples of this. But the next general election may not be until 2029, and even the local elections are in May. Thankfully then, there appeared in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ a few days ago an article that neatly proved this. 

‘Half of Americans believe Trump bombed Iran because of Epstein files’ screamed the headline. Half? HALF? Half of all Americans you say?  But hang on, aren’t there almost 350 millions of them?  One would hope that a newspaper running such a story and making such a claim would be able to back it up with irrefutable evidence. So have guess as to how many opinions were polled, bearing in mind that half of all Americans think this thing and that are quite a few Americans?

1,272 is the answer. So that ‘half’, is either the impressive sounding 52%, or the utterly irrelevant opinions of 661 people.  Complete bollocks. But the bollocks doesn’t stop there. Of the remaining 48%, 40% (509 actual people) said no and the other 8% ( 101 actual people), didn’t know. The small print that explains the methodology behind the option poll reveals yet more bollocks at work; ‘Survey of 1,272 US likely voters’

Whoa there, hold your horses! Thats a nifty bit of sophistry right enough. “Likely’ isn’t the same thing as ‘registered’ and only ‘registered’ voters can vote in the first place.  Of whom just over a quarter – 90 millions – couldn’t be arsed in the 2024 Presidential elections. And there’s more bollocks. “It [the poll] found that 81 per cent of Democrats thought the war was a deliberate distraction, compared with 52 per cent of independent voters and 26 per cent of Republicans.’

Which translates as 1030 people who already thought the worst of Tangoed thinking the worst of him, possibly a different or the same group of 661 people mentioned earlier who weren’t sure what they thought of him, did think the worst of him this time and only 331 people who had a good opinion of him though that this time he’d behaved badly.

Or perhaps that 81% belongs somewhere else. 

I know, the numbers don’t add up, but then nothing about this poll does. If one were cynical, one might think that the polling company knew what angle the newspaper was going to take, suspected that had article already been written and that it just needed a poll giving them the right result to justify the story. Because that explains the 52%; once they had a majority, they could legitimately claim that half of all Americans thought this thing, and then stop polling. 

The cool hipsters would claim, in a cool hipsterish way, that it was all a bit ‘meta.’ On account of it being fake news about a conspiracy theory involving the man who invented the notion of fake news in the first place.  Or, in a less cool, but massively more understandable word, bollocks.

A textbook example of what the phrase ‘Chickens coming home to roost,’ will play out on the streets of Central London on Sunday, and many ironies they display will not be suffered by those who properly deserve to suffer them. It is not various politicians, senior police officers or journalists who will have to face the consequences of their imagined virtue. They’ll be far too busy deciding which one of the prepared statements, explanations or articles best suits the mood they hope to create. I think some background might be in order here, don’t you?

On Tuesday, Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, approved the Metropolitan Police’s request to ban the annual Al Quds march, scheduled to take part in London this Sunday, over concerns it could provoke public disorder. Setting out her reasons for the ban to MP’s, she said ‘She said: “[This planned march] creates clear challenges for the police – heightened attention, and therefore larger expected attendance, heightened tensions between protesters and counter-protesters, and therefore greater potential for conflict.” Which is undeniably true. Only a fool would attempt to suggest otherwise. 

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), which organises the event, confirmed on Wednesday that it intended to hold a “static” protest instead. This indicates to me that they had likely foreseen the possibility of a ban, and had prepared accordingly. This throws the ball back into the governments court. He could attempt to close the loophole in the Public Order Act (POA) that the IHRC are exploiting to get around the ban. But that would leave him open to the charge of a knee-jerk response, given as how the forthcoming Crime and Policing Bill, which proposes greater powers for the police in respect of demonstrations, makes no mention of this. 

Of more concern to Emu are the local elections in May. Considering the collapse of the Labour vote in the Caerphilly and the Gorton and Denton by-elections however. It is by no means particularly astute to note that the Greens success in Gorton and Denton was due in no small part to their naked sectarian politics, ruthlessly playing on the concerns and prejudices of the constituency’s estimated 40% Muslim electorate. One can hardly blame the Greens for doing that, elections are nothing more than appeals to voters, which pander to their wants and needs, aspirations and values and also their resentments and frustrations. The Greens have just given it a 2026 makeover.

Be that as it may, the electoral reality facing Emu is problematic whatever he does. If the ‘static’ protest goes ahead and if some protesters cause disruption that leads to arrest, the last thing Emu needs is images of protesters being bundled away be police appearing on Green Party election leaflets. In the 2024 local elections, analysis identified at least 58 council wards where more than 20% of residents are Muslim. The Muslim Vote, (TMV) a campaign group that encourages Muslims to vote according to their faith alone, and which backed the Greens in Gorton and ahead of the 2024 general election identified 92 parliamentary constituencies with a Muslim population of over 10%, is very aware of the electoral opportunity that confers. So too are the Greens.

Voter turnout is low at any election, but especially at local council ones. In the 2025 local elections only 34% of eligible votes actually did so. Therefore banking on this to be repeated in May together with enthusing Muslim voters to vote is a shrewd piece of demographic democracy. Again, this no less than Labour and the Conservatives have done to great effect may times. Tax cuts. Right to buy. Privatisation….

The difference here though is that there’s a very specific calculus at work here, one not based upon a more traditional conception of what motivated people to vote – basically self-interest –  but as I mentioned earlier, given a 2026 makeover. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. May? May never happen! But Sunday probably will. A ‘static’ protest will almost certainly not happen. Imagine telling a group of children that they can’t do something, a group of children who’ve just eaten a load of sugar and then imagine that the sugar gives them not energy, but anger. Then multiply that anger by intolerance, then multiply that by and then multiply that by antisemitism and then try telling them to stay in one place. And while they’re not going anywhere, to also not nosily denounce Israel for a catalogue of imagined wrongs, not call for it to be wiped off the face of the earth and neither to demand that violence against Jews be visited upon them all around the world. 

But had the police – and I mean very senior police – after consultation with equally senior government officials and lawyers given clear instructions to the police actually policing the pro- Palestinian marches back in October 2023, this situation might easily have been avoided. Had the police on the front line facing the protesters known, and had confidence in, a robust, immediate and implacable defence from the higher-ups, Sunday might be different. Same goes for the protesters. Had they known ahead of time that the police would be enforcing the law and not just acting as enhanced stewards, then they too might’ve acted differently. Or perhaps they wouldn’t.  

But then again, the protesters passions might not have been so passionate had they not been inflamed by the constant vilification of Israel’s conduct in Gaza been so enthusiastically denounced by the media. The nonsenses of a genocide, deliberate starvation and the cold-blooded execution of aid workers. Their credulous acceptance of the  of the casualty figures released by the Hamas run health ministry gave a new meaning to the word uncritical. The reality of fighting a war in a confined urban environment, one in which the enemy had deeply embedded themselves in and who were indistinguishable from the civilian population was rarely mentioned. 

So too the opportunistic politicians, who saw an electoral opportunity and ran with it.  They talked up the various nonsenses that the media were enthusiastically reporting on, gave them ill-deserved credibility and reaped the electoral benefit. Does anyone really believe that the ludicrous alliance between the Greens and the hardline pro-Gaza/anti-Israel Muslim left would’ve happened were it not for October 7th? Or that numerous Labour politicians were all too aware of their slender majorities, majorities that had already been slashed in the 2024 election and thus were wary lest they say or do anything to further alienate their Muslim constituents.  

Thus the corner that Emu has painted himself into is because he has failed to grasp that even though the political landscape may be ever changing, a constant remains. The inescapable fact that domestic politics are shaped by international ones and consequently everything is in the national interest. Of which he won’t be the custodian of forever and which he seems worryingly cavalier about prioritising. He is unashamed in using law to justify whatever actions – or inactions – he does or doesn’t do. Preventing US planes to use the RAF base at Diego Garcia being but the latest example of him doing this, apart from when a few days later he said yes to the thing he’d previously said no to, citing yet more law as justification. 

And whilst the police are theoretically impartial enforcers of the law, and will acutely aware many operational and logistical challenges challenges they will face on Sunday. so too will TMV, the Greens and Reform UK be if those challenges become catastrophes.

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.