the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I know that ‘The Daily Mail’ has a lot of detractors, from those who complain about it’s right-wing stance, to those whom object to its online version being so ready to stand in judgement against those who flout their own hypocritical moral code. I get that, I really do, and there’s a lot more not to like about it, but one thing one can never accuse it of is not being consistent. I mean it’s consistent in much the same way that the British weather, your favourite football team and visit to a hairdresser you’ve never been to before is, consistent in that one is never quite sure what to expect. Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s very bad, very rarely it’s good, but even rarer still is it both really good and really bad at the same time. Occasionally, it’s Schrodinger’s newspaper!

Yesterday evening I happened to browse ‘The Daily Mail’ webshite, because there’s only so much doom and gloom elsewhere in the news and occasionally I like to switch off and look at an adult comic. I was left speechless by their top story, the one that greeted the viewers eye’s before anything else, and one that was uncharacteristically critical of Baldie and the Parasites.

“How many more homes can the ‘slimmed-down’ royals justify? At a time of an exploding cost-of-living crisis affecting working families up and down the country, the use of additional properties looks clumsily insensitive, writes RICHARD KAY”

The article couched it’s criticism in the mildest of tones, but there was no mistaking the seething anger behind it. An example was contained in this telling excerpt;

“Naturally, it is only fair to point out that Prince William and Kate are meeting the cost of renting Adelaide Cottage themselves and that, because of its location within Windsor Home Park, it needs, we are told, no extra taxpayer-funded security nor a costly refurbishment.” The unspoken thought, that immediately popped in to every readers head was ‘WTF’.

How is it that a married couple with three young children and no jobs, can afford three houses, send their children to public school without taxpayer support. We, the taxpayer, pay for everything they do. ‘Extra taxpayer funded’ is rubbing it in because it means that it’s just the normal amount of taxpayer support they’re getting. Their sole source of income is the taxpayer. And the houses. Their houses are houses in the same way that a tiger is cat, Concorde was plane or Boris’s Johnson is faithful.

Normally, “The Daily Mail’ is nothing but fawningly differential to the whole criminal enterprise, except of course for Harried and Dan, who have jacked the whole thing in and turned their back on wealth and privilege here by deciding to try and attain more wealth elsewhere and to do that by re-inventing themselves as leaders in the battle for virtue.

Anyway, the article had vanished from the front page of the online edition this morning. If one were suspicious, one might think that Baldie’s media team had intervened, had a few words with 4th Viscount Rothermere, the ‘Mails owner and had the story pulled. Indeed, so too were two other stories pulled about Baldie and his move, his children going to a public school, although none was as critical – meekly, it has to be said – as the one described. That a deal had been done, whereby in return for removing the story, Mail hacks would be given special access to them on their next foreign jolly or something.

Aren’t you glad that you live in a land with a free and fair press!