the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Where to start?

Well I should be writing a post which extols the sheer ease with which the city planners have made cycling in Amsterdam such a joy. But that post is for another day.

This post is going to be about the hypocrisy of ‘The Sun’, which broke the ‘story’ about the BBC presenter who is alleged to have paid a younger woman for sexually explicit ‘photos of her. My problem with all this manufactured pandering to the mob – well one of them anyway – is that there isn’t a story here at all.

If the young woman had been a very young woman when he’d first suggested paying for sexually explicit ‘phot’s that would be another matter, but she wasn’t, but was over the age of consent, meaning that however distasteful one might find it, no actual crime was commited. Nor is there one in her using the money he is alleged to have paid her to fund a drug habit which sadly has ended up with her being a crack addict. Maybe if he have said, when she gave him the ‘photo’s ‘Here’s some money but you can only spend it on drugs, and here’s the number of my drug dealer. She can sort you right out.”

But he didn’t, just as much as she didn’t use the money for something else. A deposit on a flat. Doing a degree at Birkbeck. A holiday. That was her choice. If somehow he becomes culpable for how she spent the money, then Camelot should be by rights shitting themselves.

As ironic good luck would have it, the first hit you get when you type ‘ National Lottery winners drugs’ into Google is this story in ‘The Sun’ detailing how someone who won £13M, spent it all on drugs.

The other thing that annoys me is that ‘The Sun’ is somehow portraying itself as some kind of moral arbiter. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so offensive. This, lest we forget, is the paper that every day for 44 years published topless ‘photos of women, well I write women but the most famous of them, Samantha Fox, was 16 when she started.

They only stopped in 2015.

I know that the two are nowhere near the same, mainly that for 20p one could perv along with countless others, whereas he was paying for exclusivity, but they are on the same spectrum.

According to wikipedia “In British media, a reverse ferret is a sudden reversal in an organisation’s editorial or political line on a certain issue. Generally, this will involve no acknowledgement of the previous position.”