the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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 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 soon 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 extremely 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 much the need for a sacrificial victim is an ever present part of humanity. 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 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 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 

At least 1,400 girls were abused in Rotherham and more than 1,000 children in Telford. The rape gangs targeted mainly vulnerable, working class girls. Often they were known to social services, less often 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, misconduct in public office. Not if a word or two was uttered in someones ear, not if some financial or other inducement was used in the furtherance some deals or other, or even if blackmail was used. Who cares, who in the real world is actually worse off, because of what Andrew is alleged to have done, insofar as the charges presently before him relate? Shareholders, investors and other lickspittles. 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.