the brilliantly leaping gazelle

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.