And When They Were Only Halfway Up

More is the pity, the crimes of one of the Duke of York's less advisable associates would not have been illegal in Britain, with our dangerously low age of consent.

Under Catholic Canon Law, that age is 18; any cleric or Religious who interferes with a person under that age is guilty of a specific offence in addition to any breach of the marriage vow or of the vow of celibacy, regardless of any lower age of consent in the civil jurisdiction where the act occurred. So much for the importance of co-operating with supposedly superior civil authorities.

But just as you have to be a Catholic priest to be held in any (entirely correct) odium for having sex with teenage boys, so you have to be a member of the Royal Family to be held in any (entirely correct) odium for hanging around with men who have sex with teenage girls. For what next are the London media going to excoriate someone of whom they disapprove? Taking cocaine?

Similarly, a decorated warrior who was determined not to send off any other young men to that which he himself had endured can, in his late seventies, be dragged through the mud for antique allegations of financial corruption, which is bad but which does not kill anyone.

Yet absolutely nothing is done about a much younger and fitter man who in recent years lied his country into an illegal war which has made him enormously rich while having utterly horrific consequences for numerous other people, and who actively permitted a terrorist bomb plot to be carried out in the centre of his country's largest and capital city in order to further his pre-existing agenda of eroding his people's age-old civil liberties.