Eton Mess, Indeed

Does anyone on Fleet Street or in Parliament fancy looking into what 18-year-olds were sent down for, in the week that Andrew "Picard" was not?

A suspended sentence, and not even much of that. A pocket money fine towards the prosecution's costs, effectively an insult to the taxpayer.

Nothing under the Proceeds of Crime Act. Not even a requirement to sign the Sex Offenders Register. Read that last part over again.

He was even tried under his mother's maiden name, in order to protect the reputation of his father's law firm. How is that legal?

Andrew Boeckman could not have accessed those sites using the server of any state school. Get your act together, Eton.

The laxity in these matters of at least one, extremely expensive and world famous, fee-charging school calls for a further investigation into that sector by journalists and parliamentarians.

Not that I normally engage in that type of politics.

I leave it to people who have nothing else, because the real political difference between them and their targets is discernible barely, if at all.

They hate "the Tories" because they know that they lack the class to have made it in that party.

There were more Old Etonians in Attlee's Cabinet than in the present one. The George Orwell Society at Eton is well worth a look.

The PFI-loving warmongers who rant on Twitter that George Osborne's collapsing economic policies are better than the academically rigorous alternatives proposed by the attentive John McDonnell, are most unlikely ever to be invited to address that Society.

More widely, earlier this month, George Galloway was very well-received at Winchester.

But no institution is beyond question. Not a parallel school system that leaves a legal minor (Boeckman was 17 at the time) exposed to material such as he viewed in this case.

And not a court system that hands down far harsher sentences to youths convicted of relatively minor, or even relatively major, offences, than it imposes on one of their immensely privileged peers.

An immensely privileged youth who was not even required to give his real name at his trial, nor to sign the Sex Offenders Register upon his conviction, but who had made and distributed real-life images that included the rape of a two-year-old by a pack of dogs.