Garter Snipe

As you are watching what promises to be Maxine Peake’s superb performance as Anne Williams, remember that Sir Tony Blair, Knight of the Gutter, refused to permit an inquiry into Hillsborough, as a personal favour to Rupert Murdoch. He also tried to stop one into the Stephen Lawrence case, on which Keir Starmer likes to trade despite little or no obvious connection to it. Yet Starmer, in turn, refuses to publish the Forde Report, thereby telling us almost all that we need to know about what it is in it. Someone should leak it.

From its very first day, being what would now be called a war criminal has been no bar to membership of the Order of the Garter. The fuss about Blair reminds of that which attended the knighthood that he arranged for Mick Jagger, as if sexual continence had ever been a prerequisite for admission to the British Establishment.

The mass movement that emerged in opposition to the Iraq War, and which eventually became the base of support for Jeremy Corbyn, is the least of anyone’s worries where this gong is concerned. The Order of the Garter is entirely in the gift of the monarch. There is no Ministerial involvement. The Queen alone has chosen to confer it on Blair.

Moreover, whatever Prince Andrew may or may not have done, he undeniably chose to move in the circles of Jeffrey Epstein, of Robert Maxwell’s daughter, of Peter Mandelson, and of the Clintons. It is the Anglo-American liberal elite, the right wings of the Labour and Democratic Parties, that are the Royal Family’s sort of people, even if they would never stoop to voting for those parties.

Culturally, no one is more Tory than a liberal Tory; politically, no one is more liberal. The people on whose support the monarchy depended have chosen to ignore the fact that that was what their heroes must have been, and openly were. But if the reaction to Blair’s Garter is anything go by, then we are living through the end of all of that.