Formerly Known As Prince

Thou hast committed—

Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides, the wench is dead.

Michael Tracey tears to shreds the credibility of Virginia Giuffre, but the then Prince Andrew lied about when his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had ended, and the ensuing brouhaha had begun to bring out the questionable nature of his financial arrangements. Hence his reduction to a name that was not even that of the Royal House; I strongly suspect that the King decided against Mountbatten-Windsor to keep Canada sweet. That reduction is to be effected by the supreme humiliation, Royal Warrants having the approval of David Lammy.

But do read Tracey. I have always said that the late Queen should never have settled with Giuffre, who would have lost in court. Likewise, I disliked Russell Brand when that got me abused hysterically by those of my contemporaries who thought that Blairite politics made them the cool kids, and who have never grown up to this day, even if they have changed their tune on him. While I am sure that I could stand no more than a few seconds in the company of Andrew Tate, I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as he has been, and I have said from the very start that I would not be surprised if little or nothing ended up coming of this.

See also Cardinal Pell, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond, Ched Evans, and the victims of Freya Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. You need a visa to work in Spain or France these days, and Mason Greenwood secured them to enable him to be loaned to Getafe and then signed to Marseille, so that recording was provenly false. For the second time, in fact, since if it had been genuine, then the Crown Prosecution Service would have proceeded with what would therefore have been an open-and-shut case against him.

This has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for Cardinal Pell's canonisation. To have kept Assange's work going, then I would have died in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Salmond devoted his life, I expect that he and I would have got on. But I doubt that Evans or Greenwood and I would find much to talk about. I know that Heath's victims and I would have more than enough for a very heated discussion. I have already said what I thought of Tate and of who Brand used to be, as he himself broadly says these days.

Likewise, and like Jeremy Corbyn, I dislike Hamas with the intensity of one who knows a lot more about it than, say, David "raping babies" Lammy. Lammy is particularly deplorable in his apparent ignorance of or disregard for the demonisation of nonwhite males as sexual predators, as in the cases of Greenwood and possibly Tate, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a report that it was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces.

The #IBelieveHer case for the genocide of Gaza was a case that several of those who made it had made for every previous neoconservative war, and most of them for at least one. Those of a certain age dusted down the file of lurid allegations that they had deployed against working-class white men during the Satanic panic of the Thatcher years, and which had been levelled, practically word for word, against every designated enemy since. At best, they raised no objection to the same treatment of racialised communities in Britain, who are today's Enemy Within, which is why that status will very soon be enjoyed again by the working class in general and by working-class men in particular, insofar as that has ever ceased to be the case. On course to be Viceroy of Gaza, Tony Blair was Prime Minister when he met Epstein, and all three living Labour Prime Ministers have had Epstein's closest friend as their Svengali. Yet Blair remains a Knight of the Garter. Think on.