Nothing New

A white man stabbed a Saudi to death in Cambridge in August. He denies murder, but he has admitted having the blade and his father is already on remand awaiting sentencing for having assisted an offender. We have knife crime in County Durham, which is more mixed than it was 20 years ago, but which is still very white indeed. Some of the families involved have been at it since time out of mind. Where would that not be the case? I more than suspect that it is in, say, Glasgow.

That is also where the West End Ulster Defence Union refused to sing God Save the King at its Remembrance event on Saturday, on the grounds that, following Charles III’s recent prayer with the Pope, “we cannot, in good conscience, recognise him as the rightful King. Our loyalty is to the Throne as ordained under God, not to any individual who betrays the faith and duty upon which it stands. We continue to pray that he will repent and turn to the truth of the Gospel and the responsibilities of a Christian Sovereign. If he does not, then we pray that a true and faithful Protestant will arise to restore righteousness to the Crown and to the Nation.” Gosh.

I Vow to Thee, My Country was sung instead. Staunch Protestants who were rather more doctrinally orthodox than culturally conservative, although they have often been both, have not uncommonly never liked it because, while it was theologically nowhere near as bad as O Valiant Hearts (in his 1939-1945 Star, his Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, his Italy Star, his France and Germany Star, and his War Medal 1939–1945, my father simply would not have that one, and he was not alone in that view), it does offer one’s country “the love that asks no questions”. What I assume that the West End Ulster Defence Union knew was that, at the bride’s request, it had been sung at the King’s first wedding, which was why it was also sung both at his first wife’s funeral and at her tenth anniversary memorial service. And now, it has become an alternative National Anthem for those who considered him an illegitimate monarch. Again, gosh.

But again, none of this is new. “We have no King but King Jesus,” proclaimed the Covenanters of 1638, and another King Charles’s prayer with the Pope has at least implicitly caused the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster to hoist once more the Blue Banner, “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant”, from Kyle Paisley’s ministerial charge in old Puritan East Anglia. That it is the origin of the epithet “Hun” is contested, but there is no doubt that the opponents of Irish Home Rule conspired with “Protestant Bill the Kaiser”. Far from having decommissioned its weapons, Ulster Resistance has never so much as declared a ceasefire. And here we are. Right when the Raise the Colours fraternity, which has amused some of us by making parts of Consett look like East Belfast, has been expressing its scorn for the King because of his environmentalism and his perceived Islamic sympathies.

And when none of the children of Queen Anne and of Prince George of Denmark and Norway survived, then that the Throne passed to the House of Hanover was largely due to arrangements made by the Spencers, entwining the two dynasties for centuries until they went too far and intermarried. The King is a patrilineal member of the same House of Oldenburg as was Prince George. It took that very ancient and illustrious Royal House 308 years to accede here, but it has. Even from beyond the grave, will Spencer Whiggery do for it a second time?

The Process Is The Punishment

The magazine bubbles away in the sauce of my antidepressant. Just before he died, we had planned to offer a weekly column to Alex Salmond. We had been prepared to beg, since at least initially we were not going to be in a position to pay the kind of money that we assumed that he could and did command. Yet it transpires that Salmond died practically penniless as a result of having won his judicial review and been acquitted of all charges. But Craig Murray has lodged with an American publisher a full account to be released upon his own death. And even in The Times, Iain MacWhirter writes:

It should come as little surprise that Alex Salmond was effectively bankrupt when he died a year ago last month. Five years of litigation would drain the coffers of the most well-to-do politician, and Alex Salmond had never been in politics for the money.

He liked a flutter, of course, like the late Queen Elizabeth. His betting was minutely scrutinised by every news organisation from the BBC to The Sun. If there had been any indication of spectacular winnings, or significant gambling debts, it would have been ruthlessly exposed.

Perhaps even more ruthlessly than the alleged practices of his successor Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, who was arrested and charged with embezzlement of party funds last year — allegations which the former SNP chief executive categorically denies. At any rate, Salmond was unable to secure the lucrative publishing contracts which have bolstered many ex-politicians’ bank accounts, including, of course, that of Sturgeon. She earned £300,000 for her memoirs, which were published in the summer.

Salmond always intended to write a book, and I know for a fact that he had started one not long after his exoneration by the High Court on charges of heinous sex crimes. But at that time no publisher appeared to be interested. This may not have been unconnected with the lurid publicity that attended his high-profile court cases.

From the moment the Daily Record published that alliterative splash in August 2018 claiming that the former first minister “Touched Woman’s Breasts and Bum in Boozy Bute House Bedroom Encounter”, Salmond was firmly in the toxic masculinity box. At the time, publishers were busy cancelling Orwell-prizewinning teachers like Kate Clanchy and rewriting the work of Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl to make them more in tune with the sensibilities of the snowflake generation.

One suspects that London media luvvies regarded Salmond as a bit too like a Caledonian Harvey Weinstein, which indeed was how he was portrayed by his anonymous female accusers. And still is to this day despite his innocence being established in Scotland’s highest court.

Nor, of course, could Salmond rely on those lucrative speaking engagements that former UK prime ministers have used to line their nests. Salmond had been an oil economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland before entering politics, but he seems to have been offered no remunerative directorships. And where were those green energy companies he had promoted as one of the earliest advocates of renewables?

This is what is meant by “the process is the punishment”. When people are wrongly accused and establish their innocence in court, they are often ruined financially. The coterie of nationalist politicians and Scottish government employees who traduced Alex Salmond suffered no penalty whatsoever and were given lifetime anonymity.

That the former first minister had fought his way to victory in the highest courts in the land would, you might have thought, have made him publishing gold. In the Court of Session in January 2019, he established that the Scottish government had acted unlawfully and with apparent bias in accusing him of sexual misconduct in the first place. He won costs of £512,000 from that action, which went on legal fees. A year later, in March 2020, Salmond was acquitted of 14 charges of sexual harassment and attempted rape in the High Court.

Alex Salmond’s story would have been a compelling one, and not just because of his extraordinary legal odyssey. There was barely any recognition of his massive contribution to Scottish nationalism at last month’s SNP conference, which took place on the first anniversary of his sudden death in North Macedonia. Yet it is almost impossible to imagine the SNP being where it is today, in government for two decades, had it not been for Alex Salmond.

Before he died, Salmond made clear he intended to sue the Scottish government for about £3 million in lost earnings. He did not appear to think he was able to claim defamation, since his own admission that he was “no angel” might have led a court to regard his reputation as beyond redemption.

However, Salmond’s lawyer, Gordon Dangerfield, was seeking redress for what is called “misfeasance”: that the Scottish government acted “improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond”. Given that the Scottish government had conceded as early as January 2019 that its investigation had been unlawful, he might have been expected to win this action.

Salmond always talked about a day of reckoning over his wrongful accusations but he seemed more interested in political retribution than financial reward. Until his dying day he was incensed that no one had been held to account for the botched investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct. The permanent secretary responsible at the time, Leslie Evans, was promoted.

Salmond also wanted to establish that it was the Scottish government who leaked the original story of his alleged sexual harassment to the Daily Record. Sturgeon, in her memoirs, suggested that it was Salmond who had briefed the tabloid newspaper about the accusations levelled against him. The journalist who wrote the story, the former Daily Record political editor David Clegg, told the BBC that this was not the case.

Sturgeon made further claims about Salmond, including that he hadn’t bothered to read the 2013 Independence White Paper. She also accused him of being “prepared to traumatise, time and again, the women at the centre of [the sexual harassment allegations]”. Since these women’s accounts were rejected by a female-dominated jury sitting before a female judge, Lady Dorrian, you might have thought the more traumatised person here was Salmond himself.

And, of course, his widow, Moira — the traumatised woman everyone forgets about. She has reportedly been seeking to continue the litigation against the Scottish government. She has the support of formidable figures like the former SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC, who intends to publish her own explosive account of the Salmond affair this year.

As for Salmond himself, in time he will be accorded his rightful place in history. He was a giant figure in every sense, and the fact that he died in near-penury, while others cashed in, may only add to his posthumous mystique.

To Counter Speculation

Were Derrick Bird, Thomas Hamilton or Michael Ryan alive today, and even more so if he were the age that he was when he killed himself, then we all know how he would have spent the last two summers. Crimes such as theirs are many things in this country, but they are not new, and they are not a consequence of post-War immigration.

The Huntingdon train stabbings are likely to have involved illegal drug use. That would also be a factor in any future Hungerford, Dunblane or Cumbria, for thus has Britain been intentionally changed. But there may also be a political motivation, and it would most likely not be an Islamist one, just as there seems to have been none in Cambridgeshire.

Huntingdon's Connexions

The last I heard, the workers on the railways had barely any jobs to do these days, and they and the workers in the emergency services were lazy, already overpaid, and obscenely greedy for being prepared to act to protect or restore the real value of their remuneration. How long after the Cambridgeshire train stabbings will it be before those were once again the lines? I give it until Thursday at the latest.

Similarly, the Armed Forces are pilloried as nests of woke except when it suits certain interests that they should not be, a change that never lasts anywhere near long enough to translate into doing anything for them, much less for veterans. We are a week away from the annual extravaganza of hypocrisy around those matters. Give it another year, and assuming that he had still not been charged with anything in any jurisdiction, then it might be time for Andrew Mountbatten Windsor to hit back in their cause. No, of course he should not be stripped of his campaign medal. He has not earned much, but he did earn that.

Tony Blair will presumably be at the Cenotaph. He was Prime Minister when he met Jeffrey Epstein, yet he remains a Knight of the Garter. He, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer, the only three living Labour Prime Ministers, have all been heavily dependent on Peter Mandelson, who remains a member of the House of Lords, and in receipt of the Labour whip there as a member of that party in good standing. Blair, Brown, Starmer and Mandelson are all Privy Counsellors.

For other reasons, although some of us would dispute that they were unconnected, either or both of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party might collapse in the near future. We have heard it all before, but it cannot be ruled out. "There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge," is attributed to Elizabeth II by Paul Burrell, so she never said it. Yet there are powers at work. And they would just about allow two of the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the monarchy to go down, but not all three. If they could save only one, then which would it be? That question answers itself.

Sweet Jesus, Bless The Holy Souls

David Lammy was in Rome yesterday, so when he was next on Mastermind, he should be asked, "Who was the last of your predecessors as Lord Chancellor to have been a Cardinal?" He would answer, "John Henry Newman."

But we rise above such matters with, among other things, this, on Purgatory, being one of mine from Catholic365.

Take The Salute?

Of what he now sees as the inevitable abolition of the monarchy, Peter Hitchens writes:

And New Britain will finally be born, in which we worship rock stars and revere footballers, and in which politicians (as they long to do) can wear military uniforms, ride in carriages and take the salute.

At 48, almost all of these have been the case for as long as I can remember. The only exception is that uniforms thing, which happens neither in the United States, nor anywhere in Western Europe.

That the republican and the monarchist arguments are as weak as each other means, both that the case for change has not been made, and that that change need not be the end of the world. But the monarchy simply does not occupy a space that politicians therefore cannot.

And which politicians? It is probably not, but what if it were true? What if all three of the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the monarchy really were on the brink of  collapse? What would Britain be like after they had all gone? We need to be preparing for that, if not in full expectation, then at least in absolute seriousness.

Praise To The Holiest In The Height

Saint John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church, pray for us.