Rites and Rights

Easter is not of pagan origin, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is entirely without parallel in mere mythology. When that article was published two years ago, then my Facebook post linking to it was Liked by the Editor of the Morning Star. Make of that what you will.

The King's Easter message could never have topped Donald Trump's comparison of himself to Jesus on Palm Sunday, followed by Paula White's comparison of Trump to Jesus on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Nor Trump's announcement that "Christians everywhere rejoiced" on the first Easter Sunday. Nor even the time that Tony Blair expressed sympathy for the plight of Pontius Pilate.

Blair is now on Trump's Board of Peace. If Britain were not in the war with Iran, then Blair would have been expelled from the Labour Party, or his old groupies on the Labour benches would have rallied the huge intake that had been handpicked by Peter Mandelson and overthrown Keir Starmer, presumably in favour of Wes Streeting.

But that Starmer had kept us out of this war is stated as fact even by his opponents, who want Britain to join a war in which it had been from the start, just as they despise Starmer for being the "human rights lawyer" that his outriders claimed, rather than a ruthless securocrat even by the standards of a Director of Public Prosecutions.

The third Big Lie is that Starmer had a state secondary education, and that he now headed "the most working-class Cabinet ever" simply because the other members really did go to the state secondary schools that were attended by 94 per cent of the population. This is in fact the least working-class Labour Cabinet ever.

For the time being, though, I digress. The Israeli exclusion of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and of the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday attracted the negative comment even of Mike Huckabee, who may be positioning himself as a potential running mate capable of selling JD Vance to the Evangelical base. And whatever you thought of the death penalty, it is something else to bring it back for one ethnic group only, raucously celebrating that move on television while wearing lapel badges of the noose. Might the King have something to say about either of those developments? Might the "human rights lawyer"?