Victory Arch?

Even before the Epstein Files, a line about the Catholic Church and child abuse had become akin to a mother-in-law joke. Now, though, it is not even that. The staunchest atheists recognise the Papacy’s unique moral authority and convening power in the face of the Epstein Class’s failed war with Iran, ongoing ethnic cleansing of Lebanon, and global economic iniquity. The best that that Class can do is to spit something about the treasures of the Vatican, as if the Pope personally owned them. Will Donald Trump personally own his Victory Arch? His what?

Insofar as NATO still exists, then our membership subjects our military personnel to the command of officers who were ultimately answerable Trump, or to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or to Viktor Orbán, to which last’s legislative will EU membership also subjected us, as it would again. But we are now being lined up for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state, back in the Customs Union and in Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area.

There will of course be no referendum. We are ruled by people to whom the vote is a nice thing to have, but who got their way by other means every day, so they did not really need it. If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. We have been telling you this forever. And at least Orbán has been elected by anyone. The man telling Britain to resubmit to the Council of Ministers is Volodymyr Zelensky, whose term of office has expired.

Oh, well, the Pope is keeping up his predecessor’s practice of regularly calling the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, and His Most Catholic Majesty The King of Spain, Protocanon of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, will henceforth have an Embassy in Tehran but not in Tel Aviv. Now to repeal the wicked law that murdered Noelia Castillo, and to secure comparable moves on both issues, both from the First and Only Honorary Canon of Saint John Lateran, and from the Royal Confrater of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. Or what does any of it mean?