Never Mind The Waffle

Belgium was always our principal ally and trading partner on the Continent. In 1914, we went to war to defend it. There were other factors at play, but that was not a mere pretext.

And today, of all days, we have deployed a specialist Royal Air Force team to defend Belgium from "rogue drones", assumed to be Russian. Look at a map. How, exactly, did those drones reach Belgium, and why did nothing in between interest those controlling them?

Nor The Years Condemn?

I have been asked why I was "keen" on the prospect of Reform UK and the Greens as the two largest parties in the next Parliament. I am not, and especially not on this of all days.

Last year, from Dubai, Richard Tice and Isabel Oakeshott campaigned for a boycott of the poppy, because the Royal British Legion had apparently gone woke. Reform is the only British party ever to have campaigned for a boycott of the poppy. And although the Greens do not do that, they do promote the white poppy, which raises funds only for a political campaign, the absolutely pacifist Peace Pledge Union.

But I do not like the present governing party or the present Official Opposition, either. Whatever the outcome of the next General Election, ways will be found to continue the struggle to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

Lest We Remember

Remembrance Sunday used to be about the two World Wars. No one expected that it would still be a big thing when someone who had been born on the last day of the Second World War was 80. But in this century, it has been perverted into the exact opposite of its original intention. It has become a recruitment opportunity for the Armed Forces, a celebration of recent and ongoing wars, a rally in support of future ones, and a way of cementing the idea that some kind of debt from the War was owed in perpetuity to the old or the ageing. 

Meanwhile, what has always been this country's shameful treatment of veterans continues as ever. They are dying because of benefit sanctions, they are sleeping on the streets because of the crisis in the mental health system, and so on. I am wearing a poppy as I type this. But I have never sent anyone to war and then expected private charity to look after them once they had come back. No doubt David Cameron will be there today. As Prime Minister, he once stated publicly that looking after veterans was not the job of the State, since that was what the Royal British Legion was for. Yet the Legion ought to be a purely social organisation. It did not send people to war, and neither it nor the astounding array of other military charities ought to be responsible for the aftercare. Morally, that responsibility lies with the State.

In any case, charity does not seem to be doing much of a job of it. Instead, it sits on reserves of half a billion pounds while veterans starve, and it lobbies for the pro-war foreign policy line and for the arms industry, with which it has a scandalously cosy relationship. The arms companies even sponsor the Invictus Games. Give that a moment to sink in. The red poppy is now as much of a political statement as the white poppy, and a rather larger source of revenue for political campaigning. Until quite recently, all red poppies were the same size, and you wore one at a time. Like the proliferation of poppy kitsch, and like the habit of displaying it all year, that there is now some kind of competition bespeaks the whole thing's degeneration into decadence.

Yet the red poppy was initially, and it is still properly, anything but a glorification of war. The white poppy's message to "remember all victims of war" is already included, and the red poppy no longer features the name of Haig. White poppy money goes to the Peace Pledge Union, a campaigning organisation for absolute pacifism, a cause to which I do not subscribe, rather than to a charity of any kind.

But why do I still bother with the red poppy, and with Remembrance Sunday events? In front of me are my late father's medals: the 1939-1945 Star, the Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, the Italy Star, the France and Germany Star, and the War Medal 1939–1945. He had a life story that nobody could have written. And that is why, although people suggest it to me, I never shall. The maximum possible number of Stars from the War was six, but by my reckoning it would have been impossible to have served in all the necessary theatres. So, and I mean this out of sheer interest, does anyone know of someone with five? Well-rewarded war criminals and amoral arms salesmen do not own Remembrance. We must not let them steal it. It belongs to us.

Not Known At This Address?

“That boy should be getting us coffee,” said Bill Clinton to Ted Kennedy of Barack Obama. In a colonial outpost of liberal elite America, it is almost forgivable that David Lammy insists on being addressed as “Deputy Prime Minister” rather than by name. Almost.

Lammy is like a once-glittering ornament of that milieu both here and at its imperial centre, the then Prince Andrew, who would enter a room in an entirely informal setting, and unless everyone fell silent and stood up, would go out and come back in again so that they could “get it right”. But why does Lammy not prefer the much grander “My Lord Chancellor”? How would you address him, and why?

Critical Tipping Points

Prince William is at least a third generation Green. If that is now out of step with the Tory shires, and local election results would suggest otherwise, then those shires have changed. The Conservatives were the party of Net Zero for 40 years. Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, the year that the Miners’ Strike began. That was not a coincidence.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, 36 years ago today, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Boris Johnson, whose entourage is taking over Reform UK, described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

On this, Thatcher was in lockstep both with the then Duke of Edinburgh, an asylum-seeker who had married his cousin, and with the firstborn of that marriage, then then Prince of Wales. Thatcher and the Royal Family had two great joint achievements, the conversion of the entire Political Class to anti-industrial Malthusianism, and the complete transformation of the attitude of the middle and the respectable working classes to divorce, which was regarded with widespread horror until three of the Queen’s four children were divorced and two of them remarried, in one case to the cause of his divorce. It is that cause who has now been crowned Queen. As to the last one, her third child’s surname uniquely has no hyphen as if, like his mother, he were only distantly related to the Mountbattens, and he is a Mister Firstname Surname like the rest of us, rather than the Lord Firstname Surname that would befit a younger son of a Duke. Amid all the talk of how unlike his siblings he was even physically, it is suggested that he “may” be an Esquire, because he “may” be resident in the United Kingdom as a member of one or more foreign Royal Houses.

Having first married in the Catholic Church, the never-widowed Nicolas Sarkozy was onto his third wife when he was the First and Only Honorary Canon of Saint John Lateran, the Dedication of which we shall celebrate tomorrow, so it is not all that incongruous that the King should be the Royal Confrater of Saint Paul Outside the Walls while civilly married to a woman whose first husband was still alive and with whom his affair had resulted in the collapse of both of their first marriages, hers, again, having been celebrated in the Catholic Church. But the Pope’s installation as Papal Confrater of Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor should be an occasion for demonstration by everyone from the Orange Order to the equally Protestant proponents of Marian Co-Redemption, and from the #NotMyKing travelling circus to what must now be recognised as the equally republican Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. All led by evicted former local resident, Sarah Ferguson.

Some Good May Come

Peter Hitchens writes:

Is there a stupider response to violence on trains than plans for ‘airport-style security’ at stations? If you don’t have such screening at every tiny halt, then it can’t work. It is just collective punishment. If there is anywhere in the country which does need ‘airport-style security’, on the way out as well as on the way in, it is the prisons.

And:

You cannot cure a disease until you know what it is. At last Britain is beginning to grasp that we have many crazy people in our midst, and that they are crazy because they smoke marijuana.

The obvious solution is to enforce our existing severe laws against marijuana possession, so people stop smoking it. This is what they do in civilised, serious countries such as Japan.

But that logical step may be beyond a lot of our political and media elite. It is also unpopular with a lot of people on anti-social media.

It’s easy to explain the elite problem. Our university-educated classes are full of past and present habitual drug abusers, or people who let their children abuse drugs. Or both. They are held back from admitting the truth by their own disgusting selfishness.

But the Twitter warriors – who are frantic to believe that rampage knife attacks are ‘terrorism’ – are just as bad. They go purple in the face when I say that these pointless slaughters are the acts of unhinged people.

There are dozens of examples, but take Valdo Calocane, the culprit of those crazy, horrible killings in Nottingham. His home stank of marijuana. But nobody in authority cared.

The Southport mass killer Axel Rudakubana appears to have once been a bright and pleasant child but his character and appearance changed totally in his early teens, the time at which so many British children meet marijuana at school and fly off the rails, always into slack despondency and often into desperate, incurable mental illness. Choruses of psychiatrists now link this drug with mental illness. Reams of news reports link acts of mad violence with marijuana users.

But as far as I can find out, nobody inquiring into the Southport horror has even asked if Rudakubana took this drug.

Over many years I have found police totally uninterested in the drug use of violent culprits. This is no surprise, as they don’t want to admit that their laziness and laxity, in refusing to enforce the laws against cannabis possession, have aided an explosion in its use.

But the ‘terrorist’ explanation of such events has now suffered a crushing blow. It simply cannot be sustained by any known facts. Even so, everyone but me still tried to believe it when news came in of a knife attack on a train last weekend. I observed how the authorities and media reports struggled to imagine that the Huntingdon train assault was in some way terrorist. But it wasn’t.

Codewords for terror attacks were used by police. Two people were arrested, suggesting some co-ordinated action. Then all this crumbled. No possible terror motive or connection could be discovered. The second suspect was quickly released without charge.

I can’t and won’t discuss the first suspect but will wait with great interest for the investigation and trial which must now follow.

Perhaps, out of all this horror and blood, some good may come.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature.

Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

Unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Nigel Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Ann Widdecombe and Danny Kruger?

Instead, we need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

The Four Mentors of King Charles

If, as Walter Bagehot would have it, the monarch is there to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn, then it matters urgently who is being consulted by the monarch, who is encouraging the monarch, and who is warning the monarch. I am neither a republican nor a Scottish nationalist, but Twitter is heavily suppressing Craig Murray, under whose post the comments are also very instructive:

As godfather to Prince William, heir to the British throne, Prince Charles chose his close friend and adviser Laurens van der Post. A paedophile.

Van der Post raped a 14-year-old girl who had been given into his care for the sea voyage from South Africa to London. He then installed her in a flat in London as his mistress, but abandoned her when she became pregnant age 15 (though he sent a monthly payment). She was not the only one. The victim later stated that van der Post was “sick” and “he knew how to pick his victims”.

In a sycophantic authorised biography of then-Prince Charles written thirty years ago, Jonathan Dimbleby wrote that “for Prince Charles there was a missing dimension”, that he felt his life lacked a spiritual awareness. At age 25 Charles sought out van der Post after reading his books, and van der Post became his spiritual guru. Charles continually sought his advice and absorbed his mystic teachings. Not only is van der Post William’s godfather, he gave marriage counselling to Charles and Diana and was a frequent guest at Highgrove, Sandringham and Balmoral. On his death Charles initiated the Van der Post Memorial Lectures, held inside St James’s Palace.

There is a question which will run throughout this article, which is how much did people know? In the 1970s and 1980s it was not public knowledge that van der Post was a paedophile. But then Charles was not the public. Then as now, if somebody becomes very close to the heir to the throne with frequent access to Royal palaces, they are going to be under close investigation by the security services.

I find it wildly improbable that the security services did not find out about van der Post’s predilection for young girls and that he had been paying the expenses of an illegitimate daughter originally fathered on a young teenage mother. There is also the question of van der Post’s wider lies. It is possibly neither here nor there that in fact van der Post had only ever spent a fortnight with the Bushmen of the Kalahari when he penned his famous book, full of lies and plagiarism.

But that he was actually a Lieutenant (and at times acting Captain) rather than a Lieutenant Colonel as he claimed, would have been instantly discovered. It is worth noting here that van der Post’s famous military memoir, which became the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence starring David Bowie, was massively embellished, not just in terms of his rank.

The Royalist defence of Charles’ associations rests, rather peculiarly, on the claim that any huckster and paedophile can just get entry to the Palace inner circle without any checks. That is just not true. What appears to be true is that paedophilia was treated as a peccadillo.

Before van der Post, the man credited by all biographers as the greatest influence in shaping Charles’ character was his great uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Born Prince Louis of Battenberg, Charles can hardly be blamed for Mountbatten, who was thrust upon him as a child.

I hope not too literally.

Mountbatten was a paedophile, which was an open secret in upper class society – including the diplomatic service – long before his death. He benefited from the lifetime protection of the inner Royal circle, which was absolute in his lifetime. It has only become mainstream acknowledged in the past very few years.

That is deliberately phrased as “acknowledged”, not “knowledge” – there was not a Fleet Street Editor in 50 years who did not know; they just did not publish it. Mountbatten’s paedophilia was fuelled by his access to underprivileged children, from New Delhi to Rabat to Kincora Boys’ Home.

Mountbatten spent more time with Charles in his childhood and early adulthood than Charles’ own parents did, including encouraging and coaching him to have as much sex with as many “non-marriageable” girls as possible, and providing a venue for it in his homes. After he died Charles said, “Life will never be the same now that he is gone”. It is not a stretch to think that van der Post – whom he first met four years before Mountbatten’s death – filled the emotional void

A 1944 FBI dossier described Mountbatten as “a homosexual with a perversion for small boys”. This was two years before his appointment as Viceroy of India, where the open debauchery of the Mountbattens was an open secret in high-level Indian society.

It is worth noting that in this period his military aide-de-camp was one Willie McRae. I have always believed that the murder of McRae by the British state was related to his knowledge of Mountbatten and elite paedophile rings: in this context McRae’s ties with Irish Nationalists may be relevant, as they assassinated Mountbatten over the abuse at Kincora.

In Mountbatten’s case there is no doubt at all that the security services knew all about his paedophilia, and covered for him.

So at the death of van der Post in 1996, Charles had lost two men he viewed, exclusively, as guides and spiritual mentors, and from whom he took the most intimate personal advice. There is nobody else who fits this description. Both were extremely vicious and calculating paedophiles, shielded by class privilege from the consequences. So, in 1996, to whom did Charles turn as his new “mentor”?

Jimmy Savile was introduced to a 17-year-old Charles in 1966 by Mountbatten, who vouched for him. The official story is that Mountbatten had met Savile through military veteran fundraising.

You can believe that was the primary shared interest of two prolific paedophiles, if you so please.

Savile cultivated the relationship long-term, and by the 1980s was corresponding assiduously with Charles, which continued for over 20 years. Savile was yet another person to whom Charles turned for marriage counselling. In scores of letters, it is always Charles seeking Savile’s advice and adulating him. There is no record of Charles using the word “mentor” to describe his relationship with Savile, but Diana literally stated that Savile was a “sort of mentor” to Charles.

I presume I do not have to explain that Savile was throughout this period one of the most prolific paedophiles in British history. It is widely believed the royal cachet helped to protect him from prosecution. A huge amount was known to the police, to BBC managers and to various other branches of the British Establishment, but Savile was untouchable.

In 2000 Charles constructed a chapel at his home at Highgrove, and a stained glass window in it commemorates Laurens van der Post. Before that window, Charles kneeled for long prayer vigils with his new spiritual guide, Bishop Peter Ball – who was also a friend of Jimmy Savile. It was Savile who introduced Ball to Charles.

Rather like Epstein, Ball was a known paedophile who had got off the first time without incarceration. He had, in 1993, accepted a police caution for a ceremony in which he had forced a 17-year-old novitiate, Neil Todd, to kneel naked in the snow for hours, whipped him, and then forced him to perform a sex act. The police also investigated at that time numerous other allegations, including two very similar ones.

The decision to caution was taken on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. As the Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse Report 2022 primly noted (p.378):

The first report on the Anglican Church investigation – The Anglican Church Case Studies 1. The Diocese of Chichester 2. The Response to Allegations Against Peter Ball Investigation Report – was published in May 2019. It considered the Diocese of Chichester, where there were multiple allegations of child sexual abuse, and whether there were inappropriate attempts by people of prominence to interfere in the criminal justice process after Bishop Peter Ball was first accused of child sexual offences.

I cannot, though, identify the passage referred to of the Diocese of Chichester Report.

Yet immediately after this, and for the next 17 years, Charles provided Ball with rather splendid rent-free accommodation on Charles’ estate. Ball was suspended by the Church of England as a priest and, astonishingly, Charles asked him to officiate at services and perform the Eucharist at his personal chapel in Highgrove, as reported in the Church Times. Ball was frequently in his company and was a personal guest at Charles’ 2005 wedding to Camilla.

In 2015, Charles gifted Ball £20,000. This was said to be simply a friendly gesture – exactly why is unclear. Charles is very definitely not known for personal generosity.

In 2015, Bishop Ball was finally convicted of 12 horrific instances of sexual abuse of boys and young men, all under the guise of religious ritual. Prince Charles put out a public denial that he had interfered in the 1993 decision not to prosecute. My surmise is that he had not done so directly, but rather let it be known through others. That is how it works.

The BBC actually reported that:

Ball’s court case heard that a member of the royal family – who has never been named – was among a host of public figures who supported him when he avoided charges in 1993.

The article goes on to carry this extremely over-specific and narrow denial from the Crown Prosecution Service:

The Crown Prosecution Service has publicly stated that it had neither received nor seen any correspondence from a member of the Royal Family when Ball was under investigation in 1992–93.

Note this very deliberately does not rule out a word in the ear at a function, a phone call, or – as it would be done – getting a friend known to be close to Charles to give the message.

Charles in fact in 1997, two years after his police caution, told Ball that he would directly intervene against Ball victim Neil Todd. “I will see off this horrible man if he tries anything again,” Charles wrote to Ball.

Todd did not live to see Ball ultimately convicted. He committed suicide in 2012. This was convenient for Ball, but there were plenty of other victims who testified in 2015.

I have no doubt the Royal Family will have known about Uncle Louis’s sins – he had an official entourage and was plugged in to the system. The immediate civil servants and close protection officers always know everything. I have already explained why I do not believe van der Post’s paedophilia was unknown. That goes double for Savile – about whom authorities had a huge amount of knowledge, but whose royal connections were a key part of his protection.

While there is no doubt whatsoever Charles knew about Bishop Peter Ball, Ball’s royal circle protection appears to have broken the surface.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, I do not know any paedophiles – but none of us can be absolutely certain we do not. Of one thing, however, I feel extremely confident. The four most-valued advisers in my life, the people whose advice I have most craved and to whom I have turned in times of crisis, are not all paedophiles. I should be astonished if any of them were.

You just can’t have your four closest non-official life guides as paedophiles by accident. You just can’t. It has been put to me that Charles, by nature of his role, knows vastly more people than ordinary folk. That may or may not be true (there is a counter-argument about privilege and protection). But it if were true, it does not improve things. If there is a much larger-than-normal pool from whom Charles could have chosen, it makes it even weirder he chose four prolific paedophiles.

To be clear, prolific paedophilia is extremely abnormal behaviour.

What I do not understand is why paedophilia appears so prevalent and attractive to politicians and the ruling class. People who have much more power and wealth than the rest of us, have the ability (rightly or wrongly) to get attractive adult consenting partners more easily. So why do they, apparently in disproportionate numbers, seek to prey on the young and defenceless?

It is more than time we got rid of the Medieval system of monarchy. That will not solve the corruption of corporate interests controlling the state, or redress the appalling inequality of wealth. It will not even do much to end elite class paedophilia. But as one clear demonstration of the rotten nature of British society, the tale of the King’s four paedophile mentors is extremely instructive.