A Nasty Stench

A while ago, I mentioned my hopes that David Cameron would prove to be 'a safe pair of hands'. Unfortunately, not only does he look like all the rest of them including the Millibands (who look like a pair of wandering tinkers and sound like adenoidal schoolboys), there is now a nasty stench arising from  his direction, on account of his clandestine relationship with the Murdochs and the previously undisclosed acceptance of lavish 'hospitality'. Many a time I have heard countries such as Italy, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria mocked for the corruption of their politicians and administrations but it seems to me that they are amateurs in comparison with the current British 'Establishment': from the MPs and (unelected) peers convicted of stealing from the public with fiddled 'expenses' to all the major papers using private dicks and the police routinely selling information to newspapers, which then  close ranks and 'can't remember' anything of importance.- apart from the surprisingly frank Piers Morgan, who spectacularly fouled up as editor of the Daily Mirror, before he was promoted to be 'a celebrity in residence' by CNN.

"Pooh! What's that stink?"

I thought that the select committee hearing dealing with the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks was toothless and clueless. The only member with any idea about cross-examination was the former Observer journalist: the rest were either too old or too young and all were far too wet. Moreover, there were far too many of them to allow any line of questioning to be rammed so far down the slippery Murdochs' throats (during their quaint, obstructive "one-two" routine), that they would have to deliver the goods. Insincere apologies and false-humility did't trip any switches for me and the pair of them should have been forensically reduced to rubble. Their ultimate responsibility (which they did and did not accept) for the disgusting way in which their paper paid for the telephone of a murdered girl to be tampered with for the sake of a  story and sales was enough to justify it.

There is in Britain a right to decline to answer questions on the basis that the answers might be self-incriminating but the right has to be claimed. There is not, so far as I know any right to refuse to answer the questions of a Parliamentary Committee on the vague basis that the answers might incriminate somebody else - because the only result of that would be that the witness would end up as a witness in a criminal trial against the defendant. So all that rubbish (allowed to permit the slime-balls to evade disclosing the truth about their sleazy operations), was invented by the likes of Lord Macdonald QC and Lord Grabiner QC, toadying Counsel to the Murdochs (Macdonald, as a former DPP also with a plain conflict of interest), and accepted by the weasle-like committee chairman, who really should have stayed at home with his knitting.

It was also most undeifying to see two committee members interviewed afterwards (it seemed to lack the remote dignity which should attach to Parliamentary proceedings) let alone to hear one of them (who looks about eighteen) confess that she had been 'terrified' of questioning Rupert Murdoch. First of all: why? He is just an inarticulate, obstructive  rough-neck billionaire. Secondly: if you don't have what it takes to represent the people without fear or favour, stay at home and continue writing your chick-lit novels (Mrs Mensch's other job).

When Rebekah Brooks was asked whether she had any regrets, she really ought to have come clean on that at least and replied:

"I lost a well-paid job turning you slobs upside-down and inside-out - and I just got arrested. What do you think?"

Today's picture is a modern representation of The Fall of Lucifer.