During the week I had recorded an episode of Piers Morgan’s interview series. A case of nothing else worth recording really – the others I have seen have been a succession of women agonising over some dreadful trauma in their life, not my cup of tea at all; Piers seems to have a talent for bringing out the tears and the ‘ahhh’ factor from the audience.
This episode was different, not just from other Pier’s interviews, but from television in general lately; this one was Karren Brady. It wasn’t her achievements that galvanised me so, it was her reaction to set backs in life. ‘why did you write books’; ‘I was turned down for a journalism college, and I thought, I’ll show them’. ‘How did you come to work for David Gold’ – ‘I went to sell him advertising, and he offered me a job on the spot’. Such an incredibly positive person.
Piers did his best to elicit the tears; ‘How did you feel when you had a miscarriage’. (How do you think she felt, you plonker!) But there was no ‘it was the worst moment of my life’, or ‘I still weep to this day’, no attempt to milk the moment for all it was worth, just a dignified ‘incredibly sad’ and onto the next question. She wasn’t traumatised for life by a footballer saying ‘I can see your tits’, she just snapped back at him – ‘well you won’t from Crewe’, and promptly sold him to Crewe football club. She sold her husband, footballer Paul Pecshisolido twice – there’s a pragmatic woman! Her phone has been hacked, during tense business negotiations – but we haven’t heard her wailing to Leveson. She just got on with life.
Reflecting on my evening’s viewing, I realised what a rarity it was. Our screens are perpetually filled with whiners. When personal tax allowances are raised to bring thousands of low paid workers out of the sights of the tax inspector altogether – we don’t hear the jubilation of those who benefit, we don’t hear what they might do with the extra money; we are transported to Tower Hamlets to hear from a family with four children who have been out of work for two years – and can’t afford a holiday, and now ‘fear’ (always the fear!) that they may be asked to cut back further because the council gave them a four bedroom house and now say they only need three bedrooms and this ‘could’ (always the could!) result in £7 a week being cut from their housing benefit.
The great army of whine-managers make sure of that. I once calculated that 10% of the Scottish population were fully employed holding the hand of the other 90%; listening to their tales of woe and hardship, ‘supporting’ them in their needs. Fictitious dramas on television displaying some rare event, a flipping cow dying on some deserted hillside, will be followed by the announcement ’if you have been affected by issues portrayed’ etc – and you know that someone is employed to sit at the end of the phone to listen to a stream of viewers who may once have heard of someone who is sure that they might have been in a village where a cow once died, and oooh, it was awful and they’ve never been able to get over the horror of it all. A child dies on holiday with its parents in a foreign land – a sad event; but before we know it, the ‘bereavement counselors’ have been moved into their local school to help the children get over the trauma of little Johnny not being at that school any longer.
Every possible hurt in life is being managed by an army of trained – and paid – whine-managers. Now that Greater Manchester Police are producing statistics to show how many Goths and EMOs get shouted at in the street, you can be sure that someone somewhere is registering a charity to support traumatised Goths. Someone else will be applying for a grant to renovate a derelict building as a drop-in centre for EMOs ‘too scared’ to dress as EMOs’ for fear of what might happen to them. No doubt the NHS are already scheduling laser operations to remove Goth tattoos for those who can show that since the age of 8 they had always known they were EMOs, and now they are 43 they wish to leave their Goth husband/wife and reveal their inner self to the public at large.
Social media is the new weapon of choice for the permanently outraged, who wish to attract the attention of the paid whine-managers. During the past fortnight, we have had the ridiculous spectacle of the Twittophobes working themselves into a lather over a man employed to ensure that men paid hundreds of thousands of pounds every week to kick a pig’s bladder round a field, actually turned up and kicked said pig’s bladder, who turned out to have parents who belonged to the Fascist party in a foreign country, half a century ago. The shadow Foreign Secretary, the son of immigrants himself, and Communist immigrants to boot, resigned his Directorship of the football club in protest at this risk of traumatising the fans in the terraces. Other footballers are ‘being supported’ in their distress at some neuron-challenged and inebriated dork allegedly shouting ’put him on the bonfire’ in their general direction. I say allegedly, because no one can actually be found who heard that cry from the terraces, but the media reported it, so it must be true, and the footballers were black, so it must be racist; ‘Footballers against Racism’, in a straight nick from the ‘Giving Victims a Voice’ rule book of investigating traumatic claims, says it is convinced it occurred, even without evidence, and therefore something must be done to support the precious footballers. Presumably those fans had spent ‘every waking moment’ thinking about being racist, and were the most prolific racist chanters the UK has ever known…
Which brought my mind back to the Savile topic, and what has driven me on in my search for the truth about the Duncroft allegations. I was sent an excerpt from a blog post lurking in some dingy corner of the Internet during the week; it seems the writer has utterly missed the point and is labouring under the impression that I ‘am keen to protect the reputation of my old school’, as though Duncroft was some sort of upper class boarding school – though I have seen elsewhere – was it Vanity Fair? – that the ‘elite were fighting to get their wayward children in there’!!! Hilarious stuff. I have no brief to protect Duncroft’s reputation, I wasn’t aware that it had a reputation to be protected actually. What I am very keen on, and this blog has always been very keen on, dating to some years before Duncroft was ever a word the media had touched, was truth and honesty.
Honesty is not just a matter of the precise mechanics of how an incident is described, but also the depth of importance it is given in the great scheme of things. When the media persist in using words like ‘abused’ to describe utterly minor and irrelevant incidents in someone’s past – then I am deeply offended. There is real abuse, child abuse, in the world. It is not well served by parading egotistical attention seekers who were once patted on the bum by someone in the public eye as ‘victims of child abuse’. Who should we blame for this state of affairs? Should it be the sad creatures who 30 years after leaving care are still to be heard whining and bleating ‘that they weren’t adequately supported’ on leaving care? Who cannot leave behind their fleeting moment of discomfort, the passing insult to their breasts, the arm that was put round them 30 years ago, which they now seek to use to see themselves included as ‘victims’ that require the services of the army of whine-managers?
Or is it the Whine-managers that we should blame? Those who seek to create a career out of parading these ‘victims’, encouraging them to hang onto past incidents and blow them up out of all proportion in order to seek the security of a substitute mother who will kiss and make it better with a cheque? Is it fair to say ‘blow it up out of all proportion’ – I think it is. Remember the original Duncroft allegations came from a woman who claimed to have witnessed – and ‘conspired in’ is not too strong a word – an incident during which a visitor to Duncroft ‘maybe’ – for was it under a blanket or not? – encouraged another girl to put her hand near his groin. Since they had arranged a code-word beforehand, you can be sure that they felt they could ‘arrange’ for this to happen if she sat next to him – yet this girl chose to sit next to him. She could have sat anywhere, she could have avoided the situation, if it even happened, but no, they allegedly conspired to ensure that it did happen. Was it a dare? A teen-age bet? Whatever; 30 years later at least one of the women is still trying to make a story out of it – even though the other girl involved apparently told police that she would like to ‘punch’ the first girl for dragging her into this tale!
That story has been taken up by the professional whine-managers, embellished, publicised, and used to create an industry. An industry which brings shame to Britain. ’More high profile Savile arrests’ scream the media – as a jumped up taxi driver who may have been employed by the BBC at one time is arrested and charged with sexual offences that had nothing to do with Savile…
I find it hard to believe that a country which can produce Karren Brady can also produce middle aged women so pathetic, so terminally dependent, so outrageously devoid of any backbone and gumption, that their sad world revolves around reliving such minor incidents, if they even occurred, for the benefit of those who make a living out of peddling these tales. What also amazes me, is that for all these journalists now coming out of the woodwork saying ‘we knew all along he was creepy, never married, eyes too close together, those poor girls’ who have been wasting their time hacking the phones of third rate entertainers and past customers of Los Angeles prostitutes – not one of those investigative reporters ever thought to hack Savile’s phone! Too busy hacking the likes of Kim Kardashian’s phone to see if she had broken the heel of her shoe again, or Karren Brady to see what the overpaid footballers were up to. Not one of those girls ever thought to ring Childline, even anonymously. Not one of those investigative reporters thought to contact Barnardos, surely in the same business of ‘child protection’ as the erstwhile television ’child protectors’.
I see yesterday that Scotland Yard commander Peter Spindler has jumped ship from the appalling Yewtree ‘investigation that never was’. ‘Spindler’s List’ of 12 arrests, one charge so far, has become an embarrassment to the nation. The police involvement in the whine-managers dark arts will take a long time to live down. The justice system is damaged, perhaps irreparably. The spirit of Torquemada lives on, where debate is driven by prejudice and supposition, by fear not fact; the media preferring to give air time to the unhinged armchair moralists screeching ‘cover-up’ whenever their chosen celebrity unaccountably fails to make the ‘arrested’ list than to the likes of Karren Brady.
All I can say is God bless Karren Brady for convincing me that the entire septic isle hasn’t gone stark raving bonkers.