Hurry up! The Bandwagons moving off again!
My, oh, my – the Conspiri-loons are fair drumming their heels in the Twitter aisles this morning. Monstrous tantrums. So near the sweetie counter – and yet so far!
Was it only Monday – two days ago – that Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was being hailed as an ‘eminent Lord’ along with the Bishop of Durham for heeding their call for an ‘overarching inquiry’ into child abuse?
Every inquiry is ‘overarching’ these days, and none can be more overarching than an inquiry into the inquiries currently running which includes an inquiry into an inquiry into an inquiry that is the Macur inquiry. We need a portmanteau word. An ‘ArchInq’? Or perhaps merely a ‘KerchInk’ to reflect the handsome lawyer’s fees greasing the tracks.
A bare 48 hours later, after it is announced that Baroness Elizabeth is to head such an inquiry – and she has become that most demonised of characters – a ‘child sex-apologist’.
It seems that Baroness Elizabeth, like British Rail snow, is the ‘wrong kind of woman’, the ‘wrong kind of double-barrelled name’, the ‘wrong kind of Parliamentarian’, and the ‘wrong kind of lawyer’ to say nothing of the ‘wrong kind of children’s champion’ to be entrusted with the delicate task of proving that every teenager from the 1970s is entitled to some sort of compensation for something. It an outrage, an obvious white-wash before it begins.
Is she the ‘wrong kind of woman’? ‘Tis true, throughout her long and distinguished career, she has never, not once, called for Supreme Court Judges to be allowed to breastfeed whilst deliberating on matters of life and death; nor has she lobbied for 50% of the Supreme Court to be a woman only ‘white list’. She failed miserably to be part of the avant-guarde PIE supporting members of the NCCL like dear Harriet Harman who would have been an excellent choice in their eyes. The Baroness is obviously in denial and a rape culture apologist, for not once has she squeaked that a powerful and intimidating be-robed figure brushed too close to her ‘with obvious sexual intent’ as she went about her business.
What sort of a woman is that? Overnight they have dug through the cuttings libraries and uncovered the well-lubricated occasion on which her husband, a tad unwisely, admitted to enjoying the company of prostitutes whilst he was a High Court Judge in Kenya and she was, er, upholding the rights of children in England….dreadful woman! How dare she hold her marriage together! Even that piece of dirt was not sufficient for the rabid hordes, they are now tweeting that he used ‘under-age child prostitutes’ in Kenya and citing the News of the World article as proof – without linking to it, naturally, for it wouldn’t do to have their sycophantic followers find out that the article said nothing of the sort.
And wasn’t her brother Attorney-General when Sir Peter Havers left a packet of pornographic material involving young children on a London bus? And when he discovered that the law then extant didn’t allow prosecution for such an offence where the material had not been ‘unsolicited’ nor ‘traded for profit’, and that the law gave him no means to prosecute Sir Peter Havers. He should have bent the law! Bent it, I tell you. Strange how few people mention that Keith Vaz was Solicitor of the borough council alleged to have hidden the evidence of what went on in Elm House…..nor that Vaz should be so offended by the appointment of a civl servant to investigate the missing dossier, but uphold Peter Wanless as suitable to investigate – has he forgotten? Peter Wanless - PPS both to the former Chief Secretary of the Treasury & to the former Secretary of State for Employment - Michael Portillo. That Peter Wanless, former civil servant.
Worse, at a time when it was against the law to name people in such situation – he actually invoked the law to complain when Geoffrey Dickens, role model for Tom Watson, used parliamentary privilege to name Sir Peter Havers as a paedophile in the House of Commons. What sort of Attorney-General upholds the law and fails to bend it? A ‘child sex apologist’ obviously.
One commentator in the times, Julian Fellowes, wrote at the time – 30 years ago:
‘Thoroughly revolted as I am by the Paedophiliac Society with all its professed aims, I feel I cannot be alone this week in being almost as disgusted by the spectacle of a Tory MP dangling his victim over the slavering jaws of the media.
‘The feeblest student of human nature must surely be aware of how slight the connexion between pornography and practices need be.
‘To flirt with fetishes is hardly rare in the best circles . . . now he has to have his life, public and private, more thoroughly smashed than if he had murdered his kinsman in broad daylight.
‘It is particularly depressing that Salem-like justice should be meted out by a Conservative Party (MP) . . . their one faintly convincing battle cry has always been the importance of championing the rights of the individual against the so-called good of the faceless, heartless state.’
In an echo of Moor Larkin’s excellent article on ‘Nazification‘, the principle of eugenics is implied again as her Father becomes ‘an evil judge who condemned to death a battered woman who was hanged because he would not allow the jury to hear about her physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the man who died’. Indeed, her Father was the judge who heeded the jury’s ‘guilty of murder’ verdict long before ‘battered woman syndrome’ became the perfect excuse for everything, and sentenced Ruth Ellis to hang. Anti-RadFem thinking obviously runs in the family.
Is Baroness Butler-Sloss the ‘wrong kind of double-barrelled name’ – certainly the eminent Chewing Gum-shoe thinks so. Thrilled by the appointment of ex-Lottery Chief Peter Wanless to the ‘Missing Dossier’ inquiry, he must have gone to bed hugging himself - ‘It could be You’ – who would head up the overarching inquiry?
Isn’t he a fully qualified ‘investigator’ with 30 years experience of ‘looking at child abuse images’? How his heart must have been thumping! Hours later he was settling for second in command:
As of this morning, still no sign that he has been called. I fear his CV is more on the missing list than Geoffrey Dickens dossier could ever be….
Talking of ‘missing dossiers’, isn’t it odd that the only missing dossier anyone is concerned with is the one handed to the Leon Brittan? The other ‘dossier’, the one held by the person who had been at Geoffrey Dickens right hand for all those years, who had fielded the phone calls, served sherry at the late night conferences, been party to all the pieces of evidence as they were painstakingly gathered, day by day – well, we know what happened to that dossier. ‘That’ dossier was deliberately destroyed, hidden from the public gaze, put on a bonfire to permanently ‘protect those named’ – by dear Geoffrey’s wife…funny how nobody mentions that.
A new petition has been hastily arranged and the conspiriloons gathered to add their names. The relics of the Jersey Haute de la Garenne Stuart Syvret ‘it wasn’t a coconut shell’, dear little Andrea popped up from exile, Beatrix ‘there is so Satanic Abuse’ Campbell and of course roly-poly Tom Watson…so good to see so many old faces dutifully on parade in the middle of the night.
So many tantrums, so few characters.
For the last thing that those who were celebrating the final victory of ‘Giving Victims a Choice’ were expecting would be the appointment of the woman who gave them inspiration for that phrase, the woman who coined the term ‘Listen to the children’ nearly 30 years ago.
The woman whose work in the Cleveland Inquiry led to a radical reappraisal of child protection. The woman who is politically neither ‘left nor right’, but a cross-bencher. The woman who has sat for 30 years in the Family Courts listening to lying Mothers and dissembling Fathers, bullied children, abused children, manipulative children – and the totally innocent; the battered wife, the cowed husband, the frightened child. Learning how to decipher the signals telling her which is the true victim, who is speaking the truth.
A woman who has repeatedly upheld the interest of abused children above all else.
Obviously not what they wanted at all.
They are petitioning government to have her removed before her feet touch the ground, and replaced by one of them…they want real ‘paedo-hunters’ to head this inquiry, not some independent, fair minded, judge who knows what she’s talking about.
*Edited to add: His best yet….h/t to RetroCool73.
“Won’t somebody give me the job, pretty please?”