Earl hurls accusations over Diana at wrong people
THAT the BBC’s actions in covering up the nefarious means used to get the Diana interview were reprehensible and a betrayal of trust is unquestionable.
Martin Bashir’s actions to secure the interview are those of an odious, deceitful man – not a journalist. But to suggest the BBC and Bashir have the blood of Princess Diana on their hands is histrionics.
Earl Charles Spencer, the brother of Diana, said this week that he ‘draws a direct line from the Bashir Panorama interview to the death’
of Diana in a Paris tunnel. What utter hogwash!
The earl may still be grieving the death of his sister and – like others who lose loved ones too soon in often avoidable accidents – be still seeking to find reasons for the unfathomable.
Diana died because she got into a car with a drunk driver who drove at speed and she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The earl said that Diana was left exposed and vulnerable as the interview led to her divorce which saw her stripped of palace protection and led her to that fate ful death. What he is omitting is the fact that Diana had begged and pleaded with him to allow her stay at their family’s Althorpe Estate when she was being hounded by the press. She also refused protection offered by the palace and there is also the fact that she was with Dodi Fayed – one of the richest men in the world – so security could have been afforded. So if we accept the earl’s logic that the interview set off a tragic chain of events culminating in her death, we could equally apply the same logic to his own actions.
Had he given his desperate sister safe harbour in her most dire hour of need then perhaps history would not have led her to Dodi and to die in a Paris tunnel 27 years ago.
That accusation is, of course, just as unsustainable as his argument about the interview.
How Harry is like all of us
DIANA’S son, the Duke of Sussex – or as he henceforth shall be named, Sir Drinks-a-lot – has opened up again on his miserable life as a royal in yet another jaw-dropping ‘woe-is-me’ Oprah Winfrey interview.
The latest in a litany of ‘truth bombs’ saw Harry tell a teary-eyed Oprah that he was driven to drink such was his abject life of misery inside the palace walls. ‘I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night and I would find myself drinking not because I was enjoying it but because I was trying to mask something,’ he said.
Listen up laddie, that’s exactly how the rest of us spent our weekends. Drinking to get drunk, to mask the misery of the daily grind of college, working for minimum wage and hankering over some lousy bloke or another, and also complaining about our horrible parents.
Welcome to life as a pleasantly plastered binge-drinking twentysomething the world over. I would be more inclined to think Harry had issues if he wasn’t out downing pints every Friday and ending the night in a drunken state of early adult misery. That’s not a sign of anguish – in fact it’s a common rite of passage for the common people. Harry’s attempt to explain away his party-prince youth is nothing more than a crafty ploy to deflect criticism of his Vegas party when he played naked pool with his posse, or when he dressed as a Nazi.
On reflection... perhaps he does have real problems. The rest of us managed to get royally rollicked in a weekend drunken stupor without making light of a murderous genocidal regime and cavorting naked at posh pool parties. Well, we never dressed as Nazis at any rate...
Donnelly ‘Taken’ wrong approach
CAN somebody please stop Stephen Donnelly coming over all Liam Neeson in Taken with his macho Minister efforts at telling the ransomware hackers ‘he will find them and will not pay them’.
We know he’s not equipped to hunt down the gang. They certainly know their adversary Donnelly doesn’t know his dongle from his domain. Hostage negotiating takes skill. You do not reveal your position and you certainly don’t shout from the rooftops the ransom won’t be paid. Anyone who’s ever watched CSI knows you don’t ‘put it up to hostagetakers’. They have what you want.
You plamás them, appeal to their better nature, you keep them engaged just long enough to trace their location. You do not issue ultimatums when you’re on the back foot. That is when body parts get posted in brown envelopes, as is happening with the drip, drip, dip of data appearing piecemeal online as a threat to pay up or else. Donnelly needs to be kept away from microphones and out of earshot.
Anti-Semitic? No. It’s simply murder
ANTI-SEMITISM is abhorrent. The callous killing of innocent children is also abhorrent. The atrocious and arbitrary slaughter of some 60 Palestinian children has given rise to spurious claims of anti-Semitism aimed at those who rightly call out the acts of the Israelis for what they are – murder.
While a delicate ceasefire has been reached between Israel and Hamas, the Gaza Strip is a tinderbox on the cusp of exploding and it is an incontrovertible fact that the people of Palestine are suffering the most losses and tragedy.
But with cancel culture as silencing and sinister a force as any missiles, there has been a concerted effort to shut down criticism of Israel by levelling claims of antiSemitism at these who dare to stick their heads above the parapet in support of Palestine.
A news report this week detailed how some of those poor children killed were in a programme to rehabilitate them after they suffered severe trauma after the 2015 conflict in the West Bank.
Calling out murder for what it is can in no way be construed as hate speech or anti-Jewish rhetoric. These are small children for crying out loud, and they are being blown to smithereens by rockets fired from, of all places, The Holy Land. All because they want to live in a land they can call their own.
It took US President Joe Biden 10 days to call Benjamin Netanyahu to demand a cessation of fire. Ten whole days and 220 dead bodies. Biden, it appears, is more concerned with being on the right side of the powerful Jewish-American lobby. Shame on him.