My TCW week in review – names to drive me to despair
IT FELT like a depressing end to a depressing week, despite the excitement of the imminent Trump inauguration. Various things got me down over the week that can be summarised in three names: Yvette Cooper, Kemi Badenoch and Piers Morgan.
By Friday night, they had driven me to chocolate – my customary gin and tonic forsworn as I persist with a relatively dry January.
Automaton or Mekon (Dan Dare’s evil adversary, for those of you old enough to remember), I couldn’t decide which Yvette Cooper reminded me of most. All I felt coming over me was a grim ‘Back to the Future’ reality as I watched her at the despatch box on Thursday parroting her spiel about Labour’s so-called rape inquiry ‘U-turn’. There she was, Labour’s foolproof moving mechanical device, as though 15 years hadn’t elapsed since she last ‘rolled out’ all of those worse-than-useless initiatives in the Blair-Brown regime.
And this latest? Not a public rape inquiry, but another Quango Baroness stitch up. The ever-forensic Mark Steyn’s ‘The Baronesses won’t save you’ article nailed it; what they do is ‘chair the issue under the carpet’.
Baroness Casey of the uniparty is the perfect choice for this latest stitch-up. No one has mastered the art of the feel-good and sound-good ‘independent inquiry’ like her. She’s made a successful career out of satisfying politicians’ consciences while the real problem remains unidentified or is kicked into the long grass again.
As Mark says, ‘Everything that needs to be known has been known for over a decade. And the organs of the state that facilitated and enabled all the gang-rape are unreformed. The people in charge were not punished but wafted upwards.’
Louise Casey, again, was dredged up to tick the boxes of a data inquiry so widely based and underfunded it seemed like a bad joke; ensuring that Pakistani grooming gangs and their local Labour concealers will stay safely undercover. However, no one can do earnest ‘manageralise’ better than our Yvette, detailing process, evading the question, covering their backs and shutting down debate.
Her insistent prattle and mind-numbing deflection of Rupert Lowe’s demands for information on the Pakistani gang rapists had him slumping forward onto the bench in front of him. The data wasn’t there; that was the Tories fault (she was not going to risk criticising their cover up), so yes, she’s ordering ‘a fast-track audit’. This is what she’ll be inquiring into. Data collection reform is her priority, and it would be updated. That was the answer to Rupert Lowe’s specific demand for information on how many dual nationality Pakistani rapists had been deported. Oh yes, she reiterated, the data would update ethnicity.
Of course it would. That’s the best cover of the lot: manipulating it to show the majority white British population is worse, and making it possible to claim the desired result of showing that there are more white than Pakistani child abusers. Classic Cooper deflection, the non-answer answer, reduction to a data process issue so later she can parrot a report on the progress of the process reform as proof of Labour’s action. It is not just evasive; it’s duplicitous and specious, and they should be slammed for it.
They won’t be, and that is why we can’t rely on the futile Tories for anything. My pre-Christmas warnings about Badenoch’s inadequacies are fast taking hold. They are no longer just my concerns, which a friend – to whom I had privately communicated my fear that her backers have cruelly made her over-believe in herself, and that this is going to end badly for her – alerted me.
She pointed out that it’s not just her maladroit green blob appointments that have even Camilla Tominey now questioning her ‘soundness’, but something which one former fan had reluctantly critiqued in The Critic last week. ‘The writer has read your mind’, she emailed with this quote from the article:
‘Kemi, unfortunately, has bought into her own mythology. Her self-image far outstrips her actual abilities, a dangerous delusion that has led her to miscalculate time and again’.
Worse was to come for Kemi, with the next email to drop into my inbox being from the same friend. She commented, ‘The wind is blowing in the direction you forecast’, with a link to Lloyd Evans’ Spectator postabout Badenoch’s PMQ’s performance on Wednesday: ‘Her impenetrably dull questions read like a PPE final exam paper.’ His analysis echoes your sentiments she wrote, so I read on. Evans speaks the brutal truth: ‘Her route to the top is the source of her failings. Too much, too fast. Kemi is a Westminster Barbie, shaped by think tanks and policy wonks in SW1. She should get out more. Or get out of the way and let a street fighter take over. The Tories are sinking under her leaden leadership.’
They are providing no opposition and letting Two-Tier Keir get away with murder, even when there is everything to skewer him with. That is, if they weren’t so implicated themselves, as Ewen Stewart set out so brilliantly this week.
This brings me to the third person to depress me this last week: an opportunist without conscience or principle, who’s never been called to account. For once, I am not talking about Boris Johnson, though he has been shamelessly pushing himself this week; rather, the forever self-satisfied Piers Morgan, who I found smirking at me from the pages of The Telegraph on Friday. The photo was but the preface to a massive puff piece, an interview devoid of any real criticism, and it was this that had me diving for the chocolate. One gin would not have been enough, I knew, to dull my despair at the glorification and promotion of the man who brandished anti-vaxxers as ‘selfish pr*cks’. None of his trademark scaremongering, demonising or smearing was on this interviewer’s radar. Then as if to add insult to injury I saw he’s been named the top British influencer on YouTube. I am bereft of words.
My sanity, I am glad to say, was saved in the nick of time by finding an email from my friend David Raynes, which alerted me to Jordan Peterson’s wonderful take down of the Morgan monster, in which he put him right over Tommy Robinson and Islam to boot. Here is another Peterson masterclass in which Morgan looks visibly shocked when Peterson explains the realities of Islam and exposes Morgan’s ignorance.
I wondered, ‘What would we be doing without our Archangels (Musk and Peterson) from over the ocean?’
On our side, I am increasingly turning to the one-man-band seeker of truth in our decaying Parliament that is Rupert Lowe MP. All last week, he was a virtual one-man opposition on the war path over the Pakistani rape gang cover up, the councils’ corrupt cancelling of next May’s elections and, finally, with a brilliant and unexpected denunciation of Lockdown, the covid scam, the MHRA and their dangerous and unjustifiable vaccine-pushing. Watch him here.
What a man. Last year, no one knew of him. It is proof of the possible; things can change.
