Posted on 12/12/2002 3:15:08 PM PST by knighthawk
LONDON - Cherie, Princess of Blair, sobbed her heart out on telly last night. (Where else should one sob one's heart out? What, after all, would be the point of doing so in private? That is what God gave us tears for: to shed in front of the cameras.) She confessed to the nation and the world -- truly, genuinely, sincerely -- that she was not perfect. Every sucker in the land was deeply moved.
The problem is that Princess Cherie has been making a few rather foolish decisions lately. Like her late sister-in-suffering, Princess Diana, she has been consorting with some dubious and even unsavoury characters. It turned out that her personal trainer's newest boyfriend, by whom she -- the personal trainer -- is really excited to be pregnant, was a convicted fraudster who had done time in more than one great country's penal establishments. On the basis of what is alleged to have been only the briefest of acquaintances, and reputedly knowing nothing whatever about his past accomplishments, Princess Cherie allowed him to advise her on the purchase of some luxury apartments in Bristol. Worse still, these purchases were made from a supposedly blind trust in which the Prince and Princess's money was stored. The Princess was not supposed to be involved in the blind trust's affairs at all.
As it happens, the fraudster was in the process of being deported as an undesirable alien from these enlightened shores. Some local scandal sheets suggested that the Princess's telephone call to the fraudster's lawyer, and subsequent search to find out who the judge was who was to decide upon his appeal against deportation, indicated an exaggerated interest in his welfare, but these -- said the Princess through her televised tears -- were unfounded allegations. She refuted them utterly.
How? The proof was simple: apologizing "if" she had caused embarrassment to anyone (what a wonderful word "if" is when used in this fashion, so full of marvellous ambiguities), she added "the people who know me well know that I would never want to harm anyone...." In other words, the rest of us were born with original sin, but she was born with original virtue, that is to say a good heart, and is therefore incapable of real wrongdoing.
This is a rather odd argument, when you come to think of it. The other day, for example, I was caught speeding in Newcastle, and there seemed little choice but to pay the fine. I never got the chance to argue that everyone who knows me well knows that I would never want to run over a little child by driving at 60 miles an hour in a 50-mile-an-hour zone. I wasn't even allowed to argue that, as a matter of empirical fact, I ran over no little child while exceeding the speed limit, and therefore no one was harmed by my excessive speed: I just had to write out the cheque.
Poor Princess Cherie! Spare a thought for her difficulties. As a truly compassionate person, what else could she do but take pity on herself? As she so movingly put it, "I'm juggling a lot of balls in the air ... and sometimes the balls get dropped. There just aren't enough hours in the day." She appealed to the sympathy of her audience: "Some of you must experience that." (Surely she could have applied to her modernizing husband to increase the number of hours in the day? Twenty-four is so archaic a number.)
One has to pinch oneself to remind oneself that the Princess was not an ingenue before her elevation to her current royal status: She was a prominent lawyer, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and was also a part-time judge herself. Since she practised largely in the phony field of human rights law, she surely must have been able to spot a fraudster when she met one.
It is true, of course, that her errors and misdemeanours, or at any rate those that have so far come to light, are on a pretty small scale. But they give off the distinct and characteristic odour of the Blair government ever since it came to power: the smell of vulgarity and corruption, faintly disguised by the perfume of self-righteousness, political correctness, sentimentality and evangelical moralizing.
Princess Cherie's "confession" reminded me of the time we had a dead rat under our dining room floorboards. We knew it was there but we couldn't find it. The council's rat catcher confirmed the smell was caused by a dead rat but said it wasn't worth pulling up the floorboards just to find it, because the smell would go in six weeks' time in any case. A true professional, he was exactly right. If only one could be as confident about the disappearance of the rank smell of corruption given off by the Blair regime.
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor to City Journal.
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That's the same thought I had the other day when I saw this pic of Cherie:
Cherie had a heart?
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