Just Put Me In The Fridge
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By airyfairy
- 6214 reads
Prince Charles has Covid-19. Obviously, he managed to get tested straight away, and will presumably receive the best of care.
None of that surprises me. However it seems to have absolutely astonished some of our more right-wing commentators, among them Allison Pearson, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Piers Morgan, the only person who has managed to make a British Prime Minister take refuge in a fridge (as far as we know). Much squawking and fluttering of feathers and demanding to know why HRH gets a test when our brave girls and boys on the medical front line can’t.
Excuse me? These are people who support a system based on privilege. They make a lot of their considerable livings from spouting about the royal family, whom they regard as having a divine right to be media lab rats. And yet it seems to astonish them that with great privilege comes…even greater privilege. The privilege to get the best of everything, no matter how scarce the worst of everything is for the rest of us.
No, I’m not that naïve. Of course they’re not astonished. And doubtless they will be using their own lesser level of privilege to get whatever they can and sod off plebs. It’s just another example of the venality of some of our spouters-in-chief. They don’t give a monkey’s armpit about the boys and girls on the front line, but the bandwagon they’re jumping on at the moment is ‘we love our brave doctors, nurses, paramedics, care workers etc etc’ because bugger me, Tristram, they might be needed. Not for us, of course, Tris, because we’ve got our own private provision, but the staff might get the bloody virus, or if enough people not like us get it, our private provision might be purloined to help the great unwashed.
Last year, the Royal College of General Practitioners withdrew Hartley-Brewer’s invitation to speak at a conference, after seeing a tweet in which she said she could not see anything wrong with the predictions for the future made by Enoch Powell in his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. This was not, she insisted, meant to imply any sort of moral approval of Powell. Let’s just leave that last bit to one side, and look at the predictions themselves, which Powell, in 1968, envisaged for the turn of the century. Has immigration resulted in rivers of blood? Nope. Has immigration meant our country has heaped up its own funeral pyre? Not that I’ve noticed. Have we lit the gunpowder and blown ourselves up? Er, no. Have we callously and illegally deported people of colour who have lived, worked and paid taxes here for pretty much their whole lives? Bingo. (Powell didn’t actually say that last one.)
Julia, honey-bunch, this may come as a surprise to you, but the whole point about predictions is that they’re supposed to come true. Or at least have some vague resemblance to something it is credible to believe may happen in the future. And, please, make it clear whether or not the doctors who successfully had your invitation rescinded and whose demands you described as ‘pathetic’, are now to be regarded as our brave boys and girls on the front line.
Allison Pearson has a star-studded history in the last year alone, having falsely stated that a man who berated Boris Johnson about the health service was a Labour party ‘plant’ (no apology or retraction), falsely stated that a picture of a child lying on a hospital floor, because there was no bed available, was ‘staged’ (no apology or retraction), and referred to Rebecca Long-Bailey as an ‘Alien’. Allison – send me your email address and I’ll forward the links for Full Fact and Snopes, the fact-checking sites. Just in case you’re afraid that our brave boys and girls are cobbling together their own protective gear, in the absence of the real thing, simply for Labour Party cameras.
As for Piers Morgan – oh come on, we all know about Piers Morgan. Wanted to be David Frost but ended up as Uncle Knobhead.
Our Prime Minister, of course, came from this posse of journalistic jackals, all possessed of a good education, a facility with words and no bloody principles whatsoever other than self-preservation and advancement. And that’s the fix he’s now in. Unlike Pearson, Hartley-Brewer, Morgan et al, he can’t stick his finger up to see which way the wind’s blowing, and then jump on the nearest wagon heading in that direction. He can’t flourish a quote from Churchill or Plato to make his pals bray with delight. Most of his mouth-frothings have exactly the same intellectual heft as Lorem Ipsum, the dummy text that looks like Latin but is complete gobbledegook.
Although I am not a monarchist and although, honestly, I would cross the road to avoid Prince Charles, even without the requirements of social distancing, I hope he’ll be OK. I hope the Queen doesn’t get it. I hope everyone’s all right. I don’t want anyone to be ill. (Although I’m struggling to extend the same goodwill to Harvey Weinstein, who has apparently been assaulted by a virus which didn’t care whether or not it had his consent.) Perhaps, when All This Is Over, we could tackle those other pandemics – hypocrisy, opportunism and plain, barefaced lying.
Have a nice day, and stay safe.
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Comments
I did read a couple of posts
I did read a couple of posts about Charles and Camilla. And a story in The Guardian (so it must be true) that they didn't jump any hospital queues. They are 71 and 72. I almost feel sorry for the future king and his consort. It wasn't that long ago backbenchers of the knobhead variety cheered, as no doubt Piers and his cronies did, that nurses were not to awarded a pay rise. Junior doctors were called 'greedy' by the Home Secretary because they worked a squillion unpaid hours and thought it comprimised their ability to care. In a rat race we only hear from the rats, now their Pied Piper is being asked questions he can't answer-- we live in interesting times. The coronavirus just doesn't go away. It goes away and comes back again. We need to spend money on poor people and services. Just the very thing we've not being doing for the last 10 years, while taking money from the poor and giving to the Piers Morgans and his ilk of the world.
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Phew!
This is witty and ascerbic. Your unholy trinity of the press are the usual suspects, the three who have bought in most comprehensively to the Social Media Jungle Rules. I think you credit them with a little more self-awareness than any of the three possess. I certainly doubt Piers sees anything contadictory about his opinions and behaviour; Julia Hart-Brewer is an arriviste snob and gets all she deserves and vice versa; whilst Pearson, I'm very much afraid, is just poison, so, perhaps, she knows the dichotomy at the heart of what she does.
Good writing. Have a gin, a martini or the tipple of your choice. Celebrate the fact that we'll never come to these people's notice, and we'll never have to interact with them, so we're safe from any jail sentence.
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This is the closest I have
This is the closest I have ever come to spending any time with any of these people. Step away for your mental health. But a fine piece of writing.
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What they all say ^ ^ - a
What they all say ^ ^ - a fine piece of writing, but I hope you go and spend some time with the lemurs and kittens of facebook now. You know it makes sense xx
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Brilliant rant. I think next
Brilliant rant. I think next time anyone has something to rant about, we should send you bullet points of the general issues and you can form it into a witty and biting rant for us. I'd pay. :)
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I agree with all the comments
I agree with all the comments above, put into words v successfully a lot of things that have been floating around my brain. The mountains of Irony, scaffolding layer upon layer on social media right now, means I go online with the mantra - be kind, be kind, be kind... but it's not easy.
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Congratulations to airyfairy,
Congratulations to airyfairy, this is today's Facebook/Twitter pick. If you enjoy a good rant and want others to read this too, give it a like and share and a retweet for good measure.
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You have opened my eyes
You have opened my eyes, airyfairy - I didn't think you could vent like this on this site ! Well done (and said) !
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That's the beauty...
of this piece though, there is nothing libellous or risking litigation in it. Both fierce and funny, it is all a good rant should be.
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So glad you are posting these
So glad you are posting these. I think such commentators want to keep (or rather tax payers keep) the royal family because they like being able to look down on people even more privileged than they are. Who cannot escape. Love the idea of rants beaming up like a pillar of fire :0)
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Please don't start wearing a
Please don't start wearing a bunny suit!!! Your genius rants turn my bile and frustration into laughter and feeling I'm not alone. Important part of mental first aid kit
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