Jeffrey Epstein – Blood and Porridge

September 30, 2025

A month of ironies

© Maverick / Warner Bros.

September 2025 reminds me of the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette. The song’s lyrics contain many examples of things that are ironic, for example, “An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day,” or “a free ride when you’ve already paid”, or “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” Although, as the comedian Ed Byrne has pointed out, some of the situations mentioned in the song aren’t actually ironic. “A traffic jam when you’re already late,” for example. As Byrne observed, that’s really only ironic if you’re a city planner.

Anyway, should Alanis Morissette ever write a sequel to Ironic, the month that has just passed should provide her with more than enough material. To me, it’s the most ironic month I’ve ever experienced. Here are a few reasons why I think so.

[Incidentally, this blog-entry contains references to American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Please note that it’s possible to hold two opinions about Kirk at the same time, though many people out there are unable – or unwilling – to accept this.

Firstly, you can be horrified by Kirk’s murder, excoriate the fact that it happened while he was on a university campus exercising his right to free speech, and feel sorry for his young family. Secondly and simultaneously, you can detest many of the things that came out of his mouth. Things about black people. (“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to… target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”) About women. (“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge… And most importantly, I can’t wait to go to a Taylor Kelce concert… You’ve got to change your name. If not, you don’t really mean it.”) About Islam. (“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”) About trans-people. (“We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.”). And so on. Also, you can be dismayed by the fact he made himself very wealthy by saying such things.]

September 10^th

Charlie Kirk once said this of American gun ownership and the attendant, heavy toll of American gun-related deaths (16,576 in 2124, excluding suicides). “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel… I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Today, while speaking at Utah Valley University, Kirk was shot dead by an American citizen, using a gun, which it was his God-given right to own under the Second Amendment. How tragically ironic and tragically American.

September 11^th

UK prime minister Keir Starmer sacked Peter Mandelson from his job as British ambassador to the USA. This was on account of Mandelson being an old friend of the late millionaire paedophile and human-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson had even waxed lyrically about Epstein in writing: “Once upon a time, an intelligent, sharp-witted man they call ‘mysterious’ parachuted into my life… wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!”

Five days later, another old friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who’d also, allegedly, waxed lyrically about him in writing (“We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. Yes, we do, come to think of it. Enigmas never age, have you noticed that…?”), arrived in Britain. This was Donald Trump. Starmer rolled out the red carpet and treated him to a state visit.

© Private Eye

September 13^th

Led by double-barrelled far-right rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, failed thespian nepo-baby Laurence Fox and others, and addressed on a big screen by Sieg Heil-ing billionaire Elon Musk, a crowd of more than 100,000 people marched through London to protest against immigrants. They were particularly against foreigners who were criminals and a danger to women being allowed into Britain. According to reports, some protestors wore MAGA – Make America Great Again – hats in honour of Donald Trump: a foreigner who’s a convicted criminal, and a proven danger to women, who was being allowed into Britain for a state visit the following week.

September 16^th

Donald Trump landed in Britain and his hosts immediately went into full pomp-and-ceremony grovelling mode. The orange American president got a royal salute, a lunch with the Royal Family, a tour of the Royal Collection, a ‘beating retreat’ military ceremony, a ride in a gilded coach, a state banquet at Windsor Castle, and a visit to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, for a look at the Winston Churchill archives and a press conference.

Speaking at the state banquet, Trump declared, “…this is truly one of the highest honours of my life. Such respect for you and such respect for your country… The lionhearted people of this kingdom defeated Napoleon, unleashed the Industrial Revolution, destroyed slavery and defended civilization in the darkest days of fascism and communism. The British gave the world the Magna Carta, the modern parliament and Francis Bacon’s scientific method. They gave us the works of Locke, Hobbes, Smith and Burke, Newton and Blackstone. The legal, intellectual, cultural and political traditions of this kingdom have been among the highest achievements of mankind.”

A week later, Trump gave a speech to the United Nations and had this to say about London, capital of Britain, and Western Europe, of which Britain is a part: “And I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately… I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

Maybe the grovelling hadn’t worked.

From wikipedia.org / © Executive Office of the President of the US

September 17^th

American late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), following comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. These drew the ire of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC’s chair is Brendan Carr, a staunch Trump loyalist. Trump applauded Carr as ‘a great American patriot’ for his actions.

Funnily enough, in 2022, Carr had declared: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humour to draw more into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” And Kirk himself once said of freedom of speech: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.” But perhaps what they meant was political satire and outrageous things should only be expressed by people they agreed with.

September 22^nd

After an uproar from practically everybody, and their granny, and their dog, the forces that’d removed Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves backtracked. It was announced that he was being reinstated on ABC. A new episode of his show was broadcast the following evening. It achieved his highest ever ratings – 6.26 million viewers – and was viewed 26 million times on YouTube. Kimmel quipped about Trump’s likely reaction: “He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

In other words… The American right, which earlier in the month had worked so hard to make a martyr out of Charlie Kirk, blaming his death on the ‘radical left’ and threatening retribution against anyone who suggested he might be anything less than a saint, had inadvertently made a martyr out of Jimmy Kimmel instead.

September 23^rd

Trump delivered an hour-long speech to the United Nations. Besides condemning the institution for a malfunctioning teleprompter and an escalator that stopped working – him and his missus Melania had to climb the stationary escalator, which for someone of his considerable acreage must have been hard work – and besides ranting about ‘radicalised environmentalists’ (“No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows.”), he boasted that he’d ended seven wars: “…Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda… Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

In fact, two of these wars didn’t exist, two have continued in terms of ceasefire violations and ongoing bloodshed, one was a war Trump helped to start and then participated in, one was a war where one of the countries denies that Trump had anything to do with settling it, and one ended with a peace-deal that hasn’t yet been ratified.

That last war, the one Trump actually came closest to ending, was the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Previously, at the September 18^th press conference with Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Albania and Azerbaijan. And at a dinner in Vermont on September 20^th, Trump announced that he’d ended a war between Armenia and Cambodia. So maybe that’s why Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed on a peace-deal. One was so busy fighting Albania, and the other so busy fighting Cambodia, that they no longer had time to fight each other.

Come to think of it, none of this was ironic. It was just moronic.

September 26^th

The Ryder Cup, golf’s biennial contest between Europe and the USA, teed off at Bethpage State Park in New York State. Trump attended its opening day, making him the first sitting American president to do so. It’s fair to say that his attitude towards golf – win at all costs, even if it means getting caddies to plant new balls for you when the old ones land in inconvenient places – and his attitude towards competition generally – win at all costs, no matter what a bullying, graceless, ignorant chump it makes you look – infected the crowd. Taking their cue from their Dear Leader, they behaved like bullying, graceless, ignorant chumps for the next couple of days. They chanted “F*ck you Rory!” at Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy. They threw beer at McIlroy’s wife. They hurled insults at McIlroy’s fellow Irish golfer Shane Lowry about his weight. No wonder at one point McIlroy told them all to “Shut the f*ck up.”

Anyhow, Europe won the Ryder Cup by 15 to 13. That wasn’t ironic either. That was karma.

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

June 12, 2022June 13, 2022

Grovel, Britannia

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70^th year of her reign on the British throne. I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family. It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them. They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward. Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper. It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy. This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run. And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long. She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police. The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy. That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down. The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain? Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

That was then, however. Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

Now I just want the whole thing gone. Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me. My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein. (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19. Aye, right.) It’s more to do with the state of Britain. The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past. Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment. The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government. I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s. In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies. There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’. Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have. It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on. It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society. Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever. This is never more obvious than in the country’s press. British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen. Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.” No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are. She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone. Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them. But obviously, that isn’t going to happen. The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly. And as for the country they’re supposed to represent… Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.