One down, three to go...

If you were ever in any doubt as to why David Chaytor and his fellow former MPs strove quite so long and hard - as far as the hideously renamed Supreme Court - to have the criminal charges against them for fiddling their expenses on a heroic scale quashed on the basis that they were a breach of parliamentary privilege, I suspect that the scales may have fallen from your eyes today, when Chaytor pleaded guilty to three counts of False Accounting at the Old Bailey.

This was after the ritual speech early in the process in which he expressed his determination to prove his innocence of what were charges based on misunderstandings and misinterpretation of simple, honest mistakes.

So he's not just a thief, but a liar, too. Surprise, surprise.

I wonder what the other three are thinking tonight...

Episcopal hypocrisy and the bankruptcy of republicanism

What is it about republicans which forces them to support their position by levelling puerile personal insults at members of the Royal Family?

My own answer to that that question is that their arguments are so bankrupt and devoid of logic that childish personal abuse is all they have to support their infinitesimally small minority view.

Take for example, the drivel written about the recent Royal engagement by the Bishop of Willesden, the Rt Rev ‘Pete’ Broadbent, on his Facebook and Twitter pages, in which he likens Prince William and Kate Middleton to “shallow celebrities”, adding that the Royal Family was full of “broken marriages and philanderers”. That may or may not be true, but philanderers or not, those in glass houses should beware of throwing stones, because I cannot remember any Royal sex abuse scandals, whereas the Church of England positively bristles with them such as here, here, here and here, to name but four.

Not content with blackguarding the happy couple personally, he goes on to suggest – and remember, this is a Bishop of the Church of England making these remarks - that their marriage will not last above seven years; hardly the position one would expect from a senior member of the church in which William and Kate will marry, is it?

I wonder how many other ‘ordinary’ couples’ relationships he has openly suggested will not last more than seven years, even if he may well have thought it?

But he reserves his true bile for William’s parents, observing that, “I managed to avoid the last disaster in slow motion between Big Ears and the Porcelain Doll, and hope to avoid this one too.”
Let me remind you again that the author of these remarks is a Bishop in the Church of England; the church of which the Queen is the Supreme Governor, as all her predecessors have been since Henry VIII’s split with Rome in the early Sixteenth Century. So isn’t ‘Pete’ Broadbent – who was appointed to his bishopric by the very Queen he effects to despise – nothing more than a hypocrite?

Because, if he feels so strongly about his republicanism, I’m sure he could easily resign his episcopacy, go back to calling himself ‘Pete’ without it being a glaring and grating affectation and find himself a more egalitarian church in which to worship.

Or could it be that he enjoys the ‘fawning deferential nonsense’ shown to him as a bishop of the established church and so clings on to his position for personal aggrandisement?

I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know that peevish personal attacks such as Broadbent’s recent splenetic nonsense, serves only to display the bankruptcy of the republican argument, so I suppose as an ardent monarchist, I should thank him for his contribution to the royal cause.

Kevin Myers and a question for the Guardian...

In this article, the ever excellent Kevin Myers of the Irish Independent, asks the publishers of the Guardian why they saw fit to hire a defeated terrorist warlord to act as a moral arbiter over the actions of the British Army in Afghanistan.

Written with his usual searing disregard for reputations - in this case, those of a dissembling murderer and his naive self-hating paymasters - I think he's got it spot on; but what do you think?

The hounding of Maria Gatland...

I don't imagine it will surprise anyone to learn that the Throne has nothing but contempt for the blood-soaked criminals of the IRA, but I have to say that this story about the 'unmasking' and subsequent hounding from office of Conservative councillor Maria Gatland, a former member of that organisation, leaves me feeling distinctly uneasy.

Mrs Gatland was born in Dublin and joined the IRA as an impressionable young woman, convinced of the legitimacy of their campaign to drive the British out of Ireland and thereafter to forge a thirty-two county Republic.

Yes, joining an organisation wedded to violent revolution - and make no bones about it, that is precisely what the IRA was - was incredibly foolish and arguably criminal, but at the time she did so, she was barely in to her twenties.

To her credit, she quickly realised the true, murderous nature of the organisation she had foolishly joined, when in July 1972 IRA bombers killed eleven people and injured scores more in a series of bombings in Belfast and as a consequence, she left the organisation which promptly sentenced her to death for doing so.

Understandably, she then fled Ireland and came to England, where within four years, she met and married her husband, with whom she built a new life, eventually becoming a Conservative councillor in Croydon in 2002 with the aim of 'putting something back into the community'.

In other words, having utterly rejected the murderous violence of the Provisional IRA at the cost of attracting a death sentence for doing so, she set about building a new and respectable life in England. A full thirty years after the scales fell from her youthful eyes, she sought and secured election to her local council in order to serve her community and make it a better place in which to live.

Whilst I appreciate that Mrs Gatland had been, by her own admission, a member of an organisation which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people and the torture of thousands more, both British and Irish, during the course of 'The Troubles' she had repudiated that membership within a very short period of time.

The question I pose is this; is there to be no rehabilitation, no possibility of redemption, for those like Maria Gatland (nee McGuire) who have realised the error of their ways and set about making amends?

Whatever anyone thinks about the IRA and those who were members of it, it took considerable courage - both moral and physical - for Maria Gatland to leave and condemn her former comrades for the callous murderers that they were, and in my view, thirty-six years down the line, she should be congratulated for that courage, not hounded from office amid a tidal wave of political point-scoring and nauseating righteous indignation.

Should she stay or should she go...

There's an interesting story in some of today's Scottish papers, focussing on a suggestion made by Christine Grahame, the SNP MSP for the South of Scotland, that the remains of Mary Queen of Scots should be disinterred from their current resting place in Westminster Abbey and repatriated to Scotland.

She is supported in her view by a composer named James McMillan (of whom, I must confess, I have never heard) various historians and the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland.

What intrigues me is that Mary was so unpopular during her reign, punctuated as it was by at least one allegation of murder, that she was forced to abdicate in 1567, in favour of her then one-year-old son, James and flee to England to save her own life.

Unable to resist the usual attack on the perfidious English, Ms Grahame describes Mary as an iconic figure from Scottish history (no arguments so far) who was ultimately the victim of English plotting...

Err, no Christine, Mary was caught red handed plotting to overthrow Elizabeth and to seize the English throne and that is why a very, very reluctant Elizabeth had to order her execution.

Frankly, I have no strong feelings either way about Mary's final resting place. However, as all schoolboy historians now know, the infant son who succeeded her as James VI of Scotland subsequently inherited the throne of England on Elizabeth's death, becoming James VI and I and it was at his direction - the direction of (no pun intended) the last king of Scotland - that his mother's remains were interred in Westminster Abbey.

Perhaps he - her son - should have the final word as to where his mother's remains spend eternity.