The royal blackmail story is remarkable for the absence of outrage

I suppose there must be someone left in Britain who is surprised or shocked that a minor member of the royal family has alleged homosexual tendencies and is partial to the odd snort of cocaine. Lord Charteris of Amisfield, for example — formerly the Queen’s private secretary — would at least have pretended to be appalled, but he’s been dead for seven long years. Frankly, I suspect most British people would shrug their shoulders with resignation and boredom even if it were reported that a fairly important royal had been photographed mainlining anthrax spores while fellating a pine marten. The newspapers, denied the right to inform their readers of the identity of the blackmail victim, instead directed them to a whole bunch of websites which had blithely ignored the injunction. ‘Yesterday the name of the person was only a click of a mouse and a ten-second internet trawl away,’ the Daily Mail said in a forlorn attempt at breathlessness on Tuesday this week. I bet very few people took up the invitation.

(I did, mind, on your behalf. One of the sites not only yielded up the name of the victim but also informed me that Kemal Ataturk’s creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 was a Jewish plot — as indeed was almost everything else of allegedly malign consequence which happened during the 20th century. Including, interestingly, Auschwitz. So, I thought, those are the sort of people who think minor royal misdemeanours are interesting. In fact, the sites which chose to print the name of the royal were either anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist blogs, or bottom-of-the-barrel trash-celeb sites, or supposedly respectable Australian newspapers. In each case a certain agenda was at work.)