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Tuesday 7 October 2008

What a boring royal blackmail story

The royal blackmail story is remarkable for the absence of outrage

The gay sex and drugs allegations were met with a huge shrug

Partly this is a result of our acceptance of both homosexuality and class A drugs. Whereas 40 years ago the ‘sex act’ allegedly performed by this blue-blooded 936th heir to the throne would have warranted a prison sentence or at least a hefty fine and public and personal disgrace, it will soon be effectively illegal to describe the said act as lewd or disgusting or sordid. I do not wish to turn into The Spectator’s version of Richard Littlejohn — god forbid — but it is nonetheless true that if you were to complain to the police that you saw two men going at it like knives in your local park and you felt degraded by having witnessed this spectacle, the best you can expect is to be told to mind your own business and in future look the other way. The worst would be a visit from some ghastly hate-crime copper and a stern lecture about one’s regrettably antediluvian attitudes. And, in truth, while a good half of the population find homosexuality a filthy practice, or, more simply, ‘wrong’ (according to the latest opinion poll), there is no longer any public appetite for dragging practitioners before the courts; instead a rather healthy live-and-let-live attitude seems to prevail. Similarly, we are no longer terribly disquieted by illegal drugs. The social stigma attached to smoking now outweighs that which attaches to those who snort half of the Colombian GDP every few days; at the same time alcohol ‘abuse’ (i.e., getting rat-arsed every now and again) is now the focus of government opprobrium. We are no longer allowed to feel comfortable imbibing our legal drugs of choice and so the notion of transgression implied in the consumption of illegal drugs such as cocaine is substantially diminished. I have always assumed, without the tiniest shred of evidence, that all younger members of the royal family are possessed of noses which may very well soon fall off through prodigious consumption of cocaine. The horrible nightclubs they frequent have, in some cases, been forced to remove the lids to their lavatories in order to stop customers hoovering up vast mounds of coke from on top of them. I have to say, as a commitment to preventing drug abuse, this strikes me as rather less rigorous than the approach adopted in, say, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. But then I suppose a gibbet in the middle of the dance floor would be bad for business. But in any case at least one minor royal, Freddie Windsor, has admitted to having used cocaine in the past. (It’s always ‘in the past’, isn’t it? Youthful indiscretion, mere experimentation, student days, bad influence of peer group, etc. Yeah, as they say, right.)

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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