I told you so

It’s jolly nice to be proved right about everything

The most important, and comforting, thing to emerge from all that Wiki-Leaks business was that, by and large, we were right. All the things we suspected, or knew either instinctively or through common sense, were proved to be correct. Prince Andrew — arrogant, rude and with the IQ of a corgi? Yep. The oil company Shell effectively runs Nigeria? Sure thing. Gulf state Arab leaders are a tad duplicitous? No kidding, bub.

It is always uplifting to discover that you were right all along, and that, in secret at least, the establishment agrees with you. It may well be that by the time you read this there will be no more WikiLeaks, given that the penalty for revealing universally acknowledged truths is a spell inside a Swedish prison. But even without it, 2010 was a fine year for debunking establishment propaganda, destroying officially approved shibboleths and confirming that the things we’d always thought were right all along. Often these stories gained little press attention — so here’s a recap:

1. Lesbians don’t exist. I have always held that lesbians don’t exist or, at least, that they are scarcer in this world than ball lightning, St Elmo’s Fire, Tasmanian tigers and competent economists. But it is part of the strategy used by campaigning groups in their attempts to acquire entirely justifiable civil and legal rights that the figures get stretched a little, here and there. They use the principle of inclusivity: if we are all lesbians, then we cannot possibly object to the rights for which they are campaigning. This is not how the campaigns begin, of course — at first the complaint is that they are a minority, and that a democratic society should be judged by the way in which it treats its minorities.