I suspect I am not alone in thinking this interview is more likely than not to worsen the situation for him, not improve it - can’t help wondering WTF the palace thought that they would achieve.
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He says he learnt a lot from Epstein… including improving some carnal knowledge? 
It’s an incendiary topic to raise, Paul, and you’re very plucky to set the first flame!
For me, a declared Republican, it lifts the lid again on a totally disreputable and corrupt institution, having its basis in inherited privilege.
This principle of entitlement has in its turn corrupted and deformed social relations across the “realm”, so that one’s position in the social hierarchy is determined at birth.
The so called “ladder of opportunity” has rungs set so as to make it virtually impossible to climb, unless one was born into wealth, or chosen by those in positions of institutional elitism, especially education, as currently manipulated by an elitist government of supercilious toffs.
I hope the monarchy is soon toppled, it is rotten to the core. Any dubious claim made for its role in raising the profile of the nation is misplaced.
France is reputedly the most visited nation in Europe; Britain’s mildewing mediaeval pantomime-show is losing any vestigial ‘allure’ it ever had, and Andrew Windsor’s rancid (IMO) showing on TV demonstrates how far the rot has spread, and what remedy should be swiftly applied to the whole stinking edifice.
Elizabeth Windsor should be mercifully treated. None of them should be roughly handled. Just humbled: I suspect many of “the younger generation of Royals” would be very, very happy to be rid of the shackles on freedom they were born to.
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Nothing wrong with inherited wealth when children are born into a family where parents worked hard and earnt it, who managed to climb this “ladder of opportunity” with it’s missing or far spaced rungs!
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Let loose a thick creep with massive privilege, a cast-iron sense of entitlement and hordes of sycophants. What could possibly go wrong?
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I agree that talent should be rewarded, but the rewards should not be privilege. Many successful business(wo)men take the view that their own wealth should not privilege their children: they should work to earn their own reward. That’s the way to bring up kids IMO, not buying them a Little Lord Fauntleroy costume and an RP accent.
The distribution of rewards and privileges is grotesquely skewed in favour of a tiny elite of very rich individuals who can buy into the system, and develop it further to consolidate their interests. The current Conservative party is representative of this set-up. Boris Johnson is their poster-child, and Rees-Mogg their regimental mascot. “Good Gels” like Nadine Dorries and Anne Widdecombe are very much ‘below-stairs’ and have seen better days as scrubbers.
They do have their favoured NCOs who earn their stripes on the parade ground like Peter Bone and Mark François. They take the shilling, stick their chests out and spit-and-polish their boots with the best of them. Cannon fodder, dreaming of a long service medal on retirement or a bargain-basement knighthood, with Tom Jones, Cliff Richards or Third Secretary in the Ministry of Rubber Bands & Paper Clips.
Roll on the Quiet Revolution! I write tongue-in-cheek if anyone takes a word of what I write seriously, or feels upset by it. 
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Tracey @Anglozone knows just the kind of fence a chap like me loves to straddle! (See illustration @5/8 above). 
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I would have thought pointing up 
would be appropriate in this case.
I don’t always agree with Peter but I’m closer here than on some topics.
FWIW I don’t think that the monarchy is “rotten to the core”, Andrew is fairly peripheral these days (indeed always was) and in any case the alternatives are not without their problems.
I haven’t, I confess, sat through the whole interview - I don’t really have an hour to spare but the summaries that I have heard just sound as though he was making excuses (and poor ones at that).
In some ways I do not expect remorse - his stance is still that he did no wrong and I am not sure one can express remorse for something one did not do (this, of course, is why prisoners who maintain their innocence tend not to get early release).
I would however have expected some contrition and that he would condemn Epstein’s character and behaviour - none of which seems to have happened. “I can’t remember” is such a feeble excuse, “I don’t regret the friendship” sets entirely the wrong tone.
Possibly a narrative of “I did and saw no wrong, my relationship was purely about trade contacts which I thought would benefit the UK, now that I realise what a monster he was I deeply regret my association with him which was naïve and foolish, I offer my heartfelt sympathies to the girls that fell foul of this evil monster” would have sat better.
As it is I can’t help thinking the “man on the Clapham omnibus” is reading the papers this morning and concluding that he is guilty as charged.
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I don’t really think any individual is ever rotten to the core, not even the wretched Andrew. He is the product of a rotten institution which itself is rotten to the core, however stoically some of its present incumbents play out their pre-ordained roles within it, and however bling-smothered and fawned-to its corruption.
They even have my sympathies.
By corruption I don’t set out to vilify the individuals who serve its interests and participate in the charade. I mean the institution itself. It feeds on a grotesque deference; preposterously biased patronage via the “honours” farce; luxurious props and rituals; a mythic narrative of battle, conquest and subjugation; and a decaying supernatural cult to justify its “right to reign over us”.
I detest it and love to detest it. Whatever supercedes it will at least trim off the gangrenous bits, and allow for the cleansing that true healing of the body politic calls for.
Thought you may like this Pete, knowing your’re a word person they are included too. 
- YouTube
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Thanks Wozza! A very lusty, dramatic and well-orchestrated rendering of the blasted and blimpish dirge.
The lyrics tell their own story: a queasy mix of craven subservience and grubby triumphalism.
Here’s a few more for you to peruse audio ley 
Maybe this one is more to your taste played on the Thames trying to skip legal reasons & a good pasting (though some of them got one after).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02D2T3wGCYg
Here are a couple of other un-official anthems that could be…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT1HEXNI9c4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AQ-D_OnF-E
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And very nice too, the Pistols being by far the least nauseating.
Elgar’s majestic march has been violated with jingoistic hogwash about might and mightiest, don’t like it, never sing it
William Blake’s long prose poem ‘Jerusalem’ (it runs to over 10,000 words, I have it beside me now) has IMO been unworthily prostituted to make a tiny extract seem to be a hymn to militaristic hubris, when it is anything but.
Here’s another section (from Chapter 27) of Jerusalem, closer to Blake’s theme of worldwide justice, cooperation and peace:
Spirit of *Albion! War-like fiend!
In clouds of blood & ruin roll’d:,
I here reclaim thee as my own.
My Selfhood! Satan! Arm’d in gold.
Is this thy soft Family-Love
Thy cruel Patriarchal pride
Planting thy Family alone,
Destroying all the World beside,
A man’s worst enemies are those
Of his own house & family;
And he who makes his law a curse
By his own law shall surely die.
In my Exchanges every Land
Shall walk; and mine in every Land
Mutual shall build Jerusalem:
Both heart in heart and hand in hand.
*England
It seems that Bill wants to make use of the Pizza alibi
I was at Pizza Express in Woking in 1996, insists Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton claims he could not have had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky because he was at Pizza Express in Woking at the time.
The former US President distinctly remembers tucking into a family-sized pizza with wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea on January 11, 1996.
“I could not have had sexual relations with that woman,” Mr Clinton said in an extraordinary interview last night.
“I was at the Pizza Express in Woking. I remember it well because I spilt some mayonnaise down Hillary’s blue dress.
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They should start labelling the tables: Bill Clinton/HRH Prince Andrew/Percy Bysshe Shelley/Catherine the Great/Henry VIII/Ernest Hemingway/Pablo Picasso/Boris Johnson dined here…
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Car crash. When you’re in a hole stop digging !
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How about the Kremlin, which is run by the world’s richest man, corrupt and rotten to the core.
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@Jane_Williamson asks politely: “How about the Kremlin, which is run by the world’s richest man, corrupt and rotten to the core.”
Since Yeltsin opened the door wide to flagrant and murderous crony capitalism, perhaps? Vladimir Vladimirovic has held back the tide IMO.