At last!

+Well it’s the news we’ve all been waiting for. But when it comes, it is still a bit of a shock, taking time to be fully absorbed. Yes, I refer to the file in the FBI’s old top secret cupboard, now released, which suggests that the Duke of Edinburgh was involved with Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler of Profumo affair vintage (as reported in the Daily Telegraph 21/07/24). As much was hinted at in the Netflix series The Crown. One might ask, knowing royal family history, so what? I doubt that the D of E was party to any significant state secrets, except possibly that Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures was a Soviet spy. Actually, that’s pretty compromising in itself. I was once invited to a large formal dinner at the Banqueting House (on behalf of an environmental charity of which the D of E was the Royal Patron) and I was fascinated to see the old wit was flanked at his table on either side by two beautiful women fifty to sixty years his junior. He seemed happy enough. They didn’t look like they were senior executives of the charity though.
 
+Hey ho. What else happened yesterday? Oh yes, President Biden has just resigned his candidacy to create some time to write his memoirs, or I suspect dictate them to a ghostwriter. That’s not a job I envy. But he should have done the decent thing and also resigned the presidency immediately, to create President Kamala Harris. In a relay you don’t drop the (Torch of Truth, aka baton) but he’s fumbled with it for so long there’s not much else to be done with it. Already the global leadership messages are flooding into the White House praising his record. And to think that only a few days ago, our Prime Minister was telling us Biden was totally on top of everything. How the elite lies for its own skin.
 
I could theorise that this timing was planned all along, at least as a bit more than a common or garden Plan B. It will discombobulate the Trump camp, reinvigorate the Democrats and certainly whoever wins the Democrat nomination will give them a bounce in the polls. And it now puts the ‘age’ question firmly in the GOP camp. The media will I imagine focus much more on Trump’s gaffes. Also a younger Democrat candidate may be able to remember and enunciate what they think they’ve done right in the last few years without tripping over their teleprompt. Could have been a tactic all along. In a dramatic departure from this blog’s usual prescience, I didn’t predict this.