More likely, Prince Charles (who was a close friend of his)

‘Scuse me, but where is the evidence the Prince was a ‘close friend’ and not just an acquaintance who’d participated in some projects with the Prince? Savile crossed paths with masses of name people (among them the prime minister’s wife, Norma Major). ‘Close friends’ for most people don’t exceed in number about seven. (Less than that in a non-expressive culture like that of Britain).

Jimmy Savile was interviewed on at least seven occasions by different police forces. The silver-tongued bastard talked his way out of trouble every time. His trump card was to say that if he was arrested and charged, the public would no longer support his fundraising drives for Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which raised millions of pounds.

I was never really convinced that Savile was guilty of anything other than bad taste. After he died, hundreds of people came forth with allegations that were neither sworn depositions nor investigated, that, if true, would have meant that Savile was Britain’s most prolific serial rapist and pedophile.

All of these people were seeking financial compensation. All but a couple were anonymous and the ones who were not anonymous were not credible–one of whom was his own niece, and another an author of highly fictional pity lit who never met a man who did not rape her.

But not a single one of the allegations has ever been credibly authenticated and many of them were alleged to have occurred in public places like hospitals that Savile never visited in his lifetime.

I lived close to Savile for some years (within walking distance of his apartment in Roundhay Park, Leeds, England) and never heard of any sexual allegations against him, even though I worked in some of the some hospitals where Savile worked as a volunteer and is alleged to have committed some of his offenses, and knew many people who worked in those hospitals.

This means nothing in itself. He was known to be single and to have a preference for much younger women, but that is a whole different kettle of fish from being a rapist and pedophile.

He was given shows on the BBC radio and TV largely because there was a dearth of working class entertainers at the time in the extremely middle class, elitist BBC, and as a former miner and bona fide Yorkshireman, he had the common touch. He also raised huge amounts of money for charity and himself was very frugal led a rather austere life for the most part. He did have some luxuries like driving a Rolls Royce car, but on the other hand he saved money when working in London by sleeping in a camper van.

I did not like him, in fact I couldn’t stand him as an entertainer or as a personality, but I think his reputation has been hard done by.

In this video a male ex-mental patient from Broadmoor who was formerly a teenage girl claims to have been molested by Savile in a public space in the hospital while watching TV when she was wearing a nightdress and “not allowed to wear panties” (which seems to me like a highly improbable detail.)

Broadmoor was a hospital for the criminally insane 40 miles from London that housed many famous murderers.

The distinguishing feature of the Rotherham and Manchester cases is that they were the opposite of a child-abuse panic. They did not involve anybody rich or famous, and the authorities resisted taking action for as long as they possibly could.

I agree with this. It is just low level organized crime in areas of social pathology, not a grand conspiracy hatched in the House of Lords.

Saunders is a good example of the integrity-free individuals that ooze their way to the top throughout the western world. They infest all spheres, but are particularly strong in officialdom, the academy, and the media.

Combine those personal qualities with a near-religious belief in the blank slate and the inherent moral superiority of foreigners (especially brown-skinned foreigners), and you have an establishment class that will always opt to betray its own people and never – never – stand up for them or for the truth about anything.

Which is how we are where we are.

That photograph is quite a few years old.

I know this because Ball and Saini recently appeared on a BBC quiz programme (University Challenge – the Christmas version for alumni) on opposing teams.

Leaving aside the fact that neither showed any obvious aptitude for answering the questions (which are sometimes quite hard), perhaps a chat in the green room led to Ball’s article.

Did he want to ingratiate himself with the delightful Ms Saini? Or to protect himself from the risk of “cancellation” after some ill-judged remark?

Cromwell represented a proto-commie freak cultural outburst impossible anywhere else on earth at that time etc. The social conservatives (Puritans) were literally hounded out of the country back when the entire world was socially conservative etc.

In these stupid times we live in, I sometimes fear my eyes will roll so violently they will spring out of their sockets…

Cromwell WAS a puritan. And, there was nothing – nothing at all – socially conservative about the puritans: they were driven out of England because they were a constant threat to social order.

I agree about the eventual triumph of science.

But, in the Cnut story, the king was on the side of reality and contemptuous of empty rhetoric. There’s no doubt where he would stand on the transgender issue.

We would be lucky to have someone like Cnut as king again: no hope of that with the current heir, or either of Diana’s sons.

It is all an act now, yes. And a shabby one.

The Scottish National Party – whose leaders are globalist to their very core, and whose actions in power have made this impossible to ignore – is the perfect expression of this unreality.

Correct.

This odious class lingers on in England (centred on the universities, obviously); but for the first time in my life I dare to believe that they have passed peak influence. Nothing remains but inexorable decline.

Glory and heroism are very expensive.

That’s the truth. My father did two WW2 tours in Italy and Greece flying fighter-reconnaissance Spitfires (low-level tactical photography and ground attack). He, of course, had numerous terrifying experiences, and saw dreadful things. The Po running red, nearly drowning in the Aegean, a good friend burning up in his aircraft on the ground – and so on, and on.

As children, my sister and I always assumed that the lights on all night were for us: it was only in the last 20 years that I learnt they were for him: nightmares every night, without fail. And that lasted until he died aged 95.

The most surprising thing is, he loved flying so much he stayed in and made a career of it.

Irishness is pretty common in Northern Ireland, oddly enough.

This is the BBC’s deliberate policy. The usual suspects doing the usual thing.

Don’t tar us all with the same brush (so to speak)!

I’ve never heard anyone, British or otherwise, say anything even slightly flattering about this dreadful film.

Good story, but a little behind the times.

Before going to university in the late 1970s, I worked on the railways in England for a few months. I encountered Plasser+Theurer machines (which even then were remarkable) more than once: no Germans, Swiss, Austrians, or any other brand of foreigner involved, I’m afraid.

After a bit more thought about dates, make that “6-year-old.”

Too true, on all counts.

I remember, as a 7-year-old, carrying a flaming torch in a Guy Fawkes Night parade through our small Kentish town. No health and safety nonsense then: nor any attempts by our “betters” to make us ashamed of being English.

But that was 50 years ago: Halloween wasn’t a thing at all in England. Like so much else that’s (at best) empty and worthless, it’s oozed into our culture through American mass media.

This really does seem to be a coup, … and it very much shows that getting out of the EU is imperative.

Quite so. Only a few weeks ago, I was telling my 93 y.o. mother that the Remainers would stop at nothing – nothing – to prevent Brexit. And here we are.

Now we’re back in the lead-up to the English Civil war (David Starkey explains all this very well here). Second time as farce, obviously (I hope)!

What’s next? Proscription of the Brexit Party? The internment of Farage et al.? The importation of EU gendarmes?

Somewhat similar perspective in the UK. Back in the day, Oxford and Cambridge admitted based on their own examinations, usually taken a few months after A Levels (the final pre-university exams). These were abolished in order to be “more inclusive” – at the same time, for the same reason, A Levels’ rigour was seriously devalued.

A friend of mine was a Fellow of one of the Cambridge colleges. When I asked him what he thought about all this, he said, “oh, for us it’s excellent: all the applicants have the top grade, so we can pick literally whoever we like.”

Britain was only 12 years out from the 2nd Boer War, which had revealed in detail most of the horrors of modern warfare: yet that lesson was ignored by those who rushed to enlist, and by all those who encouraged them to do so.

My grandfather was a volunteer in 1914, aged 20. He was crippled by shrapnel at Ypres less than a year later. His wound reopened in the 1920s: from then on until his death in the 1970s, he attended hospital every day to have it dressed.

Much of the blame for this madness belongs to the Press, which was every bit as trustworthy then as it is now.

I never understood how Oliver Cromwell could still be admired

Well, Cromwell

– brought to an end a catastrophic civil war, one for which the king had been responsible.

– had the strength to hold all three kingdoms together in the aftermath of that terrible war, and to suppress a series of royalist attempts to reignite it.

– had the moral courage to lead in the regicide; Charles was an utterly incompetent king, who had shown repeatedly that he could not be trusted at all and was incapable of learning any significant lessons from his (many) failures. Any course other than execution would inevitably have led to betrayal.

Nobody has to “like” Cromwell, but sneering at what he achieved and the strength of character and intellect that allowed him to achieve it is absurd.*

* – accusing Cromwell of being a genocidalist is even more absurd: anachronistic and credulous.

Lots of people say “in the autumn” or “in the winter.” Just because dropping the “the” is a USian usage doesn’t make it standard elsewhere. This (appalling) woman lives in London, I believe.

On the other hand, I’ve never seen a season capitalised other than in bad poetry.

Physicians did not ask AIDS patients with whom they had sex, and therefore did not follow up with them.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine was a newly-qualified neurologist who had landed a career-making opportunity: to interview everyone found to be HIV-positive in the southern half of England in a year. This was early in the epidemic.

A year or two later, I met him and talk turned to careers. He was downcast: it was clear, he said, that a huge AIDS epidemic was not going to happen. This was a surprise to me, because the UK’s safe-sex propaganda campaign was already in progress.

When I asked why, he said (I quote from memory), “it’s not that AIDS isn’t lethal: pretty much everyone I interviewed is now dead; it’s that the main factor in the best epidemiological model we’ve got as yet is the average number of sexual partners per year across a population – squared. The average yearly number of partners for heterosexuals aged 20-40 in the UK is less than 2; most of the people I interviewed would think nothing of having several times that number of partners in a weekend – or an evening.”

Turned out he was right. The officials and politicians who pushed the “not a gay plague” line knew – or had no excuse for not knowing – it was false, almost from the beginning; but they did it anyway.

Sounds like a good way to lose the British Taxpayers’ money.

No: ITV is purely commercial.

British trains run on the left too.

The two directions in which the lines run are called up and down – where up leads to London – not necessarily directly…

As Auden put it:

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

I believe the war in question was 1914-1918.

My own take on this is not that the US intervention settled matters, but that the German leadership thought it might – and therefore committed themselves to a massive “last throw of the dice” offensive in March 1918.

Germany’s inability to make that offensive successful is really an indication of how marginal its position already was. To put it another way, despite the weakness of France in 1918, Germany had already been defeated: it just didn’t know it.

There’s a good discussion of what a prat is here.