Who do these people think they are?

“The Duchess was clearly alarmed”.  That’s what the British press are telling us, underneath pictures in today’s papers of Camilla with her mouth in a large O and Charles with his lips parted as well, although not so widely. Thank God for picture captions, I say. Left to myself, I’d thought Camilla was roaring her indignation against those daring to approach the royal car, let alone spatter it with paint, and I might have thought Charles was swearing colourfully at both Camilla and the yobs keeping him late for the Royal Variety Performance concert. As Boris Johnson made clear, there’s no possible connection to be made between the lives of the dizzyingly rich Charles and Camilla heading in their Rolls Royce towards a concert put on for their benefit,   and the lives of tens of thousands of British students soon to be plunged into decades of debt because their government needs university money to build bigger and better nuclear submarines. So what do these crazies with their paint think they’re doing?

The civilized world really is facing a crisis. Ordinary Joe Nobodies, people one has never heard of, are daring again and again to confront the respectable world of wealth and power.  It’s time to make an example of someone,  and thankfully that’s what’s being done with this Wikileaks person, I mean, you can’t have someone telling the citizens of the world what their governments are up to. The man’s done terrible damage already, exposing what world  leaders and diplomats said about other world leaders. It’s hardly surprising that the Republican right in the US  has called for his execution, preferably slowly and  in a public place, with trained ravens swooping to pluck out his eyes. The one redeeming feature of the whole shameful episode was the way companies like Amazon, Paypal and Visa rallied to the side of government and did their best to make life impossible for  Mr Assange and his fellow-traitors. Never let it be said that, faced with attack, capitalism failed to step up to the plate to protect power and privilege.

Now if the royal body-guards could show similar initiative  - what are your guns FOR, men? -  we could all get back to normalcy.