PM Ques 22nd October 2025
PMQs comment and analysis
Harry Wellcock refused to show his ID card back in 1950. He got huge support and when Churchill was reelected the following year, displacing Labour, he did so with the campaign, ‘Set the people free’. The state should serve the people and not the other way around. Could the forcing of digital ID on a reluctant public mean a new prime minister or government sooner rather than later? Having Tony Blair always in the background has got tiresome.
The excuse that digital ID would make life easier for the public or solve any issue about which the public has an interest is wearing thin. The state would certainly find monitoring and controlling otherwise law-abiding, free citizens of this country very easy and would solve an annoying shortfall in totalitarianism.
Speaking of the public…
In 1459 Richard Duke of York and his associates were condemned in their absence by bill of attainder at the Coventry Parliament to the forfeiture of all their property and loss of all their titles. Effectively cancelled and their children disinherited. The action, while temporarily ensuring that the exiled York would find return under arms difficult, weakened the regime and led to sympathy for the disinherited.
The medieval form of cancelling was drastic but no dissimilar from the petty revenge of public opinion circling its prey with ravenous intent. The public is a cruel mistress that can turn upon anyone in public life and bring them down. “The sage has withered from the lake and no birds sing.” Public opinion turns upon a coin and if stirred up can make one person a saint or hero and another an Emanuel Goldstein from 1984 subject to two minutes hate or more.
Thea once beloved JK Rowling and Elon Musk were both cast into oblivion for having an unfashionable opinion. Janet Jackson was reviled for a season and then reassessed. Donald Trump divides America but where he is disliked he is irrationally and viscerally despised. Zelensky good, Putin bad, like “four legs good, two legs bad” in Animal Farm is understandable up to a point, but is more indicative of mass hysteria than a moral observation or partisan opinion.
The ex Duke of York has fallen almost as far as he can go, although the courts of public opinion and social media have condemned him to lose as much as can be taken away and presumably exile him to a hovel on South Georgia or one of the lesser known Chagos Islands.
Andrew was once hailed a Falklands war hero and cheered as he went up the Mall with his then new bride. Subsequently he has evidently blotted his copybook but not been charged with ir convicted of anything. His guilt may have been more than association with a despicable criminal and the accusations against him are dark, but could there be another reason why he, Maxwell and Mandelson were singled out from among the individuals among many associates of the criminal, Epstein. They were British, not American.
As to which accusations against the person in question, who may lose all his titles and property, was guilty of all of which he has been accused, none of us know for sure. The infamous photograph isn’t conclusive evidence. Maxwell looks too tall to be behind the couple given their relative heights and the clothes don’t look right for a chilly English night out in March, but that proves nothing either except that evidence these days can’t necessarily be trusted, especially in the age of A.I. that has superseded the time when the incidents where alleged to have taken place.
Presumably, the public won’t be content until a bill of attainder has deprived Andrew of everything. He may deserve that and he appears to have been ill advised, naughty or lacking in judgement at least, but who is to cast the first stone, so to speak, and is his apparent sense of entitlement to be repaid by an entitled public that thinks it has the right to destroy lives on its own transitory judgement alone?
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