The day today turned out to be an unpredicted and unpredictable type of day. Sometimes, I go off down to the Methodist Centre but this morning, I changed my mind and after filling up the car with petrol and then collecting my newspaper, I thought there were some tidying up jobs that badly needed my attention so I decided to stay at home for most of the morning. I had some financial record keeping that I needed to keep up to date and then newspapers to review for useful articles before they get jettisoned and thrown out ready for collection first thing in the morning. It was a very dark day and raining cats and dogs as a huge band of rain was making its way slowly up through the Midlands. So it was a thoroughly depressing day and there was not much happening to lighten the mod of the moment. I received some fairly long texts from my University of Winchester friend who was explaining to me how first his daughter, and then himself and finally his exceptionally sick wife had succumbed to a new and very potent flu virus which is sweeping across the country and perhaps even the globe. This very nasty flu virus can co-exist with COVID and it appears that the last flu jabs may be rather ineffective in combatting it. What made things worse was that my friend who normally sees his sick wife every day was keeping away for a few days which the nursing staff had to try and explain to her – but she still caught the virus anyway. This means, apart from other things, that I shall not see my friend together with others when I travel down to Winchester on Friday.
In the late afternoon, my Droitwich friend and I texted each other as we were both feeling pretty low and needed to cheer each other up (which we did) We discussed some plans for the meal we were going to cook jointly on Saturday afternoon. As soon as she arrives, we are going to go to the very high quality butchers down the road and then come to my house to do some vegetable and other meal preparations. Then we both agreed that I should go and attend the church services which I usually do on a Saturday whilst my friend carried on preparing the meal which we can make into a leisurly affair on Saturday evening. My friend’s mother was in hospital in South Africa which we hope is just a short term problem and we are keeping our fingers crossed (although I have made the offer of some prayers as well) So we both have pretty busy days for the next couple of days which will make Saturday all the more enjoyable for the both of us. My friend and I have fairly similar patterns of pretty busy mornings but in the late afternoon, we are often left by ourselves which is why we seize the opportunities whilst we can to cook together and generally enjoy each other’s company.
Turning to the fascinations of US Politics, it appears that the Democrats have made a sort of concession which has allowed the Houses of Congress to reconvene and for the shut-down of the governmental machine to end. But the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have just released three emails linking Trump very closely with the Epstein affair. Members of the Oversight Committee have published three emails this morning, out of thousands the committee says it is reviewing from the Epstein Estate. One email alleges that Donald Trump spent hours with a victim.(We now know from a section, once redacted and now unredacted, that the victim was none other than Virginia Giuffre) In another, Epstein writes of Trump ‘Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine [sic] to stop’, according to the release by the Democrats. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein and has previously called the allegations against him a hoax. We are still waiting to hear Trump’s response to the emails. Now what we have here is not exactly a smoking gun but the emails and particularly one of them is potentially very damaging to Trump. It indicates that Trump had spent hours in the company of Virginia Giuffre and several other young girls. We must conclude that Trump in the company of all of these young women (Giuffre being under-age) was not in Epstein’s house to play a simple card game of ‘Happy Families’ Now the emails do not point to directly to any inappropriate behaviour on the part of Donald Trump but Trump’s past associations with multiple young women leads to suspicions (and one must say that that is all) of inappropriate behaviour. Even if the Democrats, now their latest member is capable of being sworn in and are in a position to vote that the FBI release the whole of thousands of files which mention Trump by name, may get their way in the House of Representatives but the Trump dominated Senate (= Upper House) will probably still protect Trump by not agreeing to the release of the Epstein files. All we can say is that we are further along the road to full disclosure of the Epstein files in their entirety but not yet at the end of the journey.
The downfall of the Director General of the BBC may have to be viewed in a different light as we now learn about the part played by Sir Robbie Gibb, 61, who has a long history with the BBC, having been BBC News’ head of BBC Westminster and editor of live political programmes, as well as deputy editor of BBC Two’s Newsnight. He left BBC News in 2017 to become then prime minister Theresa May’s director of communications, a post he held until 2019.He was appointed to the BBC board in 2021 by Boris Johnson. In his role as non-executive director, he is responsible for ‘upholding and protecting the independence of the BBC by acting in the public interest and exercising independent judgement’, according to the BBC’s website. But as someone with incredibly close links with the Tories, he appears to have played a critical role in bringing the maladroit Panamera edit into the light of the day. This is quite ironic as it is often in the play script of the right wing enemies of the BBC that the BBC is in the hands of ‘lefties’ but the reverse appears to be the case.