As I awoke yesterday, ClassicFM was playing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and there is certainly more of an autumnal feel in the air. Naturally, the mornings are starting to get a little darker as we start the countdown towards Christmas and the turn of the year. We often, though, get quite a spell of fine weather at this time of the year and September and October I quite enjoy although I always think that November (a bit like February) is just a month to be ‘lived’ through. In domestic politics, the Mandelson affair rumbles on with massive questions being asked about the PM’s judgement. After all, Peter Mandelson had got form, as it were, having being forced to resign on at least two previous occasions. The fact that he was doing rather a good job in his relationship the Trump administration in the USA is neither here nor there – why the PM appointed him is almost beyond belief. When emails emerged of exchanges between the two men showing Lord Mandelson remaining supportive of Epstein even after he was convicted for the sex trafficking of underage girls, it was clear he had to go. Lord Mandelson tried to cling on. The PM summarily relieved him of his duties. There had initially been an appetite to keep him, in order to avoid embarrassing Donald Trump, who himself is being asked questions about his association with Epstein – and hates it. But when these emails emerged, it was clear to No 10 that the scandal would blow up the state visit and Mandelson had to go. As it stands at the moment, the planned visit of Trump to the UK is going to be awkward in the extreme but nobody would actually ask the ‘elephant in the room’ observation which is that Mandelson’s association and friendship with the convicted paedophile Epstein led directly to his sacking whereas in Trump’s case, he now occupies the White House. The liberal American media (which does exist!) seem to have convinced themselves that the Epstein files contain details of Trump’s past misdeeds with underage girls supplied by Epstein but, of course, the detailed file will never be released under the current administration. The Democrats are clinging to the hope that elections next year will give them some leverage. All 435 U.S. House seats and 35 U.S. Senate seats will be up for grabs in the 2026 midterm elections. While control of the presidency is not at stake, midterm elections can have important consequences for the occupant of the Oval Office. This is likely to be an especially significant midterm because it will be the first opportunity for voters across the entire nation to express their views on the drastic changes in the role of the executive branch and in many government policies during the first two years of the second Trump administration. The results of the 2026 midterm elections will go a long way toward determining whether Congress will continue to largely support the president\u2019s agenda or will act as a check on the power of the White House. The liberal American media are also advancing two theories, each of which has a certain credibility. One is that after Trump fell out with Epstein over a property deal, Trump became an FBI informant to help to ‘spill the dirt’ on Epstein and this is not completely denied by the current administration. The other is quite speculative but quite plausible. Epstein appears to have all kinds of funds at his disposal but never filed any accounts for any of his business dealings. The theory is that Epstein invited billionaires into his reach, supplied them with underage girls for sex and then successfully blackmailed these rich billionaires who would pay him large amounts of money to prevent this news becoming public which would result in conviction and gaol for a very long time. This is all quite plausible but, of course proving it is another matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before I went into town, I spent a certain amount of time going through past editions of the newspaper, retaining the things (generally health related) that I wished to keep and these I will need at some point to comprehensively file. Then, later in the morning, I took the car down to the Waitrose<\/em> car park and picked up a copy of my newspaper. Then I struck up a conversation over the coffee machine and then in the seating area with a couple of customers who, as it turned out, was a doctor and his wife who was a midwife. We exchanged some reminiscences about our university days which were similar although we were slightly different generations. \u00a0Then I re-parked the car, paid for an hour’s parking and then into what call my Donkey sanctuary caf\u00e9 although that is not its proper name. I am always warmly greeted and partake of my usual coffee and homemade cake. Then I got into conversation with a man and his wife who are long standing friends of the proprietor. The husband was shortly going to part of a convey driving to Serbia which was all part of a charity raising effort in which he engages ever year. Then I returned home and prepared a lunch of beef slices served with an onion gravy and served on a bed of lettuce. After lunch, there was an item of mail that I needed to process and this was a circular from CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development) where I needed to contact them to remove Meg’s name from their database. If I had not done this, then circulars would have kept on arriving so I felt that I needed to inform them of Meg’s death. I was fortunate to get a very sympathetic person on the end of the phone who agreed to process my request but also to add Meg’s name to a special ‘Book of Remembrance’ This I was not expecting but was quite heartwarming and I conveyed to the CAFOD contact what a magnificent Catholic funeral we had managed to organise, the memory of which is still quite a source of consolation for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I awoke yesterday, ClassicFM was playing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and there is certainly more of an autumnal feel in the air. Naturally, the mornings are starting to get a little darker as we start the countdown towards Christmas and the turn of the year. We often, though, get quite a spell of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7673,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7672\/revisions\/7673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}