A Hack’s Progress

The tragic figure who appears in Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress goes by the name of Moll Hackabout.

Is life in any way comparable for female journalists looking to make a name for themselves on Fleet Street today?

We all have to compromise to get ahead.

Pippa Crerar is fêted as some sort of swashbuckling political journalist today, but how did she get to run the Mirror’s politics section and what compromises has she had to endure?

The two high profile roles she had before the Mirror were at the Guardian and the Evening Standard.

Which means she worked for Sarah Sands and Evgeny Lebedev and promoted the Conservative Party because that is how the Standard operates.

The fact that she then went to the Guardian while it relentlessly accused Jeremy Corbyn of antisemitism tells you all you need to know about her politics.

Then there is the matter of her pieces for Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign. She did everything she could to make him look good. This was for a campaign that simply couldn’t have been more racist.

Here she is with Boris Johnson. He looks quite happy. She doesn’t look displeased. But of course one shouldn’t jump to conclusions. While she doesn’t look like she’s Boris’s property, there is still something a little off-putting about this picture.

It’s not as bad as this one, but Boris’s clutch looks still quite familiar and Pippa is hardly looking uncomfortable.

Here they are at work again. Cosy.

The Americans put out a film about the cops infiltrating the unions in the 1950s.

I’ve never been able to work out what James II who was deposed in 1688 is doing in Trafalgar Square.

According to Wikipedia the statue was commissioned in the 1680s and has been outside the National Gallery since 1947.

Some notes taken during a tube journey last week. I’d been reading about the Russian / Crimean Cannons at a park in Northumberland.

I remember once seeing a bunch of Chelsea fans turn on each other because there were no opposition fans around to start on.

It appears the hooligans that run the British state have been happy to take Russian money in the form of donations and other contributions to the British economy such as buying Chelsea football club. But suddenly the mood has changed and the hooligans are turning on each other.

This type of cannibalism may be normal in the animal kingdom and the Conservative Party but it’s rather an unedifying sight for those of us who prefer to sit on the sidelines.

Incidentally Lord Lebedev no longer has the word Siberia on his House of Lords entry. Perhaps it’s been taken down because of the Russia affiliation. For those of you who don’t believe that he was ever called Lord of Siberia look at the screenshot below from late 2020.

Here is the original announcement:

We’re supposed to have local elections in London in two weeks and I would imagine the Evening Standard has hardly mentioned them at all. That is what happens when your city’s paper is run by a son of a KGB billionaire Russian Lord.

In London democracy means nothing at a local level.

The Ukrainian Puppet President Zelenskyy clearly wants nothing more than to bring down Putin. But do the protestors at Ukraine solidarity marches ever stop to consider that it is the Russians who stopped the Ukrainians from falling to the Ottoman empire?

That’s right, if it weren’t for the Russians the Ukrainians would all currently be observing Ramadan.

Ukraine was actually Muslim in the 15th Century and Muslims still live there.

Instead they’re fighting the very people who saved them.

And when they protest in Trafalgar Square with their Ukrainian flags – whose side were Russia on when France were busy attacking the rest of Europe?

Readers of the Economist are clearly not going to be encouraged to ask such questions.

Boris Kemal Johnson is a Circassian Muslim, from Georgia, on his father’s side, via Turkey.

I once read that when writing a miser one should remember to stress his generosity – sadly the client journalists in the UK are going super easy on Boris and their Media Oligarch bosses while building support for proxy wars between the Russian and Ukrainian people.

The media cartel and its Whitehall and Westminster contingent are once again exporting death to benefit their careers.

The fact that they were complicit in keeping the UK closed so that people could not see their dying loved ones while they all held raucous private parties tells you everything you need to know.

Russian soldiers killed 600 British soldiers at the battle of Balaclava – this was because the British leaders had miscalculated and sent their troops into a valley where they were surrounded.

What a way to behave.

Sir Charles Napier, whose statue is in Trafalgar Square, oversaw the British campaign with the French and the Ottomans against Russia in Crimea.

I’ve always thought of Aldous Huxley as a good guy. But I now see that his glorification as a champion of acid, Hindu culture, writer of Brave New World and teacher of George Orwell have softened me up to his output in ways that have caused me to be less critical than I ought.

I’ve never reflected on how his championing of acid overlaps with the way the American and British secret services used drugs to infiltrate and undermine activist movements.

As Joseph Heller said, “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”