Where are they now?

Shami Chakrabarti.

Her omnipresent appearances on Question Time and her sanctimonious manner were more than infuriating, but I feel for Baroness Chakrabarti at this difficult time. 

I mean her embarrassed silence - (well, I hope that’s what it is.) 

Imagine how you’d feel if you’d been elevated to a position above and beyond your merit solely because of an inquiry you undertook at the behest of the leader of Her Majesty’s disLoyal opposition with the sole purpose of exonerating the Labour Party from potentially vote-damaging allegations of racism.

  

You’d feel pretty rotten, would you not, following the deluge of incriminating evidence exposing your cobbled-together inquiry as the load of distemper it obviously is?

Who wouldn’t be thinking of a way of stepping quietly out of the limelight if they’d concocted a self-serving autobiographical essay rather than a systematically evidenced inquiry, which looks more cringeworthy with every passing revelation?

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Chas Newkey-Burden

Well, he zapped his website Oy Va Goy with nary a why nor wherefore a year or two ago. Something must have spooked him because the Israelophile of yore has reappeared as something of an Israelophobe. Which is a shame, because he once wrote a powerful article effectively demolishing the “they of all people” meme, which antisemites often drag out when accusing Israelis of committing Nazi-like genocide against Palestinians. 

It could be that he decided Benjamin Netanyahu was too right-wing. Or he might have had some other kind of epiphany. Anyway, his affection for all things Israel evaporated like a puff of wind. I’m only bringing this up because his Twitter reincarnation (allthatchas) shows that his new allegiance is to veganism, supporting animal rights and defending Jeremy Corbyn. As a couple of H/P. commenters note, he always was ‘a bit of a strange one’ and “I was wary of him”. Quite so.

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I have a long memory. Stuff sticks in my mind from years ago, like someone suffering from senile dementia; and I often forget what I went upstairs for. Next, I’ll be looking everywhere for my specs when they’re on my head. (Apart from the fact that I never do that because Specsavers told me it ruins them. I’m very obedient like that, if you must know.)